In 1580, an army of 18,000 Europeans and local Moorish allies were defeated by 60,000 - 100,000 Moroccans. .
60.000 Moroccans. The Portuguese army when it sailed in 1578 probably comprised 15,000 combatants. There were 2,000 troops from Castile, and contingents of foreign mercenaries- Italian, Irish Catholics, German Lutherans and Dutch Calvinists. There were plenty of pikemen and arquebusiers and a significant artillery component, but the army was relatively weak in light cavalry.
Weston F. Cook argues, "..In the end it was the skilful use of mounted arquebusiers that won the day for the Sadians" (The Hundred Years War for Morocco: Gunpowder and the Military Revolution in the Early Modern Muslim World, p 254).
A.R. Disney (North Africa. p. 21-24- excerpt) presented a detailed description- excerpt,
"The explanations for the defeat tend to focus on the personal mistakes of King Sebastião.
The army reached Tangier on 13 July ; it then went on in some confusion to Asilah, and there a council was held to decide how to move to al Arish ( by sea or land) After much heated debate Sebastião decided to take over the land route; as it proceeded conditions grew up unpleasantly hot, with temperatures soaring above forty degrees Celsius. Sebastião himself would eventually have water poured inside his armour in an attempt to keep cool. However, when the march began, Abd al-Malik was thought to be hundreds of kilometers away in Marrakesh, and no major action was yet expected. This was a fatal miscalculation, for in reality Sebastião delayed so long at Tangier and Asilah that the Sultan had been able to must and bring up his forces. As the Portuguese army stumbled across a scorching terrain it was watched and shadowed. Abd al -Malik chose the place and time to spring his trap carefully, waiting until the Portuguese were traversing open ground between the second creek ( the route involved fording two creeks and then crossing the river Loukkos north of Al-Ksar al -Kabir) and the Loukkos, and highly vulnerable to the Berber light cavalry.
Jerónimo de Mendonça, a participant who subsequently wrote a graphic account of the battle, singled out the king's long delays at Tangier and Asilah, allowing al-Malik to assemble its forces, as the crucial factor. However, the battle may be a more close-run than its often assumed.. For much of the battle the outcome remained in doubt, and Portugal's defeat was not inevitable."
While Portugal dominated the Arabian Sea in the years following the battle of Diu...
For the next eight decades the Portuguese dominated the Asian trade with Europe.The control over the international trade would last until the Dutch and English positioned themselves in some of the strategic Portuguese choke-points, between 1580 and 1665.
In Asia, the Portuguese confronted the powerful land empires of Persia, Mughal, India, Japan and China, states that Portugal´s armies could never hope to defeat. Thus, from the beginning of the expansion, to the end of the age of European expansion, the Portuguese had been restricted to coastal enclaves from which they sought to dominate the oceanic trade. In the Americas the Portuguese -and the Spaniards - obtained colonies where their military technology (and the old World diseases) gave them the ability to expand inland.
it would in turn lose most of those territories to Muslim Oman by the end of the period covered by the game, with their expulsion from Zanzibar in 1698 being the most severe reversal..."
Indeed. Nothing lasts forever...
History is not as simple as "Europe is ascendent, and the rest of the world declines relatively"
Well, it really happened. The facts remain that modern world history has been dominated by initiatives from Western Europe and culminated in the early Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English overseas empires. No student of the world history can ignore or downplay these events.
Recommended reading:
Why the West Rules- for Now",Ian Morris, p 431,
"The Portuguese blasted them into splinters...Like the Ottomans when they advanced into the Balkans a century earlier, rulers all around the Indian ocean rushed to copy European guns, only to learn that it took more than just cannons to outshoot them.
They needed to import an entire military system, and transform the social order to make room for new kind of warriors"
Denkt
Portugal had larger ship but larger ship don't mean better ships
Well, the Portuguese crown developed one of the most effective fighting navies possessed by any contemporary European monarch, its only rival being that of Castile. Recommended readings,
"
The Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe-1500 1800", Guilmartin,J.F,
"The navy of the House of Aviz was a pioneer in several respects and in the early sixteenth century it may have been the most advanced operational force of his kind...up to 1560"
Warfare at Sea, 1500-1650, Maritime Conflicts and the Transformation of Europe, Jan Glete
"The Portuguese navy...it is regarded as part of the Indian enterprise but it was also an Atlantic and European force. The navy of the House of Aviz was a pioneer in several respects and in the early 16th century it may have been the most advanced operational force of its kind...the first real Habsburg sailing navy was that of Portugal"
..I don't think Portugal had great ship for Korean waters
In fact, Portuguese ships were less impressive in the shallow waters near to shore. Portuguese amphibious warfare against coastal settlements was initially carried out by units of the Indo-Portuguese vessels, constructed in Portuguese shipyards in India (Goa, Daman and Baçaim) associating Portuguese technology to Indian native traits.
For Portugal that was because of competition with the Netherlands...
Portuguese historians argued that this reversal of fortunes was occasioned by the Spanish captivity; British historians argued that it was the corrupt nature of the administration; For Charles Boxer, the reason were "the superior economic resources , superior manpower, and superior firepower" of the Dutch; for Lies Steensgaard , a Danish historian, the entrance of the more advanced proto-capitalism of the English and Dutch into Asian trade doomed the monarchical monopolism of the Portuguese crown.
But a recent research has shown that during the last three decades of the 17th century, a significant rehabilitation took place in Asia. That the Estado da India was reduced in size in undeniable, but the Portuguese learned lessons from the Dutch and English (while the Dutch emulated some of the earlier practices of the Portuguese, but that's another story), and undertook political, military , economic and religious reforms between 1668-1677.
As Gerald Augier, the English Company President in Surat, notified his company directors in early 1674,
" The Portuguese Follow their trade as well in India as Europe vigorously..."
A remarkable turnaround from the chaos of the early 1660s: the loss of Cochin in 1663 is generally considered to have constituted the death knell for the Portuguese power in Asia. As the Jesuit M. Godinho wrote in that year: "if it was a giant, it is now a pigmy; if it were great, it is now nothing"
. If we assume that guy was the only one that had an explorer gene. Now they would need to wait for another mutation.
