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He ordered his sailors to divert their course towards the nearby island of Qeshm, where a small Portuguese fort assured them of the water supply to Hormuz. The day before, his lieutenant had tried to take over the fort with a massive assault but the defenders, stubborn as always, had repulsed him. Emamgoli was aware that if he did not take control of Qeshm, Hormuz would remain a Christian knife pointed at the abdomen of the Safavid empire. 2 While the soldiers arranged themselves among the palm trees of the island and dug holes to protect themselves from enemy bullets, Emamgoli dedicated a few minutes to remembering his father, may he rest in peace. He had been born as the middle son in a feudal family of the Georgian aristocracy, the Uniladze, baptized as Giorgi, in his childhood he would never have imagined that he would be deported to the Iranian Court of the Shah and become the favorite servant of the most promising prince of the empire, Abbas. . 3 Emamgoli's father experienced a dizzying rise alongside his master while doing his dirty work: in 1588 he murdered the regent of the empire, in 1602 he dethroned the king of Lar, an ally of the Portuguese, and in 1606 he destroyed the fort that they had built in the coastal town of Gamberun and renamed the town Bandar Abbas ("the port of Abbas").
In less than 20 years this Giorgi had become the second most powerful man in the empire and, before dying in 1613, he had ensured that his eldest son Emamgoli became the governor of the southern provinces of the empire. The third assault on the fort was successful and the Qeshm garrison was eventually captured . One glance was enough to BTC Users Number Data understand that none of the prisoners were going to be useful to him: he needed artillerymen and ship captains, not brave musketeers (of which he already had many), so he ordered their execution and ordered his soldiers to guard the water springs. in case the Franks decided to return. 1622, that would be the year that Emamgoli, governor of Fars and Kuh Giluyeh, occupied a place of honor next to his father. Shah Abbas was busy fighting wars with the Ottoman Sultan and the Mughal Emperor of India, so he would have the opportunity to lead the war that would eliminate the Portuguese from the Persian Gulf forever. However, Hormuz was not going to be as simple as Qeshm, he needed allies. These arrived at Gamberún shortly after; They were Franks , of English nationality and of a Christian religion opposed to the Portuguese .
In 1615, Shah Abbas had invited them for the first time to his Court of Isfahan, hoping that his navy would serve as a counterweight to the Portuguese, and the previous year he had even had religious representatives of both groups confront each other. For years the Shah had toyed with the hope of the Portuguese missionaries converting him to Christianity with the hope of involving them in the war with the Ottomans but, given that their king was not up for the task, he agreed to make their lives impossible. The arrears in the payment of tribute to the Arab king Mahmud Shah IV, once master of Hormuz, Bahrain and part of the coast of the mainland, and now little more than a guest of the Franks on his own island, had not been a sufficient reason for declare war; Fortunately, the Portuguese captain, Simao de Melo, had decided to challenge the shah with the construction of the Qeshm fort. A fort that was already his. Emamgoli inspected the ships provided by the English East India Company , five war ships and four transport ships, captained by a certain admiral named Woodcok.
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