Mahmud subsequently turned on the Portuguese and attacked the four ships in the harbour, killing some and capturing several of them, who were then imprisoned in Malacca and tortured.

[1] In April 1511, Afonso de Albuquerque set sail from Goa to Malacca with a force of around 1,200 men and seventeen or eighteen ships.

[1] Portuguese Malacca faced severe hostility as it was the first European Christian trading settlement in Southeast Asia, being surrounded by numerous emerging Muslim states.

They endured years of conflicts with Malay sultans who wanted to get rid of the Portuguese and reclaim the port town.

With a base established, the sultan rallied the disarrayed Malay forces and organized several attacks and blockades against the Portuguese's position.

He was later remembered as Pangeran Sabrang Lor or the Prince who crossed (the Java Sea) to North (Malay Peninsula).

[citation needed] Muzaffar Shah was invited by the people in the north of the peninsula to become their ruler, establishing the Sultanate of Perak.

A request sent to Java in 1550 resulted in Ratu Kalinyamat, queen regnant of Jepara, sending 4,000 soldiers aboard 40 ships to aid Johor in taking Malacca.

[citation needed] In 1568, Prince Husain Ali I Riayat Syah from the Sultanate of Aceh launched a naval attack to oust the Portuguese from Malacca, but was met with failure.

In 1574 a combined attack from the Aceh Sultanate and the Javanese Jepara tried again to capture Malacca from the Portuguese, but ended in failure due to poor coordination.

[3] Malacca harboured a community of Chinese merchants, probably from Fujian and other places, who left China in defiance of Ming laws.

[6] China was first contacted in 1513 by Jorge Álvares, who sailed from Malacca in a fleet of five junks and set foot on an island in the Pearl River Delta, and erected a padrão.

[citation needed] On 17 June 1517 a fleet of eight ships under the command of Fernão Peres de Andrade reached Guangzhou with an embassy from King Manuel I of Portugal, the ambassador Tomé Pires disembarked with pomp and circumstance and was well received by the Chinese authorities who came to see him with great ceremony.

[11][12] Pires reached Beijing in January 1521 but an ambassador from Sultan Mahmud appealed to Emperor Zhengde for aid against the Portuguese.

The first serious attempt was the siege of Malacca in 1606 by the third VOC fleet with eleven ships, commanded by Admiral Cornelis Matelief de Jonge that led to the battle of Cape Rachado.

[17] Around that same time period, the Sultanate of Aceh had grown into a regional power with a formidable naval force and regarded Portuguese Malacca as a potential threat.

In 1629, Iskandar Muda of the Aceh Sultanate sent several hundred ships to attack Malacca, but the mission was a devastating failure.

[citation needed] The early core of the fortress system was a quadrilateral tower called Fortaleza de Malaca.

From the gateway of São Domingos, an earth rampart ran south-east for 100 fathoms ending at the bastion of the Madre de Deus.

[citation needed] After almost 300 years of existence, in 1806, the British, unwilling to maintain the fortress and wary of letting other European powers take control of it, ordered its slow destruction.

The centre of trade of the city was also located in Tranqueira near the beach on the mouth of the river called the Bazaar of the Jaos (Jowo/Jawa i.e. Javanese).

[citation needed] The district of Yler (Hilir) roughly covered Buquet China (Bukit Cina) and the south-eastern coastal area.

Modern land reclamations (for the purpose of building the commercial district of Melaka Raya) have, removed Banda Hilir's sea access that it formerly had.

Some of the original Muslim Malay inhabitants of Malacca lived in the swamps of nypeiras tree, where they were known to make nypa (nipah) wine for trade.

However, its area encompassed parts of what is now Banda Kaba, Bunga Raya and Kampung Jawa within the modern city centre of Malacca.

[citation needed] The other major organisation present in the city was the Misericordia or the House of Mercy which was a fraternity dedicated to providing aid, medicine and rudimentary education to the Christians of Malacca regardless of background.

[citation needed] With regards to native matters, the administrative structure of Malacca pre-conquest remained largely unchanged.

[citation needed] In 1571, an attempt was made by King Sebastian to establish three separate entities of his Asian colonial holdings with Malacca being one sector under its own governor, though this effort did not come to fruition.

[27] According to Eredia in 1613, Malacca was administered by a governor (a captain-major), who was appointed for a term of three-years, as well as a bishop and church dignitaries representing the episcopal see, municipal officers, royal officials for finance and justice and a local native bendahara to administer the native Muslims and foreigners under the Portuguese jurisdiction.