The naval Battle of Calicut was a military encounter between the 16 ships (10

carrack A carrack (; ; ; ) is a three- or four- masted ocean-going sailing ship that was developed in the 14th to 15th centuries in Europe, most notably in Portugal. Evolved from the single-masted cog, the carrack was first used for European trade fr ...

s and six

caravel The caravel (Portuguese: , ) is a small maneuverable sailing ship used in the 15th century by the Portuguese to explore along the West African coast and into the Atlantic Ocean. The lateen sails gave it speed and the capacity for sailing win ...

s) of the 4th Portuguese Armada and a fleet led by two Arabic corsairs formed under the orders of the

Zamorin of Calicut The Samoothiri (Anglicised as Zamorin; Malayalam: , Arabic: ''Sāmuri'', Portuguese: ''Samorim'', Dutch: ''Samorijn'', Chinese: ''Shamitihsi''Ma Huan's Ying-yai Sheng-lan: 'The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores' 433 Translated and Edited by ...

. After the fleet of

Vasco da Gama Vasco da Gama, 1st Count of Vidigueira (; ; c. 1460s – 24 December 1524), was a Portuguese explorer and the first European to reach India by sea. His initial voyage to India by way of Cape of Good Hope (1497–1499) was the first to link E ...

reunited with 6 caravels of the patrol fleet of Vicente Sodré, the Portuguese inflicted a heavy defeat on

Calicut Kozhikode (), also known in English as Calicut, is a city along the Malabar Coast in the state of Kerala in India. It has a corporation limit population of 609,224 and a metropolitan population of more than 2 million, making it the second la ...

. In one of the first recorded instances of a naval

line of battle The line of battle is a tactic in naval warfare in which a fleet of ships forms a line end to end. The first example of its use as a tactic is disputed—it has been variously claimed for dates ranging from 1502 to 1652. Line-of-battle tacti ...

, Gama's spice naus and escort caravels sailed in a line end-to-end, concentrating all their immense firepower as they passed against the twenty large Arab ships of Cojambar, before they could get organized, sinking a number of them and doing immense damage to the remainder. On 30 October 1502,

landed in Calicut on the

Malabar coast The Malabar Coast is the southwestern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Geographically, it comprises the wettest regions of southern India, as the Western Ghats intercept the moisture-laden monsoon rains, especially on their westward-facing m ...

for the second time. This time he had come in war. He came to seek revenge for the treatment meted out to

Pedro Álvares Cabral Pedro Álvares Cabral ( or ; born Pedro Álvares de Gouveia; c. 1467 or 1468 – c. 1520) was a Portuguese nobleman, military commander, navigator and explorer regarded as the European discoverer of Brazil. He was the first human in ...

who had come to

earlier.Archana Subramanian
"Vasco da Gama landed the second time in Calicut"
''

The Hindu ''The Hindu'' is an Indian English-language daily newspaper owned by The Hindu Group, headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. It began as a weekly in 1878 and became a daily in 1889. It is one of the Indian newspapers of record and the secon ...

'', India, 29 October 2015. Retrieved on 20 November 2019.

, was a Portuguese nobleman, military commander, navigator and explorer. He had come to make a treaty with the Zamorin of Calicut and to set up a Portuguese factory in the city. But he was not successful and there was conflict between the local Arab merchant guilds. The Portuguese factory was overrun in a riot and almost 70 Portuguese were killed. Cabral blamed the Zamorin and bombarded the city. War broke out between Portugal and

invoked his royal letter and took command of the armada. He set sail with 15 heavily armed ships and 800 men.

References

{{Reflist Calicut 1503 Calicut 1503 1502 in India 1503 in India History of Kozhikode