Turnus in India—The Figure of Khwaja Safar in Corte-Real’s Second Siege of Diu

This article investigates Virgilian allusions in the Second Siege of Diu (Successo do Segundo Cerco de Diu, 1574), a Portuguese historical epic by Jerónimo Corte-Real about the siege of a Portuguese fortress in northwest India by the Sultanate of Gujarat. The Gujarati army contained soldiers from across the Muslim world, including many European converts to Islam. I argue that when Corte-Real allusively compares these soldiers to characters from the Aeneid, he occasionally does so in ways that emphasize their shared cultural ties through the Greco-Roman classical tradition. This is especially true concerning the Muslim commander Khwaja Safar, an Italian convert to Islam who serves as a Turnus figure within the epic. These allusive connections are further reinforced by a series of illustrations that Corte-Real himself created for a deluxe manuscript version of the poem, in which Safar’s soldiers wear classicizing Roman-style armor (Codex Cadaval 31, Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo).