Page:History of India Vol 7.djvu/66

 40 THE STRUGGLE WITH THE PORTUGUESE them and make slaves of them." At the western ex- tremity of the Asiatic trade-route the Shah of Persia sent an ambassador to Paris begging the King of France for help " to drive the Portuguese out of the East Indies." But it was not the piracies of the Portuguese that most deeply stirred the much-enduring Eastern races. In 1320, Marino Sanuto the elder had submitted his famous Secretum Fidelium Cruris to the Pope, for seiz- ing the Egyptian route and securing the proceeds of the Indian trade as a war fund to retake Jerusalem. To the Portuguese sovereigns and Grand Masters of the Military Order of Christ the conquest of the Asiatic Ocean seemed the true continuation of the Crusades. Their determined efforts to reach the Christian king- dom of Prester John, by land or by sea, ended in Da Gama's discovery of India. Seekers are apt to find what they go in quest of, and Da Gama's companions were at least half-convinced that the Malabar temples were Christian churches. On their return, King Em- manuel at once wrote to their Catholic Majesties that when these " Christian people " of India " shall have been fortified in the faith," they would help in " des- troying the Moors of those parts." To Rome he an- nounced that " the king [of Calicut] looks upon him- self and the major part of his people as Christian." This exaggeration, although quickly corrected, served to perpetuate the legend of the Crusades. The Portuguese in fact, by a happy chance, landed on a strip of Indian coast to which the ancient trade-