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In April 1511, Portuguese conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque set sail from Goa to Malacca with a force of some 1,200 men on a fleet of 17 or 18 ships. They conquered the city on August 24, 1511, and Sultan Mahmud Shah, the last Sultan of Malacca, had to take refuge in the hinterland. Malacca became a strategic base for Portuguese expansion in the East Indies where they could exploit the spice trade.<br/><br/> In 1641, the Dutch defeated the Portuguese with the help of the Sultan of Johore. The Dutch ruled Malacca from 1641 to 1798, but they were not interested in developing it as a trading centre, placing greater importance in Batavia (Jakarta) on Java as their administrative centre. Malacca was ceded to the British in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 in exchange for Bencoolen on Sumatra. From 1826 to 1946, Malacca was governed by Britain, first by the British East India Company and then as a Crown Colony.
Diego Lopes de Sequeira was a Portuguese ‘conquistador’ sent to analyze the trade potential in Madagascar and Malacca. He arrived in Malacca in Malaysia in September, 1509, but left the next year when he discovered that Sultan Mahmud Shah, the local leader, was devising his assassination. This gave Afonso de Albuquerque the opportunity to embark upon his expeditions of conquests. Sequeira was subsequently made governor of Portuguese India (1518–22), and in 1520 led a military campaign into the Red Sea which hastened the first legitimate Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia.