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Tehát Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, akit a portugál király küldött Malakába, kifejezetten azt az utasítást kapta, hogy a bennszülött uralkodókkal kölcsönös bizalmi viszonyt alakítson ki, így biztosítva a nyereséges és oda-vissza működő kereskedelmet, amely „minden tettünk fő mozgatórúgója.
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The Portuguese, when they conquered a few, strategically placed Indian Ocean islands thought that they were conquering the Indian System and accordingly called their new conquest ‘Estado da India’. As Leonard Y. Andaya says: “Much has been written of the heyday in the sixteenth century of the Estado da India, or the ‘State of India’, an all-embracing administrative term for the Portuguese empire east of the Cape of Good Hope.”[35] This further goes to showing that the then unbeatable Portuguese maritime power was into expanding and deepening the structures of the Indic System at another level. They physically controlled a minuscule part of the Indic-System but gloriously believed, boasted abroad and at home, that they controlled the whole system. But what did it mean that they were in control of the system? As Sar Desai explains that anyone could designate himself as a potentate but in reality everyone had to build consensus at several levels: “…an examination of early Portuguese contacts with Muslim potentates in Africa and South and Southeast Asia would bear out a generalization that the Portuguese sought alliances among indigenous rulers, irrespective of their religious persuasion. Thus, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, who was sent by the Portuguese King to Malacca, was specifically instructed to make the establishment of mutual trust with the native rulers, so as to ensure a profitable and reciprocal trade, the “mainspring of all your action”.”[36] None could survive if controls on the whole state apparatus was imposed. As a noted scholar reminds us: …”the state was deeply enmeshed in the local social forces, and that the ‘office’ itself was quite incapable of serving as an earnest instrument of the imposition of imperial will on local customs and practices”.[37] Mobility and common interest were the two guiding principles: “Most contemporary accounts allude to Malacca as the richest city in the world. This may be wrong; but it was undoubtedly the most convenient meeting place for traders from Arabia, Persia, India, Pegu, Java and China. Since the founding of the Kingdom of Malacca in 1403 the Malaccan rulers had striven to maintain the cosmopolitan character of Malacca’s trade and population.”[38] This goes to show that race, nationalism and any other discrimination for that matter was promptly weeded out, something pertaining to the anti-systemic domain, and therefore avoided at all costs and by everyone.
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