Diu, India. Year: 1509. Distance from Lisbon: fifteen thousand kilometers by sea. Seventeen Portuguese ships and caravels faced two hundred large vessels filled with Ottoman warriors, Egyptian Mamluks, and the troops of the Sultan of Gujarat. The numerical disproportion was terrifying. A thousand Portuguese soldiers faced seven thousand enemies who awaited them.
However, NASA had been in Lisbon since the beginning of the previous century. It had been developed with significant Jewish capital and modern artillery, navigation, and cartographic instruments. Experienced technicians and navigators mastered the seas like no other, in navigation and warfare.
The battle of Diu was led by the Portuguese viceroy, whose son had been killed by the enemy. Instead of lighting a candle for his deceased son, the viceroy decided to burn down an entire city.
The Portuguese victory was overwhelming. History had never recorded anything like it. The national fleet lost not a single ship, and yet the sea was filled with shattered shipwrecks and floating corpses. Those who did not want to die retreated. In Diu it was said that "the Portuguese are not of this world".
The Portuguese ships possessed unique technology and impressive robustness. They reached great speeds against the wind, and the power of their heavy artillery had never even been imagined by other peoples. Mounted on the lower decks, the artillery allowed firing at great distances and with great precision.
The boarding tactics that less developed peoples usually employed were primitive and useless in the confrontation with the Portuguese. Equipped with individual firearms and clay grenades with gunpowder, a technological advantage in close combat at that time, the Lisbon soldiers generally did not need to bother. Battles could be won from a distance.
That was the colossal strength of Jewish technology. The Jews had been expelled from the country a decade earlier, but the nation's technological equipment had remained in the possession of King Manuel's kingdom.
