Fifteen Years Under the Portuguese.
Portuguese captain Andreas Andre — known in Dhivehi as Andiri Andirin — seizes Malé in 1558. Forced conversions, brutal taxation and pork imposed on mosque grounds follow. The fifteen-year occupation is remembered in oral tradition as the darkest chapter of Maldivian history.
By the mid-16th century, the Portuguese Estado da Índia had turned the Indian Ocean into a commercial war zone. The Maldives — strategically placed on the pepper and textile routes to Malacca — were too valuable to leave independent. In 1558 a heavily armed fleet under Captain-General Andreas Andre sailed into Malé, defeated and killed the reigning sultan — remembered in the Maldives as Ali Rasgefaanu (numbered Ali VI in Maldivian tradition, Ali IV in some regnal lists) — and installed a Portuguese garrison.
What followed is still told in Maldivian oral tradition as the darkest fifteen years in the nation's memory. The Portuguese imposed crushing taxes, destroyed Islamic sites, installed a Catholic mission, and reportedly forced pork onto mosque grounds as a deliberate desecration. Resistance was met with public executions.
It was from this that the Utheemu insurgency grew. Three brothers from a small island in the north — Hassan, Ali and Muhammad Thakurufaanu — built a boat called the Kalhuohfummi, designed for extreme speed in shallow reef channels, and began a guerrilla war that would end the occupation.
The women are better swimmers than the men, and swim with such grace that one would take them for fish of the sea.
Continue the timeline.
- Wikipedia — Portuguese Maldives
- H. C. P. Bell, The Maldive Islands (Ceylon Government Press, 1940)
- Britannica — Maldives: History
Two thousand years of history — one extraordinary place to experience it.
The atolls in this story are the islands you can stay on today: private-island resorts and overwater villas, planned by a team that works from inside the Maldives.