Fort

Kodungallor [Cranganor], Kerala, India

Military Architecture

One of the oldest and most famous ports that were centres of trade between the Malabar Coast and the Roman Empire, Muziris in ancient cartography, lies in the area of the River Periyar estuary, about 26 km north of Kochi. When the Portuguese arrived in India, this port area was disputed between the Samorin of Kozhikode and the Raja of Kochi. The Portuguese allied themselves with the latter, settled at Kodungallor and prised the pepper trade from the hands of the Muslims and Jews. The Portuguese presence had two distinct phases, probably in the same place, and ended in 1662 when the Dutch took Kodungallor. The first phase of Portuguese settlement began in 1502 and continued until about 1520. According to Gaspar Correia, a two-storey house-fort was erected in 1507, with two heavy bombards on the ground floor facing the river and four falcons on the upper floor. The construction must have been square with towers at each of the four corners, very similar to Pedro Barreto Resende’s drawings in António Bocarro’s report of about 1635 (showing the type of military construction erected by the Portuguese on the Malabar Coast at that time). This construction was probably abandoned or destroyed long before 1536, as both Zinadin and Gaspar Correia state that the Portuguese had erected a fortress in that year and make no reference to the previous structure. The construction of the second fortification at Kodungallor was supervised by Diogo Pereira, who became the captain of a small force of 20 men supported by some local forces, mainly Christian, and, later, by casado settlers. This organisation remained practically unaltered during the 16th and 17th centuries. António Bocarro described the Kodungallor fortress as “a perfect square with round bastions at each corner, the ones on the raised defensive works being the biggest with a span of twenty paces, while the others have ten”. The curtain walls were ten braças (twenty-two metres) long by three (six and a half metres) high and six palms (1.32 metres) thick, including the parapet. As they were very close to the water, the two stretches of walls facing the canals were badly affected during the monsoons and were constantly in need of repair. The vulnerability of these walls, which would have been hard put to resist an attack, prevented the defenders using heavy artillery. Besides the captain’s quarters, the armoury and food stores, there was also a church and well inside the fortress. It was defended by four pieces of heavy artillery and eight falcons, three of which were half falcons, each one in its own gun carriage. A stone’s throw away lay the settlement of about a hundred casados surrounded by a wall of approximately six hundred braças (1.32 km), not more than three metres high and little more than half a metre thick, so it was very “simple and weak and unable to withstand artillery fire”. As part of their plan for the capture of Kochi, the Dutch took Kodungallor on 15 January 1662. Among the victims of the attack was the last Portuguese captain, Urbano Fialho Ferreira. The Dutchman Baldeus, who took part in the attack, relates that there were six churches in the settlement, of which he mentioned the Jesuit College, the Franciscan church and the Cathedral, where the archbishops were buried. He also mentioned that outside the walls was a college that belonged to Christians of the Syrian-Malabar rites, commonly known as Saint Thomas Christians. The Dutch erected a new, triangular fortification, probably using the towers of the Portuguese fortress. Kodungallor went through a period of upheaval at the end of the 18th century, as it was the stage for a struggle between the Dutch and Sultan Tipu’s forces. The fortifications were completely ruined and today the archaeological vestiges of the Portuguese period cannot be seen.