Mark Gagnon

Then by 1507, a Portuguese naval commander named Alfonso de Albuquerque,

Yes.

That is literally his name, Albuquerque.

He basically arrived in, you know, Hormuz or at Hormuz Island with a fleet of warships.

And now Albuquerque had already seized Muscat and Socotra as a part of Portugal's aggressive campaign to lock down the Indian Ocean trade routes.

And he basically recognized what every strategist before and after him to this day would recognize is that whoever held Hormuz held the key to Gulf trade.

So...

By 1515, Portugal had said, this is ours.

And they established a permanent fortress there, turning Hormuz into basically the choke point or like the linchpin of their Eastern Empire.

So for over a century, the Portuguese controlled access to the Persian Gulf and it extracted tolls and tariffs from every single ship that went through.

And they did that for a long time until 1622 when they were driven out by the Shah Abbas I. And now this was the Shah of the Safavid Persian Empire.

And with the help of the English East India Company, basically recaptured the island.

Now, this is just another one of those things where there's alignment.

You know, you have the Persians, you have the English that are like, hey, let's get these Portuguese out here.

And they did.

And it was one of the very first major collaborations between Persia and England.

And it really foreshadowed a relationship that would define the region for the next 300 years.

Because after the Portuguese came the British.

Now, Britain's interest in the Persian Gulf was about the same thing, right?

It was about money and trade and controlling their route to India, which was the crown jewel of the British Empire at the time.