The Day the Elephants Turned Around

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The sultan unleashed war elephants. They turned on his own men.

The story

«Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice,» wrote the Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires, because Malacca controlled the spice route. On 25 July 1511 Afonso de Albuquerque attacked it with about a thousand men. The sultan answered with war elephants. The Portuguese met them with lances. The sultan's elephant, wounded, turned back howling, the others panicked and trampled their own side, and the sultan, wounded too, left his mount. A month later the city was Portuguese.

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Context

The numbers vary: some sources mention about twenty elephants, and the defenders are put at 20,000 to 30,000. Albuquerque is given between 1,000 and 1,200 men, about 700 of them Portuguese. He pulled back after the first assault, attacked again in August and took the city after about forty days of fighting. The monument to Albuquerque in Belém shows the taking of Malacca on one of its four reliefs. Much of what we know of his campaigns comes from his son Brás, who turned his father's papers into the Commentaries and built Lisbon's Casa dos Bicos with the fortune his father had made.