Portugal's seaborne empire in Asia was founded on the seizure of two entrepôts. Goa was taken in 1510 and, after being lost and retaken, its Muslim inhabitants were massacred on Albuquerque's orders; the city became the capital of the Estado da Índia and the seat of a Portuguese settler and mixed-descent population. Malacca, the greatest emporium of Southeast Asia, fell in August 1511 after a short campaign; Albuquerque's letters describe the killing and expulsion of the Muslim population and the deliberate sparing of Hindu, Chinese and other merchants whose trade Portugal wished to keep. The sultanate re-formed at Bintan and then at Johor, and much of the Muslim commercial network shifted to Aceh, Banten and Brunei, so that Portuguese Malacca never recovered the traffic it had captured. The scale of killing and expulsion is known only from Portuguese narrative sources; there are no independent counts, and the figures they give are contested.
Afonso de Albuquerque seized Goa and Malacca for the Portuguese crown, killing or expelling their Muslim populations and installing a garrisoned trading empire across the Indian Ocean
No count exists for either city. Tomé Pires, writing in the 1510s, describes Malacca as a port of extraordinary size and later estimates derived from him run from about 40,000 to 190,000 inhabitants; for Goa there is no comparable figure at all. Because the two cities' estimates differ by a factor of four and cannot be added to anything reliable, no denominator is offered.
No reliable figure. The repeated Portuguese claim of about six thousand Muslims killed at Goa in 1510 is the only number of any precision and derives from the conquerors' chronicles; deaths at Malacca are described but not counted.
The massacre of Goa's Muslim inhabitants, the killing and expulsion of Malacca's Muslim community and the conversion or destruction of mosques are recorded in Albuquerque's own letters and in the Portuguese chronicles of the conquest.
Malaysia, Indonesia