Kozhikode

Kozhikode, called Calicut by foreign merchants, was the great port of the Malabar coast and the seat of the Zamorins, the rulers who grew rich on pepper and spices. Arab and Chinese ships crowded its roadstead, and local Muslim merchants connected it to the whole Indian Ocean. The fine cotton cloth exported from the port gave its name to calico.

Ibn Battuta, who visited between 1342 and 1347, called it one of the great ports of Malabar, where merchants of all parts of the world were found, and noted the wealth of its Muslim merchants. Ma Huan, who came with Zheng He's fleet in the 1410s, admired the emporium and its twenty or thirty mosques. In the fifteenth century the Zamorin made Cochin a vassal and became the strongest king of Malabar. On 20 May 1498 Vasco da Gama anchored near Calicut after sailing around Africa. The Portuguese soon sought to control the spice trade, and war followed: the Zamorin's Muslim admirals harried their ships, and a Portuguese fort stood in the town from 1511 until its fall in 1525. In 1766 Hyder Ali of Mysore conquered Kozhikode, and the Zamorin died by his own hand as the Mysore troops closed on his palace. The Treaty of Seringapatam of 1792 transferred Malabar to the East India Company.