Most of them perished.’ There was nothing the Portuguese Viceroy of Goa could do about this.Īlso read: English plunderer, social psychopath or hero? Why Indians have misunderstood Robert Clive Those who refused were ‘divided among the amirs’, according to the Padshahnama, ‘or held in prison and tortured. Four hundred of the captured Portuguese prisoners ‘along with the idols of those erroneous infidels’ were then sent off to Agra to beg for mercy. The city fell to the Mughal armies within days and the attempts of the inhabitants to escape down the Ganges were thwarted by a boom ingeniously thrown across the river. When, in 1632, the Emperor discovered that the Portuguese had been building unauthorised fortifications and ‘dwellings of the utmost splendour and strength’ in Hughli in Bengal, as well as flouting Mughal rules by making forced conversions to Christianity, he commanded that the Portuguese settlement should be attacked and the Portuguese expelled. In the Spice Islands of the Moluccas, the Dutch had recently begun to turn their cannons on the same rulers they had earlier traded with, slaughtering those islanders who rode out in canoes to greet them, burning down their cities and seizing their ports.īut as Captain Hawkins soon realised, there was no question of any European nation attempting to do this with the Great Mughals, not least because the Mughals kept a staggering 4 million men under arms. In the 1520s the Spanish had swept away the vast armies of the mighty Aztec Empire in a matter of months. By the early seventeenth century, Europeans had become used to easy military victories over the other peoples of the world.

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