1622, when Iran expelled a European Empire from Hormuz
Juan Cole 04/22/2026
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Decades ago, I wrote an article about Shi`a Islam in the Persian Gulf in the early modern period. Some of what I said then has some resonances with today’s events.
The Portuguese took Goa on the western coast of India in 1510. Their empire in the Indian Ocean focused on naval dominance and small forts — it was not settler colonialism. They rather high-handedly declared that they owned the ocean, and that all ships plying it required a Portuguese permit or cartaz. The ships had to pay fees at the ports controlled by Portugal. They were forbidden from carrying spices or canon. The Portuguese did not increase the GDP of the Indian Ocean, they just redistributed its trading profits. They established a monopoly on pepper from India’s Malabar coast in the first half of the 1500s. Since European food at that time was fairly tasteless, it was a treat to sprinkle some pepper on your gruel. But how did you get pepper? You had to buy it from the king of Portugal, who became known as the pepper king. Portugal was a relatively poor small country of about 1 million people then, but through a pirate-empire and really good big ships built for the Atlantic, it grew wealthy and pushed around more populous peoples.
To cut off one alternative route for the spice trade, the Portuguese State of India (Estado da India) reached up to the Persian Gulf. Lisbon had already taken Hormuz, which dominates the narrow Strait of Hormuz, in 1507. The Estado took the strategic island of Qeshm around 1515. In 1515 it conquered Bahrain, which was notable for its pearl industry.
But by the early 1600s, Portugal was being challenged in the Persian Gulf by rival rising powers. On land, the Safavid Empire under Abbas the Great (r. 1588 – 1629) had begun attempting to recover Iranian territory along the coast at what the Portuguese called Camorao, which later became the Safavid port of Bandar Abbas once the Portuguese were defeated. The press to assert Iranian dominance was led by the governor of the southwest Fars province, Imam-Qoli Khan.
Portuguese Empire. Public Domain. Via Picryl
I wrote:
“In 1602, the Safavid military occupied Bahrain. Teixera described the isles around 1610 as inhabited by Arabs with an Iranian minister and garrison. He estimated the official value of the yearly pearl trade of Bahrain at 500,000 ducats, with another 100,000 smuggled on the black market. The tax-farm of the islands itself was worth 4,000 ducats annually. The governors sent from Iran appear from their names mostly to have been Qizilbash notables and al-Nabhan wrote that one was removed by the shah after the Baharina [local Arabic-speaking Bahrainis] complained of extortions.
“With the rise of Dutch and British mercantile and naval power in the first decades of the 17th century, the Safavids saw an opportunity to dislodge the Portuguese from the Gulf altogether. The Portuguese protection system, requiring that Asian merchants pay high tariffs and bribes to Portuguese officials in return for safety from Portuguese attacks, had grown so onerous to Indian merchants that they began reviving the overland route to Iran from Lahore through Qandahar. At the same time, new Dutch naval technology and trade routes allowed the Dutch to bypass the Portuguese factories. Gulf trade probably fell in the first decades of the 17th century which weakened the Portuguese at Hurmuz.
“In a joint 1622 Anglo-Iranian campaign against Hurmuz, the Iranians expelled the Portuguese, who retired to Goa. With Hurmuz now an Iranian dependency, the Safavids briefly reverted to the practice of administering Bahrain from that island. Later, Bahrain fell under the administrative jurisdiction of the Beglarbegi of Kuhgilu centered at Bihbahan in southern Iran. But the governor of Bahrain always exercised a great deal of autonomy. With Iranian dominance of Bahrain, the marketing entrepot for its pearls shifted to the Iranian Persian Gulf port of Congoun near the administrative center of Lar.
“The Dutch and British East India Companies, new economic institutions that by their control of the sea, their lower protection costs, and their knowledge of world prices represented an advance on the protection racket that constituted the Portuguese empire, began carrying Iranian and Indian merchants for a transport fee. The Companies traded with the local merchants, as well as competing with them, setting up a system of European-staffed Asian trade alongside their trade to Europe.
“The 17th century witnessed Dutch supremacy, as well as a gradual shift after 1650 from pepper to cotton textiles as the major European import from the East—though pepper imports did not decline in absolute terms. The Gulf trade overland to the Levant continued, despite the decline of Venice, to remain important along with the Red Sea route, especially for the French. The Gulf also witnessed expanded commerce between the East and Iran and Iraq. The Dutch, for instance, brought Indonesian pepper and Bengal sugar into the Gulf.”
Cameron Winter writes in his “The Fall of Hormuz: Portugal, Safavid Persia, and Comparative Military Power in the Early Seventeenth Century,” International Journal of Military History and Historiography (2025) that the Safavids took the island of Qeshm. It supplied Hormuz with its water, so this was a serious challenge to the Portuguese ability to retain Hormuz. The captain, Simao de Mello, and his vassal, the king of Hormuz, foresaw that they were the next target and they stockpiled supplies to survive a siege. And lo and behold, Safavid troop ships arrived in February.
The Safavids were at war with the Ottoman Empire in the north, and now the Portuguese in the southwest. They made an alliance with the British East India Company against Lisbon. Or more accurately they threatened the EIC with being expelled from Iran and denied a share in the lucrative silk trade conducted by that country if they would not lend their ships to the effort to dislodge the Portuguese. Six EIC warships accompanied the Safavid troop transports, which brought something on the order of 3,000 troops.
Although the Iranians were not a big artillery power, they did have light artillery. They also had big muskets that were slow and cumbersome but had really good long range accuracy, and Iranian snipers were able to pick off Portuguese soldiers inside their fort. The Iranians hid in trenches and behind earthworks, so the Portuguese snipers could not effectively return fire.
The Portuguese defending the fort at Hormuz, from a Jarunnameh of Qadri. Isfahan, dated 1109/1697. Imam-Quli Khan is depicted at the upper left astride a white horse holding a sword and shield. Opaque watercolour and ink on paper; page 29.2 × 19.7 cm. British Library, Add. 7801. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The Safavids, like the Mughals, deployed sappers to dig beneath fortifications and mine them. That was how the Mughals took Qandahar. Likewise, the Safavids did this to the Portuguese fort in Hormuz. The Portuguese, under siege, also ran low on shot and gunpowder, and the EIC ships prevented any attempt by Goa to resupply them. De Mello surrendered to the EIC captain, Monnox, after a little over twelve days.
Imam Qoli Khan thus recovers Hormuz for Iran. Although the British East India Company role was important, Iranian troops and techniques took the territory. Monnox maintained bitterly that the Safavids did not repay him for the help as they had promised to.
Through the early 1620s the Portuguese tried several times to take back their lost territories in the Persian Gulf, but they failed and Iran remained dominant.
Winter concludes,
“It shows that the Estado da India – and, for that matter, the EIC – while supreme at sea, could do little in the face of sustained aggression or defiance from an Asian land empire. Well-trained and ably led, the Safavid Army of Fars possessed several advantages over its Portuguese enemies in the fields of siege engineering and long-range musketry and was able to leverage those advantages into a triumph over Portugal’s warships and military architecture . . .”
The Iranian determination to control the Gulf, and thence trade with India, derived in part from the ways they were blocked in the north by the Ottomans, the east by the Uzbeks and the southeast by the Mughals.
In contrast, the Mughals, a great land power who gradually conquered almost all of the Indian subcontinent, gained so much wealth from land taxes that they left Goa largely alone. They figured it would be more expensive to try to dislodge the Portuguese than simply to forfeit to them small port fees.
Safavid Iran was more motivated to escape the stranglehold of Lisbon. The advantages of determined land-based powers in controlling nearby territory and waterways over the navies of distant empires is a lesson that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth should contemplate.