Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/156

108 final step was taken in the career of Portuguese supremacy which he had marked out. In 1571 the Lisbon court divided the Asiatic seas into three independent commands, with a Portuguese governor at Mozambique for the settlements on the African coast; a Portuguese viceroy at Goa for the Indian and Persian possessions; and a Portuguese governor at Malacca for the islands of the Far East.

From the time of Albuquerque the inexorable issue between Catholicism and Islam in Asia stands forth. Each side firmly believed itself fighting the battles of its God. "I trust in the passion of Jesus Christ, in whom I place all my confidence," Albuquerque declared in 1507 before entering on his governorship, "to break the spirit of the Moors." "The first ground of our policy," he wrote four years later, "is the great service which we shall perform to our Lord, in casting the Moors out of this country and quenching the fire of the sect of Mafamede [Mohammed], so that it may never burst forth again hereafter." "May God never permit," writes a Portuguese commander in 1522, "that by our neglect and sins should be lost what has cost so much of the martyrs' blood." The most precious gift brought to Goa by an ambassador, real or pretended, from Abyssinia was "the wood of the Holy True Cross," according to a letter of Duarte Barbosa for the king, dated January 12, 1513, and preserved in the India Office Mss. The Moslems, appealing with equal confidence to Allah, called the Faithful to the sacred war. "We desire nought else but to be close