Unwanted Neighbours

Unwanted Neighbours
The Mughals, the Portuguese, and Their
Frontier Zones

Jorge Flores
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For Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Muzaffar Alam
 Contents

Note to the Reader

Prologue
List of Abbreviations

1. Un-neighbourly Empires
2. Chessboard Politics between Central Asia and the Arabian Sea
3. Gujarat: Borderland Experiments I
4. Gujarat: Borderland Experiments II
5. The Deccan Wall
6. Bengal, an Eastern ‘Far West’

Bibliography
Index
About the Author
 Note to the Reader

For the general reader’s convenience, I have not included diacritical

marks when transcribing Perso-Arabic words but, for the sake of
pronunciation, have used the left single quotation mark (‘) and the
right single quotation mark (’) for ain and hamza respectively. As for
plurals, I have indicated them by adding the letter ‘s’.
Regnal dates are signified by ‘r.’, while government periods (of
Portuguese viceroys, Mughal governors, and so on) are signified by
‘g.’—both are given in brackets. The book renders dates in the
Gregorian calendar only.
When quoting from primary sources in European languages other
than English, I have translated the text into English, providing the
original in the footnotes or in brackets where I consider it to be
useful. All translations from Portuguese and Spanish to English are
mine, unless stated otherwise. I have not preserved place names
and proper names in their original Portuguese form, but offer them in
brackets when appropriate. For English quotes, I have kept the
original spelling and punctuation.
The bibliography includes all secondary sources and published
primary sources quoted in the book, but it does not list manuscript
sources; for the latter, one has to consult the footnotes.
M I.1 Mughal India and Portuguese India
Source: Drawn by Mikkel Jensen.
 Prologue

On 23 December 1572 the Mughal emperor Akbar arrived in the port

city of Khambayat and, as the chronicler Muhammad ‘Arif Qandhari
described it, ‘adorned the sea of Aman (Arabian Sea so called) by
the light of his presence’.1 Having been raised in distant Kabul,
Akbar had never in his thirty years been to the ocean. Another
novelty was soon to follow: presumably anxious with the news about
the Mughal military campaign in Gujarat and probably impressed by
the imperial camp, several Portuguese merchants in Khambayat at
the time rushed to Akbar’s presence. It was not the first time that a
Mughal ruler had encountered anonymous Portuguese subjects; it
had happened with Akbar’s father, also in Gujarat, roughly four
decades earlier. Nonetheless, this poorly documented encounter of
December 1572 launched a long, complex, and unequal relationship
between a continental Muslim empire that was expanding into south
India while often ‘looking back’ to Central Asia, and a European
Christian empire that had been ‘written on water’ and whose rulers
did not hesitate to consider themselves ‘kings of the sea’.2
The Mughal imperial system, then in the making, was just
commencing its apprenticeship in the maritime world; this would
have been indeed an utterly inconceivable horizon just a few
decades earlier. Conversely, the Portuguese Estado da Índia, since
its inception in 1505, was very much at ease with small polities and
‘liquid states’ in maritime Asia, from the Swahili coast to (politically
fragmented) Japan.3 For the successive viceroys in charge of
crafting political solutions in the capital city of Goa to directly face
the colossal, land-based Asian powers constituted the exception
until the 1570s. The Safavids, for example, all but ignored the
Persian Gulf before the early seventeenth century. True, the
Ottomans were considered in Goa to be a menace to the Arabian
Sea, but were hardly viewed as a continuous territorial one to the
Estado. The comparable case to Mughal India for the Portuguese at
the time was probably Ming–Qing China, which had posed
enormous challenges to Macau since the early days of this port city
in the mid-sixteenth century. What was at stake in Goa with regard
to the Mughals was far more vital and pressing still: from its
threatened capital city, the Estado da Índia had to deal with the
territorial encroachment by, and consequently a potential multi-front
war with, a powerful northern ‘intruder’. In fact, by the middle of the
seventeenth century the Mughal embrace to the Portuguese
spanned thousands of kilometres from Sind to Bijapur, with a
supplementary eastern ‘arm’ in faraway Bengal. A number of
evolving geopolitical situations from Thatta to Chittagong required
varied approaches from Goa and Lisbon. Indeed the arduous
management of diverse frontier environments of Mughal India by a
European power on the ground lies at the heart of this book.
Unwanted Neighbours addresses the long relationship between the
Portuguese and the undesirably close Mughals by placing frontier
zones and borderlands front and centre.
The Portuguese challenges vis-à-vis the Mughals diverged from
those faced by other Western players that entered the scene some
decades later. The officials of the Estado da Índia had a state to
safeguard; albeit a loose and ‘intermittent’ polity, it was one that
exerted authority over a few pockets of land and several port cities
surrounded by Asian neighbours. Conversely, the English and the
Dutch in the area were servants of commercial companies; from a
growing web of trading posts and factories, the agents of both the
East Indian Company (EIC) and the Vereenigde Oost-Indische
Compagnie (VOC) primarily looked after the business of their
corporations in the Indian subcontinent and beyond (even if we are
aware that these were hybrid enterprises, able to combine economic
and political agendas).4 Despite their clear anxiety over crucial
events that surfaced in Mughal India—successions, uprisings, wars,
famines—and the negative effect such events had on trade, it is
rather unlikely that the institutions these men represented
considered the Mughals to be their neighbours in the same way as
the Portuguese did. Another divergent point that distinguished the
Portuguese interactions with Mughal India from those of the other
Europeans was the strong religious component that characterized
them, as exemplified in the three successive Jesuit missions to the
imperial court (1580–3, 1590–1, and 1595 onwards).5 While this
work does not address the Catholic missions at the imperial court
per se, the Mughal–Portuguese frontier(s) cannot be understood
without also taking into consideration the intricate relations the
missionaries maintained with Mughal emperors, Portuguese
viceroys, and myriad officials from both parties.
Unwanted Neighbours delves into the ways in which the
Portuguese understood and dealt with their frontier zones with
Mughal India between c. 1570 and c. 1640. It specifically looks at
the western coastline from Sind to the Konkan, particularly Gujarat;
littoral Bengal from Pipli to Chittagong, with emphasis on the
southwestern delta; and the southern continental frontier, that is, the
western Deccan, or the sultanates of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur.6
While the Estado da Índia was compelled to cope with Mughal
conceptions of their political space and its limits, it is far less certain
that the Mughals were ready to accommodate Portuguese concepts
of frontiers and borders.7 Understandably, the Portuguese found
themselves on the defensive most of the time. This, however, did
not prevent them from nurturing a number of expansionist projects
and from dreaming about disputing land and authority of the
Mughals.
Be that as it may, the history of these contested spaces is far
more than a simple tale of Mughal–Portuguese rivalry, given the
inner complexity of the two protagonists and the multifaceted
context. Indeed consideration of the respective roles of several
Western and Central Asian powers—the Ottomans, the Safavids,
and the Uzbeks, as we specifically examine in Chapter 2—is
essential. This tale also involves smaller polities, from the various
sultanates gradually engulfed by Mughal expansion, and the
resistance movements that persisted in those sultanates after their
conquest, to Buddhist kingdoms such as that of the Maghs of
Arakan. It is further coloured by the presence of other European
powers, such as the EIC and the VOC, as well as myriad individuals
(Europeans or not) who lived in and travelled between Mughal India
and Portuguese India.
This book does not intend to provide an ‘evolutionary analysis’ of
Mughal–Portuguese relations in this period. And although it is
informed by a clear chronological rationale, it does not follow a
strictly chronological format. This exploration begins in the 1570s,
when the integration of the sultanates of Gujarat and Bengal into
Timurid India truly brings the Portuguese and the Mughals face-to-
face. The end point is roughly sixty years later, in the 1630s, with the
occurrence of major developments in all three of the geographical
fronts under examination. Particularly relevant events are the
demise of Ahmadnagar and the submission of Bijapur in 1636,
which literally brought the Mughals to the gates of Goa. This is
where the book stops; it does not venture into the following half-
century, in which Aurangzeb rises as the key figure of the period,
first as viceroy of the Deccan and later as emperor.
Bearing in mind the temporal framework, the book is organized
geographically, and takes the reader counterclockwise from Hormuz
to Hughli. Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for the following five
chapters and constitutes a reflection on the Mughal and Portuguese
conceptions of their political spaces and frontier zones, as well as
surveys the perception Goa and Lisbon had of Akbar’s India.
Chapter 2 elaborates on a possible Mughal plan to control Hormuz
in the 1590s, a putative Safavid interest in taking Sind in the 1620s,
and the Estado’s attempt to solve a challenging geopolitical
conundrum which saw Lahore, Bukhara, Isfahan, and Qandahar as
the most important pieces in the game. Gujarat played such a
central role in the Mughal–Portuguese encounter that two full
chapters have been devoted to the region; Gujarat is simultaneously
land and sea, border and borderland, war and negotiation,
integration and rebellion, political elite and common folk. Therefore,
Chapter 3 focuses mainly on the territory and not only looks at the
parallel growth of Gujarat as an imperial province (suba) and the
Estado’s província do Norte (‘Northern Province’) in the period from
the 1570s on, but also their clashes. Chapter 4 shifts the focus
temporally to the first half of the seventeenth century, but also
spatially to the sea by exploring the two major conflicts of 1613–15
and 1630 between the Portuguese and the Mughals, the ‘epicentre’
of which was just off Surat. Chapter 5 steps away from the maritime
fringes of Mughal India to thoroughly consider the imperial advances
in the western Deccan since the final years of the sixteenth century
and the impact this had on the neighbouring city of Goa.
Considering the Portuguese commonly understood the region as a
natural and political barrier between Mughal India and Portuguese
India, the chapter measures the impact Mughal expansion in the
area had by gauging the Estado’s reaction to the early stages of
Ahmadnagar’s dismemberment in the 1590s and the taming (not yet
full demise) of Bijapur in the 1630s. Lastly, Chapter 6 takes us
farther east still, namely to the Ganges delta, where it seems neither
empire ever felt comfortable. The analysis hones in on a single
imposing event: the destruction of the Portuguese-controlled port of
Hughli ordered by Emperor Shahjahan in June 1632. By scrutinizing
the possible causes, the Estado’s response to the attack, as well as
the surprisingly fast return to the status quo ante, the aim is to gain
understanding of the nature of the Mughal–Portuguese frontier in
Bengal.
Unwanted Neighbours is focused on the interplay of tension and
accommodation between political empires and consequently adopts
a state-centric approach. Many of the plans, discussions, and
actions studied in the following chapters took place (albeit not
exclusively) in courts, capitals, and fortresses. They involved
individuals that represent the elites—Mughal, Portuguese, Deccani,
and others. The book surveys Mughal emperors and princes, Iranian
favourites and Deccani sultans, imperial mansabdars (Mughal
officers holding a mansab, rank-holders) and mutasaddis (Mughal
high port officials, or ‘governors’). The same may be said of the
Portuguese kings, viceroys, and captains, along with Jesuit
missionaries of the time. But, when and where possible, the actions
of anonymous individuals that moulded the everyday life of the two
empires at the margins—ranging from Portuguese moradores
(residents), foreiros (appanage-holders), and alevantados (rebels) to
Hindu Banias, Shenvi Brahmins, and Marathi settlers—are equally
considered.
This book offers a fragmented, discontinuous picture of the
Mughal–Portuguese ‘vicinity’ built on the study of ‘snapshots’, flash
points, and episodes in the frontier environments under
consideration. An incident, or a ‘moment’, calls attention to itself,
triggers reactions, and brings emotions to the fore. It impels
individuals to decide and act, strategize and fight, discuss and write,
all to the advantage of the modern historian and the paper trail at
one’s disposal. Incidents that occurred in Gujarat, Bengal, or Bijapur
have a local and regional history of their own, but they also
provoked shockwaves in distant centres of power, especially in the
Mughal capital, the city of Goa, and even the Portuguese court.
Bearing this in mind, Gujarat is studied from the perspective
generated by successive Mughal–Portuguese frictions that occurred
in 1593–4, 1613–15, and 1630. In the same fashion, by focusing on
the major conflict of 1632, what was at stake between the Mughals
and the Portuguese in Bengal can best be captured. It is possible to
compare these and other similar incidents to the regular movement
of tectonic plates, and eventually to sizeable earthquakes, a parallel
that we explore in Chapter 6 and that Jack Goldstone has
suggestively put forward in order to explain the occurrence of
revolutions and rebellions in the early modern world.8
Concurrently, and in some ways following in the footsteps of
Richard Eaton, this incident-oriented approach is combined with the
study of relevant individuals, their profiles, and the roles they played
in particular events and contexts.9 To investigate in Chapter 5 the
Mughal expansion from Akbar to Shahjahan in the western Deccan
(and the Portuguese reaction to it), first Chand Bibi, the female
regent of Ahmadnagar in the 1590s, and later Mustafa Khan, an
influential Iranian at the court of Sultan Muhammad of Bijapur, are
discussed. To explore borderland tensions in Gujarat in the late
sixteenth century, the figure of Mirza ‘Aziz Koka, who broke with his
foster-brother Akbar and took shelter in the fortress of Diu before
performing the hajj, is analysed. As we have noted earlier, Chapter 4
is built around the Portuguese capture of Mughal ships off Surat in
the first half of the seventeenth century, but the intent is to
demonstrate how such episodes are better understood by bringing
to light the complex figures of the two mutasaddis involved:
Muqarrab Khan in 1613–15 and Mir Musa in 1630. These
individuals, and many others, found (or rather placed) themselves at
the heart of turbulent situations that erupted in the different Mughal–
Portuguese frontier zones. Incidents and the individuals involved,
therefore, lie at the core of our work. Needless to note, this
approach bears shortcomings. It is possible to argue that incidents
are instants; they can be exceptional and do not necessarily mirror
the long-term ‘behaviour’ of a given frontier zone. As for individuals,
some will note that they are just individuals and do not necessarily
represent the collective body. But we are aware of the challenges
posed by case thinking, as well as the difficulties in identifying
correlations between singularity and generalization.10
Unwanted Neighbours studies a set of anxieties and clashes
between the Estado da Índia and Timurid India and the ways in
which the Portuguese perceived—particularly from their privileged
position in Goa—the creation and evolution of the frontier zones
they came to share with the Mughals. Consequently, the book is
mostly, though not exclusively, based on Portuguese sources and
other European primary materials, including a vast Jesuit corpus.
Consisting of letters, reports, memorials, and chronicles, these texts
are all characterized by their prevailing institutional tone. Yet they
are far from dry, dull sources that convey only predictable
information. By reading them, the centrality of rumours, uncertainty,
and fear in the life of the frontier areas under analysis becomes
apparent. These documents also help us to uncover the existence
and significance of several individuals and objects then circulating
between Mughal India and Portuguese India. Moreover, the sources
used often contain intriguing stories and conversations that were
resilient enough to travel across political and cultural spheres
covering a wide region—spanning from West Asia to South Asia to
East Bengal—eventually reaching Goa or Diu. Documents do not
necessarily have nationalities, and some of the Portuguese sources
studied in this book may also be considered in many respects
Mughal (or Gujarati, Deccani, and Bengali).
Unwanted Neighbours is in part based on work that has come to
light in the current decade. Chapters 3 and 5 contain and present
entirely new material, while portions of the remaining four chapters
draw upon previously published articles and book chapters. I am
grateful to the following publishing companies for readily giving
permission to reproduce here some of my prior work: Brill for ‘The
Mogor as Venomous Hydra: Forging the Portuguese–Mughal
Frontier’, Journal of Early Modern History 19, 6 (2015): 539–62
(Chapter 1); Peeters Publishers for ‘Solving Rubik’s Cube: Hormuz
and the Geopolitical Challenges of West Asia, c. 1592–1622’, in
Portugal, the Persian Gulf and Safavid Persia, edited by Rudi
Matthee and Jorge Flores, Leuven, 2011, pp. 191–216 (Chapter 2);
Cambridge University Press for ‘The Sea and the World of the
Mutasaddi: A Profile of Port Officials from Mughal Gujarat (c. 1600–
1650)’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (third series) 21, 1
(2011): 55–71 (Chapter 4); Sage Publications for ‘Relic or
Springboard? A Note on the “rebirth” of Portuguese Hughli, ca.
1632–1820’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 39, 4
(2002): 381–95 (Chapter 6). Notwithstanding, I have in most
instances substantially reconceived and reworked my previously
published pieces to ensure the book reads with a clear, coherent
flow that the reader can engage with rather than struggle through a
mosaic of separate voices. The book also draws—both in terms of
ideas and source material—on a long monograph on the Luso-
Mughal encounter that I published in Portuguese in 2015.11
 It would be difficult at this point to individually acknowledge the
many debts that I have incurred with colleagues and friends,
archivists, and librarians; the most pressing ones are indicated in
the footnotes, but all those who have helped in any way know that I
am deeply grateful to them. The team at Oxford University Press in
Delhi has shown great interest in the project and a strong
commitment to its publication, for which I am very grateful. I am also
grateful for the comments of the referees who have reviewed both
the book proposal and the full manuscript. Margot Wylie was
responsible for the painstaking task of revising my English, and I
thank her for the superb work and good spirit. I am indebted to
Mikkel Jensen, who designed the illustrations, as well as to Uroš
Zver for having prepared the index with much professionalism and
efficiency. I dedicate this book to Sanjay Subrahmanyam and
Muzaffar Alam, from whom came, over the past two decades, most
of the scholarly inspiration and the personal incentive to investigate
and publish about the Mughals and the Portuguese. My
engagement with this field is a long-term intellectual venture, and I
am sure that I will continue to count on their advice and friendship
further along the road.
Unwanted Neighbours was researched, outlined, and partly
penned in some of the very cities where the Portuguese and the
Mughals engineered their neighbourhood relationship. However, the
rewriting and full editing of the final draft were carried out in
Florence, in a way replicating the geography of The Enchantress of
Florence and the relationship Salman Rushdie imagined between
Akbar’s Fatehpur Sikri and the city of the Medici.12
Florence, March 2017

1 Muhammad ‘Arif Qandhari (1993), p. 193.

2 The expression ‘written on water’ applied to the Portuguese Empire was
coined by Subrahmanyam (2001). On the Portuguese rulers as ‘kings of the
sea’, see Thomaz (1990).
 3 On the politico-institutional framework of the Estado da Índia (Estado as
the shortened form) and its capital city of Goa, see Santos (1999) and Thomaz
(1994). On the nature and evolution of the Portuguese Empire in Asia, see
Subrahmanyam (1993a). Also see Subrahmanynam (2007).
4 Van Goor (1998); Stern (2011); Clulow (2014).
5 There is abundant literature on the subject, even if one excludes the more
recent and substantial research on the artistic impact of these missions and
their political and ideological implications. The conventional work by Maclagan
(1932) still provides the basic framework with which to understand the Jesuit
missions in the Mughal court and minutely describes most of the available
source material.
6 The sultanate of Golconda was clearly marginal to the Mughal–
Portuguese equation in this period. Consequently, the eastern Deccan will not
be considered here.
7 For a preliminary analysis of the ‘clash’ between Portuguese and Mughal
conceptions of political space and sovereignty, see Saldanha (2005), pp. 660–
72.
8 Goldstone (1991), p. 35.
9 We refer to Eaton (2005) and his attempt to write the social history of the
Deccan by recounting eight lives spanning from the fourteenth to the
eighteenth century. More recently, focusing on Sino-Viet relations in the Ming
era, Baldanza (2016) anchored her study in the biographies of several border-
crossers.
10 Passeron and Revel (2005).
11 Flores (2015).

12 Rushdie (2008).
 Abbreviations

ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES

AGS Archivo General de Simancas (Simancas,
Valladolid)
AHU Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Lisbon)
ANTT Arquivos Nacionais Torre do Tombo (Lisbon)
ARSI Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (Rome)
BA Biblioteca da Ajuda (Lisbon)
BL British Library (London)
BNP Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (Lisbon)
BPE Biblioteca Pública de Évora (Évora)
HAG Historical Archives of Goa (Panaji, Goa)

ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS
Add. Ms. Additional Manuscripts (BL)
CC Corpo Cronológico (ANTT). Cited by part–bundle–
document
CU Conselho Ultramarino (AHU)
JA Jesuítas na Ásia (BA)
LM Livros das Monções (ANTT)
MM Miscelâneas Manuscritas (BA)
MMCG Miscelâneas Manuscritas do Convento da Graça
(ANTT)
MR Monções do Reino (HAG)
SP Secretarias Provinciales (AGS)
PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED SOURCES
ACE Pissurlencar, Panduronga S.S, ed. 1953–7.
Assentos do Conselho do Estado, 5 vols.
APO Rivara, J.H. da Cunha, ed. 1992 [1857–76].
Archivo Portuguez Oriental, 6 fascs.
CSL Sanceau, Elaine, Maria de Lourdes Lalande, and
Filomena Gonçalves Gomes, eds. 1973–83.
Colecção de São Lourenço, 3 vols.
DI Wicki, Joseph and John Gomes, eds. 1948–88.
Documenta Indica, 18 vols.
DRI Pato, Raimundo António de Bulhão and António da
Silva Rego, eds. 1880–1982. Documentos
Remettidos da Índia ou Livros das Monções, 10
toms.
DUP Rego, António da Silva, ed. 1960–7.
Documentação Ultramarina Portuguesa, 5 vols.
EFI Foster, William, ed. 1906–27. English Factories in
India, 1618–1669, 13 vols (cited by the years
covered by each volume since the volumes are not
numbered).
Linhares 1 First part of the diary of Viceroy Count of Linhares
(3 March 1630 to 6 February 1631), BA, MM, cod.
51–VII–12.
Linhares 2 Second part of the diary of Viceroy Count of
Linhares (9 February 1631 to 20 December 1631),
BNP, Reservados, cod. 939, ff. 1r–110r.
Linhares 3 Third part of the diary of Viceroy Count of Linhares
(6 February 1634 to 21 January 1635), published
as Noronha, Miguel de. 1937–43. Diário do 3º
conde de Linhares, vice-rei da Índia, 2 toms.
 1
Un-neighbourly Empires

AN IMPROBABLE ENCOUNTER
The Mughal Empire was founded in 1526 when a Chagatai Turk,
Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, defeated a force of Afghans at the
battle of Panipat, just outside Delhi. Babur, the founder of the
Mughal Empire, thus came to India as an outsider. He was a native
of the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia, and as the ruler of Kabul he
held the title of padshah, or ‘emperor’. Babur saw India for the first
time in 1524 and, subsequent to his victory at Panipat, ruled from
Agra for just four years before his death in 1530.1
As a testament to just how tenuous Babur’s relationship with the
subcontinent had truly been, one may note that by 1540 his son and
successor Humayun would be overthrown and sent into exile in Iran;
he would not return to India to reclaim his throne until the very last
year of his life, in 1555. But over the next century and a half, until
the end of the reign of Humayun’s great-great-grandson, Aurangzeb,
in 1707, the Mughal Empire would grow relentlessly to encompass
multiple cultural and geographical zones as it spread across South
Asia. Eventually, though not without setbacks and obstacles, its
outer limits extended to Kashmir in the north, Sind in the west, and
Chittagong (eastern Bengal) in the east. The apex of territorial
expansion was reached in 1698 when, following the overthrow of the
sultanate of Golconda, the empire gained control of Jinji in the
southern tip of the Indian peninsula. At this point, the political space
of Mughal India had grown to encompass virtually the entirety of the
Indian subcontinent.2
 The dramatic rise of the Mughal Empire is clearly reflected in the
changing depictions of the Mughals that are expressed in the
Portuguese texts of the time. Writing from Lisbon in the early 1530s,
the celebrated Portuguese poet Garcia de Resende (d. 1536) had
apparently never heard of Babur. In his Miscelânea, Resende spoke
of the Ottomans and Safavids, yet failed to make any mention of the
Mughals.3 A century later, however, things were rather different. A
procession that marched through Lisbon in December 1620 to
commemorate the recent beatification of the Jesuit missionary
Francis Xavier (d. 1552) put on display an equestrian figure
intended as an allegorical representation of India. Clearly framed by
the Indus and Ganges Rivers, the figure wore a silken robe and held
a ‘sword that belonged to the great Mughal (gram Mogor)’; the
image unequivocally links the geography of India and the political
power of the Mughal dynasty.4
Indeed by this time the success of the Mughals as ‘Indian’ rulers
was so firmly recognized, both in Europe and in the subcontinent,
that it is easy to forget just how improbable the original encounter
between the Portuguese and the Mughals actually was—the former
being recent arrivals to India from Europe, the latter even more
recent arrivals from Central Asia. Yet fans of counterfactual history
may very well ask: what would have happened if Babur had not
exchanged Kabul for Agra, dying while conquering a land that, as
we know from his memoirs, had always remained foreign to him?5
How would India have evolved politically had Babur’s successors
sacrificed everything to regain control of Central Asia, rather than
consolidating control of South Asia? The truth of the matter is that
the Mughals wrestled for a long time with this crucial choice: should
they return ‘home’ or expand south and claim a new ‘motherland’ in
a foreign land long populated by other peoples? Had the Mughals
returned to their native territories, it is clear they never would have
met the Portuguese; ultimately, the events underpinning this book
would never have come to pass and neither would have the book.
The Mughal rulers eventually chose to make of Hindustan their
‘garden’, giving the empire an unexpected southern as well as
maritime configuration.6 Seeking to conflate their empire with India,
Akbar and his successors were able to bring together a colossal
multi-ethnic state that encompassed several cultural spheres and
was marked (at least under Akbar and Jahangir) by eclectic religious
policies.

WHO KNOCKS AT WHOSE GATES?

Created in 1505, the Estado da Índia was the political and
administrative framework of the Portuguese Empire in Asia; it was
the institutional bond that connected a string of maritime cities,
fortresses, and trading posts that stretched from the eastern coast of
Africa to the South China Sea. Although Viceroy Dom Francisco de
Almeida (g. 1505–9) was appointed that same year by the
Portuguese king in Lisbon to rule this ‘floating state’, Almeida was
destined to step down from office four years later without having
found a capital city for his state and a viceregal palace for his
person. His successor, Dom Afonso de Albuquerque (g. 1509–15),
would have this opportunity the following year; in 1510 he captured
Goa—on the island of Tiswadi, just off the Konkan coast—from the
sultanate of Bijapur, and the city was later made capital of the
Estado.
Despite the interest expressed here and there in a number of
more or less utopian plans for continental occupation, the actual
territory comprising Portuguese Asia was always quite
circumscribed; it encompassed the Rios de Sena—the ‘Rivers of
Sena’, or the Zambezi Valley—portions of the island of Ceylon, and
the already mentioned província do Norte, a strip of land situated
between Diu and Chaul in coastal western India, an area that was
roughly 5,000 square kilometres at its greatest extension (1560–80).
These territorial experiences, which (with the exception of Ceylon)
continued beyond the seventeenth century and constituted special
social laboratories, were of secondary importance to the vital,
extensive web of port cities that was woven over the course of the
first half of the sixteenth century. Following Goa, other nodal points
were added to this maritime network: Malacca (1511), Hormuz
(1515), and Macau (1557). The most expressive and complex
societies of Portuguese origin in Asia would come to flourish in
these four considerably distinct and geographically distant cities.
Other urban centres, such as Bassein, Cochin, or Colombo, could
perhaps be included in this group. Nevertheless, the most
representative societies coexisted alongside many other, more less
apparent examples and were to be found in cities, fortresses, and
simple settlements (povoações).
The question here is whether the Mughals considered the Estado
da Índia—whatever conception they had of the Portuguese domains
in India—as part of their ‘garden’. Concurrently, whether or not the
Portuguese drew a line between themselves and the Mughals, and if
they did then where they did so must be established. In sum, it is
important to know where the physical and imaginary gates to the
two territories were located, according to the views of the two
parties. Just as important was the question of who the putative
intruders forcing those gates were. To understand the dynamics
between these two actors, considerations of territoriality and political
space are necessary.
The engagement of modern historians with these questions dates
back to the late nineteenth century and, as far as North American
history is concerned, to Frederick Turner’s model of a civilizational
frontier.7 We have come a long way since this ‘abrasive’ notion was
first expressed, and it is common today to fall into lengthy
discussions (equally involving geographers, sociologists, and
anthropologists, as well as political scientists) on the variety of
concepts and viewpoints involved, from frontiers and borderlands to
borders and boundaries.8 The debate is still very much driven by the
problem of state formation, the nexus between sovereignty and
territory, or the ways in which we have passed from speaking of
borderlands to border(ed)lands.9 Notwithstanding, scholarly
discourse has shifted from viewing the frontier as a line (territorial,
political, civilizational) and as a site of tensions between centre and
periphery, to looking at the frontier as a zone, within which ‘middle
grounds’, ‘contact zones’, and ‘liminal spaces’ spring, leading to
further nuances in the distinction between core and edges.10 This
sits in the realm of meeting places and merging spaces, areas
moulded by porosity and fluidity, negotiation and mediation,
exchanges and crossings.
Tamar Herzog took the debate yet a step further and went on to
reject the predominant binary views on the study of the concept of
territory—borders as either linear or zonal, internal or external,
natural or artificial—by minutely exploring the Iberian case (both
Iberia and South America) and its complexity. Borders can be
simultaneously all of the above, since ‘each confrontation and each
place, time, and parties had a shape of their own’.11 Equally
influential is Lauren Benton’s work on the ‘formation of corridors and
enclaves within imperial spheres of influence’, a concept that ‘moves
us beyond a reliance on the concept of borderlands to describe
spaces in which imperial sovereignty was contested’.12 Alternatively,
to focus on the ways in which space—geographical, political, urban,
religious, and ethnic—was handled is likely to prove beneficial; in
fact, Timurid India and Portuguese India shared, negotiated,
disputed, and imagined both the space in between and the space
within.
The study of the Mughal–Portuguese ‘neighbourship’ (vizinhança)
should consider these and other scholarly developments in the field
of frontier and border studies. It was always a rather unequal
relationship, one in which the Portuguese thought much more about
the ‘Mughal peril’ than the other way around. Since demarcation
lines had never been discussed, boundary commissions never
appointed, and treaties never signed, the existence of a ‘traditional’
border as such was never really what was at stake. As we will see in
Chapters 3 and 4, the frontier of Gujarat was perhaps that which
came closest to seeing a number of these practices surface here
and there, but the situation was still very far from that of a mutual or
conflicting understanding of a border. In most instances unclear
divisions between zones of relative influence and power remained
the norm, a situation common to a wide range of premodern
settings. However, this did not necessarily translate into the
flourishing of ‘liminal spaces’. As with the Habsburg–Ottoman–
Hungarian border area, we can argue that ‘border communities’ of a
sort developed in the Mughal–Portuguese scenario.13 Indeed
spaces and occurrences of mutual accommodation in Gujarat and
Bengal have been recorded, even if they lacked the density
recognized in similar situations for other parts of the early modern
world. The borderlands of Mughal India and Portuguese India seem
to have predominantly been areas of tension and separation.
In a survey of the existing scholarship on early modern Asia, it is
clear that, to date, the frontier in East Asia has attracted the
attention of historians more than any other region. One of the most
dynamic research strands from the ‘New Qing History’ specifically
focuses on the study of Chinese frontiers and is particularly evident
in the work of James Millward, Peter Perdue, and, most recently,
Matthew Mosca and Kathlene Baldanza.14 The Ottoman and
Safavid empires have also been explored from this perspective.15
Conversely, the frontiers of the Mughal state have been largely
overlooked.
One possible explanation for such neglect lies in the scarcity of
available Mughal cartography.16 Its comparative absence renders
inaccessible the visual expression of prevailing Mughal concepts of
frontier, which contrasts, for instance, with the abundance of
seventeenth-century Muscovite cartography and the wealth of
ethnographic materials contained therein.17 Nevertheless, it is
possible to infer and glean much from references in the sources.
The way in which the term ‘Hindustan’ was used in surviving texts
clearly indicates that it operated at several different levels in the
Mughal imaginary.18
Learned courtiers could (and did) employ the word in such a way
that it corresponded with the political space of the empire itself,
implying that ‘India’ and Mughal rule were essentially
synonymous.19 In a more strictly territorial sense, some of the
references to the term examined excluded the Deccan (Dakhin, ‘the
South’).20 Within a broader ideological frame, over time Hindustan
came to stand as the main instrument used to legitimize the ‘Mughal
embrace’ of the world; it was used in such a way that tended to
dilute the territorial and cultural distinctions involved. Under Akbar (r.
1556–1605), in fact, Hindustan became synonymous with the entire
subcontinent, while his son Jahangir (r. 1605–27), if Corinne Lefèvre
is right, saw Hindustan as ‘the new centre of the early modern world
—or at least of the Persianate ecumene—a transformation in which
the dynasty took no small pride’.21 This imperial rhetoric presented
Mughal political space as an unlimited, universal horizon. If the
border had to exist, it was understood ironically as an absence of
borders. The instruments used to shape this ideology were varied,
ranging from persuasive texts written by skilled ideologues, for
example, Abu’l Fazl in Akbar’s reign, to sophisticated visual
manipulations that both Jahangir (the ‘World Seizer’) and Shahjahan
(the ‘Lord of the World’, r. 1628–58) created around the globe as an
object and as an image.22
Although echoes of this imperial ideology reached Goa and
Lisbon and Madrid, these distorted fragments of the Mughal political
rhetoric were often interpreted as signs of the emperor’s arrogance
and his immoderate territorial ambition. Yet the Portuguese viceroys
of the Estado were certainly not alien to similar universalistic
imperial stances that had been adopted by some of their own
monarchs, ranging from the millenarian King Manuel I of Portugal (r.
1495–1521) to Philip II of Spain (r. 1556–98, king of Portugal, r.
1580–98) for whom ‘the world was not enough’.23 The Jesuit
missionaries were perhaps sharper observers of the process that lay
behind the Mughal display of a borderless empire and the
construction of a universal ideology. Well-acquainted with the
centrality that the globe played in both the political discourse and the
imperial image Jahangir had created, Jerónimo Xavier (d. 1617)
sought to artfully direct the attention of the Mughal courtiers, as
described, many years later, by Father José de Castro: ‘Many
prominent noblemen went to him [Xavier] in order to see his works
which he made by a map of the world of a rotund shape, like a big
globe, and sun-dials and other mathematical figures.’24 A Jesuit
treatise on the court and household of Jahangir dated 1610–11,
probably also written by Jerónimo Xavier, emphasizes how the ruler
considered the space of the empire and its inclusive relationship
with regard to both his subjects and those who were not:
King Akbar, the father of Jahangir, and his ancestors were paid taxes
and tributes from their lands and ports, as is customary with all the
Kings of the world.… King Akbar died and was succeeded by Jahangir
who made all of his ports, lands, and custom-houses free of all taxes
and tributes. This included all the goods coming from his kingdoms or
from abroad. He would say: How could he possibly deny freedom to
those who seek his protection, him being Lord of the world? As soon as
he began his reign he immediately decreed that all who came to his
lands were free of any tributes and taxes.25

In Kabul, Jahangir ordered that a piece of white stone be carved

with his decision to abolish any such imposts. Tellingly, as though it
were a Mughal genealogical seal, the emperor had his name as well
as those of his ancestors going back to Timur engraved on the other
side of the stone.26 Still, it is not certain that the Catholic
missionaries always understood the universalizing intent behind the
Mughals’ symbolic actions. When a missionary of recent arrival to
Akbar’s court, the Jesuit Antonio Monserrate, observed the
emperor’s habit of ‘dressing in the Portuguese style’, he interpreted
the gesture as something that ‘he did in order to please his
guests’.27 It was more than likely, however, that the gesture was
intended to emphasize the universality of the sovereign’s power, as
Akbar was asserting his capacity to hold authority over culturally
distinct kingdoms and to rule harmoniously over different peoples.
This same intent may have underpinned Jahangir’s self-
representation in a painting later in c. 1620, as an Indian deity or
ruler.28 Such gestures therefore reveal a ‘multicultural’ attitude with
rather blatant political objectives and have parallels in many other
parts of early modern Asia. In addition to similar cases involving
Shah Tahmasp (r. 1524–76) in Iran and especially Toyotomi
Hideyoshi (r. 1582–98) in Japan, there is the emblematic example of
Qing China.29 In the context of the imperial incorporation of Tibet,
there were Manchu emperors who did not hesitate to present
themselves as Lamaists with the Tibetans, even as they ‘became’
Confucianists in Chinese company.30
If we are to leave the realm of courtly imperial imagination and
symbolic authority and consider the situation ‘on the ground’, the
picture becomes even more varied. Jos Gommans—one of the few
historians to tackle the question of Mughal frontiers—underscored
the importance of a Mughal analytical conception of space that
placed emphasis on the identification of foci of power, the conquest
of which was achieved through an efficient communication network.
The road system in Timurid India both ensured the streamlined
connection between the many economic and administrative centres
and facilitated the link between these zones and their respective
agrarian hinterlands.31 The army, the imperial hunts, and the
mobility of the court itself constituted essential tools used in the
process of Mughal imperial expansion. To craft the imperial space,
efforts to consolidate new limits and to stabilize newly conquered
provinces were undertaken alongside measures to assert the novel
political order—such as controlling rents’ collections, imposing
imperial currency (sikka), and reading the khutba (Friday sermon)
on behalf of the Mughal ruler.
Does this imply that the Mughals considered the territory within
the limits of their empire as a cohesive whole? Does it mean they
nurtured a holistic view of their imperial frontiers to the point of
developing a coherent and unified ‘foreign policy’ in the modern
sense? Mosca recently posed this question for Qing China in
relation to India, indicating—as the title of his book suggests—that
there was room for evolution over time. As a departure from an
earlier period in which many different frontier management policies
coexisted simultaneously, each reflecting the many different groups
present at different points along the various frontiers, Mosca argues
that a true Chinese foreign policy was established in the 1840s. In
the first stage of this process, the frontier was mapped via various
fragmented and pluralistic sources of information. In the second
stage, new institutions, such as the Zongli Yamen (1861), undertook
the systematization and codification of information at the Qing
imperial centre.32
The scenario presented by Mosca for Qing China is not entirely
evident in the case of Mughal India, more so because the empire
collapsed de facto well before its formal downfall in 1857: at a time
—the mid-nineteenth century—when the Qing were implementing
reforms and getting their second wind, the Mughals had simply
ceased to exist. What seemed to prevail in the Mughal case during
the period under study is a frontier policy shaped by a consistent
ambition to expand the empire, with a policy that was subject to
oscillations in its priorities depending on a given agenda, and a tacit
acknowledgement of the impossibility of advancing on multiple
fronts contemporaneously. Challenging Safavid rule in Qandahar, for
example, implied diminishing imperial pressure on the Deccan
sultanates. Such pendular movement almost always led to the
relocation of the Mughal capital. In order to tackle problems in
Central Asia, Akbar chose Lahore as his imperial capital in 1585 but
decided to move it to Agra in 1598, when his interest swung back to
the Deccan.
Portuguese and Jesuit observers were always attentive to the
mobility of the Mughal ruler. They wrote extensively about the
changing location of the imperial capital and about the ‘portable’
court; these observations were followed up with anxieties whenever
the emperor moved close to a place under Goa’s sphere of
influence. As we will see in Chapter 5, this is exactly what happened
when Shahjahan moved his capital to Burhanpur (from March 1630
to March 1632) and to Daulatabad (from February 1636 to July
1636), two southern cities that were not only strong strategic points
for a military assault on the Deccan but also close to the capital of
the Estado da Índia. However, even in moments of indisputable
imperial authority, circulation within Mughal India was not absolutely
secure, and many of the frontier regions of the empire were never
pacified. News on the outbreak of internal rebellions and borderland
disputes, all with varied motives, are not lacking in Mughal texts.
The Jesuit Antonio Monserrate (d. 1600), who accompanied Akbar
on his expedition to Kabul in 1581 to quell the insurrection of his
half-brother Mirza Muhammad Hakim, highlights the emperor’s
prudence when moving into territory that was not under his rule:
‘When he advanced beyond the frontiers of his empire … he bound
to him the petty kings of the regions through which he passed by
means of treaties, gifts and promises.’33 It was necessary, therefore,
to negotiate each step of the way.
Later, in the 1620s, despite the sophisticated cultivation of
Jahangir’s image as an uncontested world ruler, this emperor’s
authority seems to have been precarious in places ostensibly within
the limits of his realm. Another European observer, the Dutchman
Francisco Pelsaert, sarcastically emphasized this in 1627 by noting
that he who titled himself the ‘World Seizer’ was no more than a
‘king of the plains and the open roads’:
But it is important to recognize also that he [Jahangir] is to be regarded
as King of the plains and the open roads only; for in many places you
can travel only with a strong body of men, or on payment of heavy tolls
to rebels. The whole country is enclosed and broken up by mountains,
and the people who live on, or beyond, the mountains know nothing of
any king, or of Jahangir; they recognize only their Rajas, who are very
numerous, and to whom the country is apportioned in many small
fragments by old tradition. Jahangir, whose name implies that he grasps
the whole world, must therefore be regarded as ruling no more than half
of the dominions which he claims, since there are nearly as many rebels
as subjects.34

Pelsaert’s observation serves as an important reminder that the

vision of the borderland produced at the heart of an empire does not
always reflect what is happening at the frontiers or reveal much
about the notions of limit and difference that developed in those
zones. Manan Ahmed considered this question with acuity,
suggesting that in order to gain a sense of what the empire failed to
see in its many centuries of rule, we situate ourselves in the space
of the borderlands of today’s Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the north of
India.35 The premise is clearly a valid one; by viewing the Mughal
Empire from the so-called peripheries, from the recently conquered
provinces, or the places under threat of assimilation, it becomes
evident how very different it is from the perspective depicted in the
sources produced at the heart of the empire.
Imagine the Mughal frontier seen from, for instance, Bengal. This
perspective is easily adopted, whether it be through the writings of a
Mughal official such as Mirza Nathan—one of the primary actors in
the expansion of the Mughal Empire during the time of Jahangir and
discussed in Chapter 6—or through Bengali literature, as proposed
by Kumkum Chatterjee.36 It is possible to do the same for Assam
and view it as it is represented, for example, in the Padshah-Buranji,
a local chronicle written in c. 1679 with additions incorporated until
c. 1731.37 And looking to the west of the empire, one could study
what the Mertiyos of Merto (in Rajasthan) said about the Mughals or
otherwise explore what poets such as Keshavdas thought of the
imperial conquest of Gujarat.38 Subject to this game of
simultaneous contestation and accommodation, and seen from a
variety of cultural, ethnic, and geographical prisms, does the Mughal
Empire seem always the same? Certainly not.
With regard to the Portuguese in this context, it is important to
consider them—quite provocatively, from a European viewpoint—as
one among the many frontier peoples of Mughal India, sitting
alongside the Gujaratis, Bengalis, Rajputs, and Deccanis. From the
perspective of an empire in the process of perpetual expansion, how
did the Mughals envision the frontier with the Portuguese? Did they
view the Portuguese as an absolutely autonomous, foreign element,
a ‘nation’ they aspired to eventually incorporate?39 Or did they see
them instead as just another of the autochthonous problem
elements present within their domains in Gujarat, Bengal, and the
Deccan? Did the Mughals perceive ownership over Firangistan? Did
they consider it a wilayat (province) over which they could exercise
authority?40
In the most ample sense in which it was used by Mughal
courtiers, Firangistan meant ‘Europe’, the land of the Firangis.
According to a Jesuit missionary, it is in this very sense that Prince
Dara Shukoh (d. 1659) utilized the term in 1652: ‘Now you tell the
priests to write to Ferengestão (that is, Europe) what I do for
them.’41 This book applies an alternative, more circumscribed
meaning of the word ‘Firangistan’, taking it to signify solely the
(scarce) dominions of the Portuguese on the Indian subcontinent;
this is, for instance, the meaning Akbar applies in a letter sent to the
sultan of Ahmadnagar in 1591.42
Shifting perspective, it is equally interesting to analyse the way in
which the Portuguese incorporated the Mughals into their
discourses; this is possible by studying how they addressed their
Mughal neighbour and also by exploring how they saw the
connections between Hindustan and Firangistan. The vocabulary
predominantly employed by the Portuguese with regard to the
Mughals was that of ‘neighbourship’, or vizinhança. Relations with
the Mogor fit into the same sort of relationship the Estado da Índia
had with the surrounding Asian sovereigns, or ‘neighbouring kings’
(reis vizinhos). While being ‘neighbourly’, these relationships were
simultaneously characterized by rejection: the Portuguese invariably
considered the Mughals undesired neighbours, enemies who should
be kept at a distance whenever possible. From the palace of the
Portuguese viceroy, the frontier between Firangistan and Hindustan
was tense, marked by contained conflict and the potential for open
violence. This, however, did not preclude exchange and, in fact, the
frontier was often permeable. That said the Estado did not
encourage the development of ‘contact zones’, as made evident by
Goa’s views on Portuguese–Mughal interactions in Gujarat and
Bengal.
However, within this general framework the specific relationship
between the Portuguese and the Mughals varied greatly with
respect to the three separate geographical fronts (Gujarat, the
Deccan, and Bengal) in which their political spaces come into direct
contact. In Gujarat, the sea and the control over it was claimed by
the Estado da Índia; the Portuguese had positioned themselves in
such a way that that Mughal emperors, members of the royal family,
and courtiers relied on Portuguese safe conducts, or sea passes
(cartazes), in order for their ships to safely navigate the Indian
Ocean.43 For the Portuguese, the Gujarat coastline was a border
within which, to a certain extent, they were able to circumscribe
Mughal authority. In Bengal, where Goa’s power was almost non-
existent and where Mughal rule also took a comparatively longer
time to establish itself, the frontier was considerably more fluid,
impermanent, and subject to constant renegotiation by a large
number of actors. In the south, the Portuguese envisaged a natural
border, a geographical divide that effectively separated the Deccan
—with its distinct, if weak, and ever-menaced political identity—from
the Hindustan and would (they hoped) ultimately spare Goa from
falling to Mughal conquest. Thus, even if the Estado da Índia
sometimes discussed their ‘neighbourliness’ with the Mughals as
though it were a cohesive whole, the truth is that the Portuguese
forged different strategies for dealing with the Mughals in each of the
three points of contact. The western maritime front tolerated, to a
certain extent, tension and open confrontation; the eastern maritime
frontier required prudence and caution; and the southern continental
extremity called for dissimulation and realpolitik.
Many other lines of differentiation intersected these obvious
geopolitical divides. Throughout the book, ‘frontiers’ (in its plural
form) will be used to refer to certain distinctions that are not strictly
political, such as gender (particularly Chapter 5), religious, or ethnic
frontiers. The ethnic divides do call for a quick mention here since
the Estado da Índia looked at (and sometimes imagined) the frontier
regions of the Mughal Empire as the sum of many ‘nations’ that, with
their strong regional identities, justifiably challenged the tyrannical
Pax Mughalica. Hence, the Portuguese were always ready to
support and encourage rebellions among the ‘colonized’ peoples,
from the Indus to the Ganges; perhaps this is because they saw
themselves as one of the ‘nations’ that would eventually run the risk
of being ‘colonized’ by the Mughals. Worried by the pressure
Aurangzeb had been placing on the Portuguese positions in the
província do Norte in 1639, Viceroy Pedro da Silva (g. 1635–9)
expressed the following recommendation to the newly appointed
captain of the armada do Norte (‘Northern fleet’): ‘See if, by any
means, we can divide the enemy’s army. Since it is composed of
Moors and Gentiles, of Mughals and Deccanis, and of other nations
(nações) hurt by the loss of their kings and kingdoms, maybe there
will be no shortage of captains willing to foster discord.’44
Furthermore, the Portuguese, at times, would contest the current
‘border’ to their advantage; they defended and even dreamt of
conquering territories and taking them from the heirs of Timur in
Gujarat, Konkan, and Bengal, as we will discuss in Chapters 3, 5,
and 6.
In a sort of prologue to the remainder of the book, the following
pages address the setting; the ways in which the Portuguese viewed
the emergence of the Mughals and the rise of Akbar will be
considered.

AKBAR’S INDIA: WHAT THE PORTUGUESE SAW

Having personally invested in the conquest of the sultanate of
Gujarat (1572–3), Akbar made a triumphal entry into the port of
Surat in February 1573 before returning to his court in the city of
Fatehpur Sikri. The royal artist Farrukh Beg represented the scene
c. 1586–9 in a painting that would soon after be included as an
illustration in Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarnama (c. 1590–6). Akbar is depicted
on a black horse and surrounded by a crowd that had gathered to
see the emperor. In the crowd, the painter included a European
figure, a man wearing Western clothes and with a black hat on his
head; the man was no doubt Portuguese.45 Whether real or
imagined, this character in some way represents the long-term
involvement the Portuguese had with the sultanate that was about to
be erased as an independent polity.
If this shadowy figure really had been in Surat on the occasion,
then he can certainly be counted as one of the first Portuguese to
have seen Akbar. At that point, not many of them had had the
chance to look upon the Mughal emperor. As noted in the prologue,
an initial encounter occurred in Khambayat, December 1572, during
which some Portuguese merchants came to ‘offer themselves to the
Mogor’ (se foram offerecer ao Mogor).46 The interactions between
the Mughals and the Portuguese were quite intense in these early
years, culminating in the visit of an imperial envoy to Goa in 1575.47
However, such developments lie in sharp contrast with the years
between Akbar’s ascension to throne in 1556 and the conquest of
Gujarat.48 During that crucial period for the young emperor and his
ascendant state, the Portuguese wrote almost nothing about the
Mughals, and the little they wrote was hardly accurate. In 1563, the
chronicler António Galvão refers to Kabul as ‘the principall citie of
the Mogores’, while Fray Gaspar da Cruz—a Dominican missionary
who lived in different parts of Asia between the late 1540s and the
early 1560s—was convinced that Samarcand was the capital city of
the Mughals, never mentioning Akbar in his Treatise (1569–70).49 It
is only with António Pinto Pereira and his História da Índia (penned
c. 1572–5, but printed as late as 1617) that a richer picture of the
Mughals is painted. Like other authors, Pereira seeks to explain
Mughal origins with references to the Old Testament. He links them
to Magog, Noah’s grandson, and to the Scythians in general: the
‘Schytian people’ (gente dos Schytas), from whom ‘that monstrous
conqueror great Timur Lang (Grão Tamorlão) has come out’.50 But
Pereira—who was rather well informed of Gujarati affairs in the
1560s, even if he probably wrote his História da Índia in Portugal—
provides a more grounded portrait of the Mughals on the eve of the
imperial conquest of Gujarat. The Portuguese chronicler
emphasizes that ‘they are politic in their lives, vain and full of
ceremony, and much given to dressing up’. And yet, as Sanjay
Subrahmanyam put it, Pereira basically saw them as ‘little better
than freebooters or condottieri, adventurers on the lookout for
possibilities of political advancement’.51
Akbar’s ‘invisibility’ in Goa and Lisbon during his early years as
emperor surprisingly contrasts with a wealth of information available
on the Mughals from the time of his father’s reign. In fact, for the
Portuguese living in India, the 1530s and 1540s were full of
unexpected news from the north. Following Babur’s death in 1530,
his son Humayun (r. 1530–40, 1555–6) invaded and conquered
most of Gujarat, only to be overthrown in turn by the Afghan general
Sher Shah (r. 1540–5). It was with shock that the Portuguese saw
waves of ‘foreign’ peoples, who became characterized as fearsome
warriors, capable of swift and decisive raids, arriving from northern
India—a geographic horizon still relatively unknown to them at the
time. Mogores (Mughals) and Patanes (Pathans) made their way
into coeval Portuguese chronicles and letters, the principal texts
within which the origins and chief traits of the Mughals and Afghans
are established.52
The original Mughal offensive on Gujarat culminated in the
entrance of Emperor Humayun into the capital of the sultanate,
Ahmedabad, in October 1535. Bahadur Shah (r. 1526–37), the
reigning sultan of Gujarat, took refuge on the island of Diu; unable to
count on immediate Ottoman assistance, Bahadur made an
agreement with the Estado da Índia that granted permission to the
Portuguese to construct a fortress on the island. As a result of this
agreement, Martim Afonso de Sousa fought alongside Sultan
Bahadur’s forces against the Mughal army during the final months of
1535, and thus became one of the first Portuguese to engage in a
ground war in India. In his personal account of this experience—an
extremely valuable source from which to gain understanding of the
initial moment of direct Portuguese contact with the Mughals—
Sousa begins by praising the many qualities of the ‘conqueror’
Bahadur Shah. He speaks of Bahadur’s fortunes and how they
changed considerably with the arrival of Humayun and his armies
and goes on to advise King John III (r. 1521–57) to support the
sultan in whatever way possible. The Mughals, Sousa remarks, ‘are
far worse enemies than any we have yet seen here; this other
people is not from India and that is very difficult to accept here’.53
Sousa goes on to speak of their genealogy and describes the
trajectory they took before arriving in Gujarat in the mid-1530s:
 …a certain people came upon him [Bahadur Shah]; these are called
Mogores and they belong to the same family (geração) of the Tartars;
up until recently, [they] were subjects of Shah Isma’il (Xeque Ysmaell).
They left their homeland and came to conquer a kingdom called Delhi,
which is a very large and very rich one. This [Humayun] is now the king
there, and he came upon this ruler of Gujarat (Cambaya), and they [the
Mughals] are a valiant people, especially when compared to those [in
Gujarat], who are weak; and they smote this [Bahadur Shah] and took
from him endless land in such a way that he was compelled to take
refuge in Diu.54

The Portuguese captain’s emphasis on the foreign origins of the

Mughals is of considerable interest and parallels similar discussions
found in other texts of the time, such as book VIII of Fernão Lopes
de Castanheda’s Historia do Descobrimento (published
posthumously in Coimbra, 1561). Having arrived on the
subcontinent a quarter century before the first Mughals, the
Portuguese, in some way, claimed ‘seniority’ over them. They did
not hesitate to consider the Mogores foreigners, and sought to
banish ‘this other people’ that had ‘left its homeland’, from the
ethnic, political, and social landscape of India. Naturally, the
Portuguese—who had also left their homeland—did not belong to
this landscape either; they seem, however, to have overlooked this
point. Given the events at the time, especially those that arose
during the Sur interregnum (1540–55), Portuguese India viewed the
northern part of the subcontinent (including Gujarat and Bengal)
overall as a conflict zone between the Mughals and the Afghans,
who were both considered interlopers on the Indian scene.
These new enemies, as the Mogores soon came to be defined,
were described as the more ‘haughty and cruel’ counterparts of the
Patanes. Their war-mongering nature combined with the ease and
apparent irreversibility of their territorial advances made contact
inevitable. An earlier attempt to establish territorial bounds is
marked by the (apparently mutual) reliance on binaries such as ‘sea
ports’ (portos de mar) or ‘nearby lands’ (terras de perto) on one
hand, and ‘backlands’ (sertão) and ‘faraway lands’ (terras de longe)
on the other. Such language moulded the relations between
Emperor Humayun and Governor Nuno da Cunha (g. 1529–38) with
regard to Gujarat. This dichotomy also proved key to the
correspondence later exchanged between Governor Dom João de
Castro (g. 1545–8) and Islam Shah (r. 1545–54) on the subject of
possibly dividing the sultanate of Gujarat between them—the
Afghan ruler could claim ‘the largest and best part of the land’ while
the Portuguese king would ‘possess the sea’, and in this way both
Afghans and Portuguese could ‘enjoy their respective empires’.55
These first impressions by the Portuguese were not easily
transferable from writing into visual materials. The so-called
Casanatense codex—a sort of pictorial guide of the peoples of Asia
and the Indian Ocean prepared c. 1540 most probably by Gujarati
painters working for an undisclosed Portuguese patron—does not
include any representations of the Mughals. Yet the Afghans, both
men and women, are depicted and described as follows: ‘people
that are called Patanes; they are very warlike, and the women also
go with them to war and fight’.56 Portuguese cartography of the
period shows no knowledge of Humayun’s or Sher Shah’s empires,
and the first piece that fills in some of this knowledge gap is a map
made in Lisbon by Bartolomeu Velho in 1561. This map, today
housed in Florence, Italy, constitutes a considerable advance as far
as the Portuguese representation of the geography of continental
Asia is concerned. Despite its errors, the cartographer depicted
rivers, mountains, kingdoms, and place names, showing an up-to-
date and realistic awareness of layout, which only very rarely
applied the geographic ‘jargon’ of Antiquity. In northern India, Velho
drew the domains of the Mogores, indicated the zone of influence of
the Patanes, and noted several place names, including Qandahar
(Candahar) and Delhi (Deli).57
The Mughals became unavoidable neighbours of the Estado da
Índia ten years after Bartolomeu Velho drew his map. In 1571, Akbar
moved his court from Delhi to the newly built Fatehpur Sikri, a
capital city designed to impress people and to effectively
communicate his political project and symbolic authority.58 A Jesuit
priest would state some years later that Fatipur ‘mirrors his huge
power and riches, and astonishes even those who have seen very
good things’.59 It was from this moment forward that the Mughal
ruler aspired to end the exclusively land-locked nature of his empire
by opening two major pathways to the sea—one to Gujarat in the
southwest, and the other to Bengal in the southeast.
Akbar’s advance south began in 1572 with the invasion of
Gujarat. The emperor first took the sultanate’s capital of
Ahmedabad; by November, he had forced Sultan Muzaffar Shah III
(r. 1561–72) to renounce his throne and heard his own name
pronounced in the khutba of the Friday prayer of Gujarat, formalizing
his status as the region’s new ruler. The following month, having
reached the port of Khambayat, the emperor ventured onto a boat
for a cruise at sea that, according to the chronicler ‘Arif Qandhari,
helped to clear his mind.60 This boat journey off Khambayat can be
understood as a metaphor for the development of the Mughal
Empire itself, a continental state that first took shape in distant and
land-locked Kabul during the early years of the sixteenth century, but
which had grown to encompass considerable maritime domains. As
we have seen earlier, the emperor then entered the fortified harbour
of Surat in February 1573, thus completing his first tour of the busy
world of harbours and a markedly different environment from the
northern imperial capitals that he had, heretofore, been familiar with.
Akbar’s time in Gujarat was also the occasion upon which he was
confronted with a new experience: it was then that Akbar had his
first meetings with the Portuguese, who by then were already well-
versed in the intricacies of the commercial and political life of
Gujarat and at the same time extremely impressed with the Mogor’s
might. These initial encounters—first in Khambayat, in December
1572, and second in Surat, in February and March 1573—are
described in Portuguese and Mughal texts alike. And while there are
significant differences between the two versions, both agree on at
least one point: Akbar took a keen interest in the exotic commodities
the foreigners presented to him, from the Portuguese wine, which he
drank in excess, to the Portuguese clothing, which he immediately
decided to wear.61
 This, however, was not the very first time the two actors had
come into contact. Just previously, contact had been established
between the two sides when the Mughal emperor, in late 1572, had
addressed in writing the captain of the fortress of Diu, Aires Teles.62
This letter, of which no original or Persian copy is known, has
survived thanks to a corrupted Portuguese translation. It is dated 13
December 1572, when Akbar was still in Ahmedabad. Therein the
ruler asked that the khutba be read in his name in the mosques in
Diu and simultaneously expected that, from then on, Mughal
currency would circulate in the city. Both requests correspond to
Akbar’s need to impose markers of Mughal sovereignty over the
new imperial province. It is not clear whether the Portuguese
understood the political and symbolic implications of these two
requests, but they reacted rather pragmatically and eventually
acquiesced to both demands. It is worth noting that with regard to
Diu the Mughals proposed a condition of shared or overlapping
political spaces: the Estado would maintain control of the fortress,
but crucial elements of Mughal sovereignty were to be adopted in
the Portuguese-controlled space with their agreement. This was a
typical shared sovereignty regime by cession of rights.63 The
Portuguese had aimed to implement a similar formula in Diu several
decades before in 1537, when they sought an understanding with
Mirza Muhammad Zaman (d. 1539), Humayun’s cousin and brother-
in-law. According to the only available version of this agreement
(which ultimately never came to pass), the Estado was to gain
control over the lands stretching from Daman to Bassein, along with
several other benefits. Concurrently, if he were to become sultan of
Gujarat, Muhammad Zaman expected the coins minted in his name
to circulate in Diu as well as ‘in other places owned by the King of
Portugal in the said kingdom [Gujarat]’. He also required that his
name be read in the same mosques in which the former sultan of
Gujarat had his name read.64
Upon concluding his visit to Surat in February 1573, Akbar
travelled back to Fatehpur Sikri. Not long after, however, he was
forced to return to Gujarat in order to crush a serious insurgence
against the newly established imperial order. With Gujarat once
again under control, the emperor’s attention then turned to the
eastern side of the subcontinent, and he invaded Bengal in 1574–6.
The entente cordiale between Akbar and Sulaiman Karrani (r. 1565–
72) began to disintegrate in 1568 and came to an end when Da’ud
Karrani (r. 1572–5) refused to acknowledge and adopt the two main
markers of imperial authority (the sikka and the khutba) in his
kingdom. Tanda, the Bengal sultanate’s capital, was conquered in
September 1574, although hostilities lasted until the Battle of
Tukaroi (March 1575) and continued to break out until the new
Mughal governor of Bengal (g. 1575–8) executed Da’ud in July
1576.
Once these conquests were over, the Jesuit Duarte de Sande
suggestively observed that from Akbar’s capital to the ‘two parts of
the triangle, Gujarat (Cambaya) and Bengal, he [Akbar] has directed
his armies and seized these two kingdoms which are the gems of
India’.65 The two invasions were precipitated by the fact that the
sultanates of Gujarat and Bengal both found themselves in messy
political situations at the beginning of the 1570s, which provided
Akbar with the opportunity to intervene and to conquer both regions
quickly. When considered from an economic perspective, however,
the motivation for each operation reveals specific interests that go
beyond mere political opportunism and ambition. The conquest of
Gujarat—a logical extension of Mughal hegemony in Rajasthan—
facilitated the connection of the large markets in central and
northern India to the Arabian Sea. Meanwhile, Bengal represented,
alongside Agra, the richest agricultural region of Hindustan, and its
ports constituted a hub of commercial-maritime trade within the Bay
of Bengal.66
By the end of the 1570s, the Mughal Empire, which up to this
point had been a continental power that saw its main political rivals
in Bukhara and Isfahan, had acquired an evident maritime
dimension. Over the course of the 1590s this new element was
consolidated with the further conquest of Sind and Orissa and it
ultimately altered the strategic priorities, political layout, ethnic
composition, and even the core mentality of the empire. Suddenly,
the emperor came to concern himself with the overseas journeys of
Indian pilgrims that left from Gujarat for Mecca and with the
suppression of pirates in the Ganges Delta. Mughal officials in the
new provinces began interacting with maritime merchants and,
through them, gained access to new, ‘exotic’ commodities. And
members of the ruling dynasty soon started to think of the sea as
both a source of revenue and of novelties; they purchased ships and
invested in trade operations within the extensive network that
stretched from the Red Sea to insular Southeast Asia.
Meanwhile, the empire’s foreign relations also shifted as a result
of this new, somewhat unexpected maritime orientation. Mughal
relations with the Ottomans, who were also interested in the Indian
Ocean, became more nuanced and complicated. To the east, in
lower Burma, the Maghs—improbable neighbours of the Mughals in
Babur’s time—now became unavoidable ones. And whenever the
empire neared the coast, it inevitably came into contact with the
Portuguese, who had had strong interests of their own in Gujarat
and Bengal since the beginning of the sixteenth century. Once the
independent states of these lands were absorbed, the Portuguese
and the Mughals found themselves face-to-face. Though earlier
interactions between them, dating back to the 1530s, had laid the
groundwork for this contact, their interrelations acquired an entirely
new significance in light of the double maritime frontier of Timurid
India that emerged in the 1570s.
Akbar was arguably the first Mughal ruler to fully enter the political
and religious lexicon of the Portuguese and the Jesuits. In 1573, the
appointed envoy of the Estado da Índia to Safavid Iran was forced to
postpone his departure from Goa due to the military offensive
against Gujarat by a new and ‘rather powerful enemy’, ‘Akbar great
King of the Mughals’.67 Some years later, in 1579, the Jesuit Duarte
de Sande admitted that the ‘Mogor … is here in these parts like the
Turk is there [that is, in Europe] in terms of power’. Notwithstanding,
Sande considered Akbar to be a ‘foreign king’ in India, using the
exact same expression Martim Afonso de Sousa had employed to
characterize Humayun back in 1535.68 Also in 1579, another Jesuit
missionary placed emphasis on the victories achieved by the Grão
Mogor in Gujarat and in Bengal. After discussing the provenance of
this ruler and elaborating on the military capacity of these yet-
unknown ‘white men’ (homens brancos), Fernando de Meneses
apprehensively noted that ‘they already are at our limits’ (já confinão
comnosco).69 The newly arrived Mogores introduced a novel term
for the region they held under their control: Hindustan. The term was
heretofore unknown in Europe, which explains Antonio Monserrate’s
need to clarify its meaning to the Superior General of the Society of
Jesus in Rome: ‘The lands of Nearer India (India citerior) are now
called by its peoples Hindustan (Industán), which is a name that
only these peoples use.’70 The Portuguese were used to viewing
India and all of Asia from the sea, and not from land: in the first
decade of his Da Ásia (Lisbon, 1552) the chronicler João de Barros
adopted this maritime-oriented perspective of the continent and
segmented it into nine distinct maritime parts. Barros is rather vague
and imprecise regarding Hindustan, referring to it at times as land
(terra) and at times as region (região).71
The foundation of a Jesuit mission at Akbar’s court in 1580
brought more European observers and writers to the scene.72 One
of the most acute and prolific among them was Monserrate, who
penned in 1582 a Relação do Equebar, rei dos mogores. The
circulation of this account in manuscript form was sizeable and
contributed to shaping a first portrait—personal (even psychological)
and political—of Akbar in Europe.73 The text additionally served as
a prelude to Monserrate’s lengthier and far more comprehensive
Mongolicae Legationis Commentarius dated 1590 (Commentary in
its shorthand English form).74 The Commentary, which was
completed in Sana’a (Yemen) under rather difficult circumstances
and did not reach Rome or Lisbon during the author’s lifetime,
includes an excursus on Genghis Khan, Timur, the Scythians, and
the origins of the Mughals. To compose this appendix, the Jesuit
priest not only used information ‘gathered primarily from King
Zelaladinus [that is, Jalaluddin, ‘Glory of the Faith’] himself’, but also
took advantage of the account of Ruy González de Clavijo’s
embassy to Timur in 1403–6, as well as the work of ‘other writers
whose authority is to be relied upon’.75 As we have noted, the
association between Timur and Akbar was suggested by Pinto
Pereira, but was not yet entirely integrated. As late as 1579,
Fernando de Meneses still did not know what sense could be made
of the disparate news regarding the Mughal genealogy. In short, he
could not say from whence Akbar hailed:
There are great opinions about this Mogor: some say that he descends
from the Great Tamurlane and that he is still called Tambirão; others say
that he is king of the Massagetes; others of the Parthians; and others
say that in old times his ancestors came down from the Caspian Sea,
which are the ones who put Alexander the Great in great despair and
danger; others say that he is king of Lower Tartary.76

The Commentary included a small (18 x 11 centimetres) but

intriguing map. This map is today lost, but Henry Hosten thankfully
published it in 1914, together with the original Latin text of
Monserrate’s work on Akbar and his empire. The missionary’s map
does not represent Mughal India per se; rather, it consists of a
depiction of India as its author experienced it, especially between
1579 and 1589.77 The map offers systematic information on
latitudes and longitudes and provides more than two hundred Latin
names of cities and towns; regions and provinces; mountains, and
passes; rivers, their sources, and one lake (the Manasarovar Lake).
Monserrate used several dark colours and shades to differentiate
these four groups and selectively used capital letters to indicate the
names of regions. As a Catholic missionary, he was attentive of a
putative Christian territory in the region; hence his interest on Tibet
(‘Both or Bothant’)—‘where Christians are said to live’ (hic dicuntur
christiani habitare)—and his remark that Delhi was once a Christian
city. It is certainly not an ethnographic map since there is nothing on
it (verbal or visual) to indicate the human geography. Nor is it a map
that projects Akbar’s worldviews and the Mughal ideological
discourse on empire and its shape.
As stated earlier, the map mirrors Monserrate’s knowledge of the
terrain, acquired during his stay in (and journey to) the Mughal court
(1579–81) and his participation in Akbar’s military campaign to
Kabul against Mirza Muhammad Hakim (1581–2). Consequently, the
roads and physical features of the long stretch of land between the
capital of the Estado da Índia and the Mughal imperial capitals—
Fattepur, ‘founded by Akbar (Equébar) in 1571’, but also Agra,
Delhi, and Lahore—are represented in detail. Unsurprisingly,
Konkan, the Deccan, and Gujarat figure prominently on the map;
these regions were on the Mughal radar, but were also part and
parcel of a Portuguese–Jesuit geography of India. From the city of
Surat, Monserrate and myriad other travellers would head to the
Malwa (Malva provincia) before reaching the heart of Industan.
Further north, the city of Lahore, and Kashmir, the Himalayan
foothills, and Kabul frame a vast territory. In contrast to this detailed
representation, Monserrate offers but a rough depiction of the Indus
delta (the location of Thatta is also marked), wherein Sind and
Rajasthan are represented as empty regions. Likewise, contested
areas between the Mughals and the Safavids, namely Qandahar,
were not described. Nor did they catch the missionary’s attention. As
for Bengal, the Catalan priest drew the road linking Agra to Tanda
and depicted the western Ganges delta. He made reference to
Satgaon (Satagom), Hughli (Goli), and Chandekan (Chandecan),
but did not venture further east. In sum, Mughal India in 1590 was
certainly more extensive than Monserrate’s map of India, as the
visible blank, ‘naked’ spaces reveal. Notwithstanding, it is clear that
the missionary managed to capture on paper some of the most
important highroads and foci of power in Mughal India at the time.78
By the time Antonio Monserrate finished writing the Commentary
and drawing its appended map, Goa was gripped by severe anxiety
over the Mogor. Following the Mughal conquest of Sind, the
Portuguese believed that Akbar’s plan was to take Hormuz from
them and transform his empire into a seafaring power they would
have to rekon with (Chapter 2). The new maritime dimension of the
Mughal Empire also became entangled, towards the end of the
sixteenth century, with a strategic move to acquire a new continental
zone that was clearly distant from Central Asia. The Deccan Plateau
and its sultanates (Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, and Golconda) had
become a primary target of imperial expansion and, consequently
though indirectly, a potential arena for Mughal–Portuguese friction.
Thus at the turn of the seventeenth century, by land as well as by
sea, the heirs of Timur in India found themselves on the threshold of
the Estado. Akbar was truly feared by the Portuguese, as the
concurring visions of a diverse cast of characters writing from India
in the 1590s—from Jesuits to viceroys to administrators to
projectors (arbitristas)—attest.
Jorge de Lemos, scrivener of the Estado’s Treasury, resorted to
Biblical language in 1593 to portray the Mughal Empire as a ‘wild
beast’ (besta fera) and a ‘venomous hydra’ (hydra pessonhenta),
obviously equating the several imperial warfronts to the creature’s
many tentacles.79 Viceroy Dom Francisco da Gama (g. 1597–1600)
firmly expressed his dislike of Akbar. Where other contemporary
observers, such as Monserrate, saw in Akbar a curious, intriguing,
and eclectic individual, the viceroy saw but a ‘shrewd and bogus’
man who nurtured an ‘insatiable desire to come closer to this land
[Goa]’. Akbar was a person given to ‘machinations and plots’, ‘sly
and full of artifice’; he pretended to be friends with the Portuguese
viceroys only to better pursue his ultimate purpose—‘to harm this
state [the Estado da Índia]’.80 The arbitrista Francisco Rodrigues
Silveira felt much the same and bitterly criticized in his Reformação
da milícia (c. 1599) the ‘great pride and haughtiness of this arrogant
barbarian’; having substantially expanded his empire without
shedding any blood, the ‘tyrant’ now sought to conquer Portuguese
India and was persuaded that he could ‘bring the entire world under
his obedience’.81 Silveira echoes here the Mughals’ rhetoric
concerning the universal character of their empire, as did Philip II in
the very last year of his reign: ‘to the Mogor, the whole world seems
small, and he thinks that everything within it belongs to him’.82
 The Jesuits still entertained hopes to convert the Mughal ruler at
this point, but they also feared the consistent territorial enlargement
of his state. Writing from Cochin, one missionary was convinced in
1600 that the Portuguese domains in India would vanish at the
hands of Akbar: ‘Our destruction is certain, God forbid, because
there will be no refuge; only Ceylon can serve us.’ The missionary
foresaw an immense Mughal India stretching ‘from Vijayanagara to
Bengal’ (o Bisnagá atee Bengala), which would not actually
materialize before Aurangzeb’s reign. 83 Yet Akbar was already
incubating this vision in his mind. This is the unequivocal sense
expressed in one passage of the farman sent by the Mughal
emperor to Viceroy Aires de Saldanha (g. 1600–5) in March 1601
(the Portuguese version of which was published by the Jesuit
chronicler Fernão Guerreiro two years later). Akbar sent the
document to Goa right after conquering Asirgah and incorporating
the sultanate of Khandesh into his domains. Writing from Burhanpur,
just before his return to Agra, the emperor openly claimed for
himself control of ‘all the ports of Hindustan, from Sind to Chittagong
and Pegu’.84 Akbar obviously desired to rule over that entire vast
space, but this proclamation served mainly as a manifestation of
imperial propaganda. If it is true that Sind had been incorporated a
decade before, the Mughal dominion over Bengal was still not fully
complete in 1600. Moreover, East Bengal (Bhati) would succumb to
imperial rule much later (Chittagong was taken in 1666), and lower
Burma never came under the authority of Timurid India. That said,
Fernão Guerreiro seemed impressed by the farman, and was further
convinced that the ‘great desire’ of ‘this tyrant’ was to become ‘lord
of Goa and of the parts of India controlled by the Portuguese as well
as those parts neighbouring with them’.85 No matter where they
were—be it in Goa, Diu, Hormuz, Agra, Madrid, or Lisbon—those
keeping their eyes on these developments believed Akbar’s state to
be the ultimate menace to the Estado.
The expansion of the Mughal domains was carried out by soldiers
who fought along the fronts and of nobles who ruled over the new
provinces. But it was equally achieved thanks to the efforts of court
intellectuals who penned sophisticated farmans and of skilled artists
who painted evocative images. The Portuguese tried to address
both challenges, dealing simultaneously with the concrete and
fictional liminal spaces that brought their India face to face with
Mughal India. The Mughals, it goes without saying, had the upper
hand in this evolving relationship. But for the Portuguese, labelling
these undesired neighbours as foreign (albeit white) and alien to
India and its peoples, seems to have translated into a form of
political legitimacy and moral compensation for themselves.

1 On Babur, see Dale (2004).

2 For a synthesis, see Richards (1995). For the visual expression of this
territorial enlargement, see Habib (1982).
3 Verdelho (1994), p. 561.
4 Marques (1621).

5 For an English translation of Babur’s memoirs, see Babur (2002).

6 On the image of Hindustan as a Mughal garden, see Koch (2007), pp.
159–75.
7 Turner (1921), ch. 1 (this chapter was first published in article form in
1893).
8 For a good survey of the meanings involved and respective genealogies,
namely the distinction between an old European ‘school’ that emphasizes the
frontier as a political border and a North American tradition that speaks of
frontiers of settlement, see Power (1999), pp. 1–12. Also see Ellis and Esser
(2006).
9 Sahlins (1989); Anderson (1996); Adelman and Aron (1999). Maier
(2016), pp. 14–81, addresses the differences between the ‘spaces of empire’
and the ‘spaces of states’ in the early modern period, the latter being
‘characterized by chronic unrest at the periphery and the often uneven grip of
central authority within’, while the former ‘aspires to frontiers stabilized by
treaty … and to a more direct, uniform, and pervasive administration at home’
(citation on p. 15).
10 White (1991); Pratt (1992); Norton (2015).

11 Herzog (2015), p. 261.

 12 Benton (2010), p. 37.

13 Norton (2015), pp. 84–5.

14 Millward (1998); Perdue (2005); Mosca (2013); Baldanza (2016). Also
see Crossley, Siu, and Sutton (2006); Dabringhaus and Ptak (1997); Rawski
(2015). The origin of this line of enquiry goes back to Lattimore (1940). On a
different East Asian frontier setting, namely Choson Korea–Tokugawa Japan,
see Lewis (2003).
15 For Safavid Iran, see Mazzaoui (2003); Floor and Herzig (2012); Matthee
(2015). On the Safavid–Ottoman frontier, see Matthee (2003); Murphy (2003);
Zarinefab (2012). For the Ottomans, see inter alia Peacock (2009); Heywood
(1999); Bazzaz, Batsaki, and Angelov (2013). There are also numerous
studies concerning the several frontier zones of the Empire (Mediterranean,
Habsburg, Polish–Lithuanian). Among them, Hess (2010) is of particular
relevance.
16 Schwartzberg (1992), esp. pp. 400–9; Habib (1977).

17 Kivelson (2006). Also see Khodarkovsky (2002), pp. 47–51, who

notwithstanding defends a (too) rigid and ‘dogmatic’ distinction between border
and frontier in the Russian case.
18 On the Mughal discovery of India, see Sharma (2017), ch. 2.

19 Ali (2006), ch. 10, pp. 109–18. For an interesting analysis of eighteenth-
century Chinese perceptions of Hindustan—namely Emperor Qianlong’s (r.
1736–95) view—see Mosca (2013), pp. 69ff.
20 Fischel (2012) has elaborated on the Deccan region as a culturally non-
imperial space, a topic that we will deal with in Chapter 5.
21 Anooshahr (2012); Lefèvre (2012), pp. 255–86 (citation on p. 282).
22 Ramaswamy (2007), pp. 751–82; Koch (2012).

23 Thomaz (1990); Parker (2001).

24 Father José de Castro to Muzio Vitteleschi, Agra, 1 January 1642, ARSI,
Goa 46 II, f. 152v, letter quoted (and excerpt translated and discussed) in
Camps (1957) pp. 196–7.
25 ‘Tratado da Corte, e Caza de Iamguir Pachá rey dos Mogores’ [1610–11],
ANTT, Cartório da Casa Real, bundle 49 B, box 7420, folder 897, f. 9v, in
Flores (2016), p. 101. Other Jesuit missionaries such as António de Andrade
commented on Jahangir’s decision to eliminate these particular taxes along
the same lines (annual letter, Agra, 14 August 1623, in DUP, vol. III, p. 167).
 26 Jahangir (1978), pp. 107–8. Koch (2007) wrote about the custom and
meaning of rock imprinting among Mughal emperors, while Perdue (2005), pp.
429–42, dealt with similar practices in Qing China. On Mughal genealogical
seals, see Gallop (1999).
27 Monserrate (1992), p. 28. Abu’l Fazl (2001), vol. I, p. 93, remarks that
‘Irani, European, and Mongolian articles of wear are in abundance’ in Akbar’s
wardrobe.
28 Koch (2007), p. 162 and fig. 3.

29 See Toby (2001), pp. 15–45.

30 Dabringhaus (1997), pp. 119–34.

31 Gommans (2002), pp. 15ff. For a reconstitution of the Mughal road

system, see Deloche (1968); Farooque (1977).
32 Mosca (2013), pp. 271–311.

33 Monserrate (1992), p. 80.

34 Pelsaert (2001), pp. 58–9.

35 Ahmed (2011), pp. 60–5.

36 Nathan (1936); Chatterjee (2013).

37 Bhuyan (1947).
38 Saran and Ziegler (2001); Busch (2005), pp. 31–54.

39 An interesting comparison may be made with Macau vis-à-vis Ming

China in the 1620s; in 1623, Emperor Tianqi (r. 1621–7) granted the
Portuguese in Macau the tricky privilege of being considered Chinese ‘citizens’
(‘privilegio de naturaes da China’). On this case, see Flores (2000), p. 251.
40 See Digby (1999), pp. 247–59, who tackle the evolution of the concept of
wilayat vis-à-vis the English in the eighteenth century in precisely this sense.
41 Dara Shukoh, as quoted by Father António Botelho in a letter written to
Father Bento Ferreira, Agra, 20 January 1652, in DUP, vol. III, p. 208.
42 5 September 1591, in Haidar (1998), pp. 64–7.

43 On the Portuguese cartaz system and policy, see Thomaz (2001);

Thomaz (1999).
44 Viceroy Pedro da Silva to António Teles de Meneses, Goa, 1 April 1639,
HAG, Regimentos e Instruções, bk. 3, f. 152r.
 45 London, Victoria and Albert Museum, IS 2117–1896. See Stronge (2002),
pl. 37, p. 56. Some ‘shadowy forms of Portuguese soldiers’ are also
identifiable in one of the illustrations of the Hamzanama, c. 1562–77 (Victoria
and Albert Museum, IS 2156–1883), Stronge (2002), pl. 5, pp. 18–19.
46 Couto (1974), dec. IX, ch. 13, p. 66.
47 Renick (1970).

48 On Akbar’s early years, see Streusand (1989).

49 Galvão (1862), p. 55; Cruz (1997), ch. 4.

50 Pereira (1987), bk. 1, ch. 5.

51 Subrahmanyam (2005b), pp. 150–3 (both citations on p. 152).

52 Fernão Lopes de Castanheda’s História do descobrimento e conquista

da Índia pelos Portugueses is particularly noteworthy. See Castanheda (1979),
bk. viii, especially chapters 83, 84, 94 to 102, 107, 108. On this and other
related texts, see Subrahmanyam (2005b), ch. 6, pp. 138–79.
53 Martim Afonso de Sousa to John III, Lathi, 1 November 1535, in CSL,
vol. I, p. 97. For a similar, contemporary Portuguese account of the Mughals in
Gujarat, namely an anonymous interpolation dated c. 1542 to the Book of
Duarte Barbosa (c. 1516), see Barbosa (1996–2000), vol. I, p. 250.
54 Martim Afonso de Sousa to John III, Lathi, 1 November 1535, in CSL,
vol. I, p. 102.
55 Dom João de Castro to Islam Shah, [Goa], 4 July 1546, in Castro (1995),
pp. 209–11.
56 Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, no. 1889, published by Matos (1985), pl.
xxiii, ff. 39r–40r (‘jente que chamão patanes muito belicosa, porque as molhe-
res tanbem vam com eles a guera a pelejar’), pl. xxiv, ff. 41r–2r (‘patanas’).
57 Florence, Museo Galileo, Dep. Aba, reproduced in Cortesão and Mota
(1987), vol. II, pp. 95–101, pl. 204. Also see Barbieri (1949).
58 On Fatehpur Sikri, see Rezavi (2013); Brand and Lowry (1987);
Petruccioli (1988); Nath (1988).
59 Father Francisco Rodrigues to father Lourenço Peres, Fatehpur Sikri, 6
April 1580, in DI, vol. XII, p. 6.
60 Muhammad ‘Arif Qandhari (1993), p. 193.
61 Couto (1974), dec. X, pp. 66–7, 82–94; Muhammad ‘Arif Qandhari
(1993), p. 199; Abu’l Fazl (1993), p. 37.
 62 Published both in Portuguese and in English in Flores and Saldanha
(2003), pp. 61–4. Also see Saldanha (2005), pp. 661–2.
63 On this regime, see Maier (2016), p. 8.
64 For the Portuguese version of the 1537 contract with Mirza Muhammad
Zaman, see Felner (1868), pp. 224–8.
65 Father Duarte de Sande to the Jesuit College of Coimbra, Goa, 7
November 1579, in DI, vol. XI, p. 676.
66 Gommans (2002), pp. 25–7.

67 ‘Equebar grande Rey dos Moguores’; Miguel de Abreu de Lima to King

Sebastian, Goa, 25 December 1573, AGS, Estado–Portugal, 391–68.
68 Sande to the Jesuit College of Coimbra, in DI, vol. XI, p. 676.

69 Fernando Meneses to Everardo Mercuriano, [Goa], 15 November 1579,

in DI, vol. XI, pp. 732–3.
70 Monserrate to Everardo Mercuriano, Goa, 26 October 1579, in DI, vol. XI,
p. 651.
71 Biedermann (2013), pp. 47–8.
72 The first mission to the Mughal court (1580–3) included the Italian
Rodolfo Acquaviva, the Catalan Antonio de Monserrate, and the Iranian
convert (educated in Hormuz) Francisco Henriques. On this mission, see
Correia-Afonso (1985); Mariotti (1991).
73 The ‘Account of Akbar King of the Mughals’ was written in Portuguese
upon Monserrate’s return to Goa. For the English translation of this text, see
Hosten (1912).
74 Monserrate (1914); Monserrate (1992).

75 Monserrate (1992), pp. i–xlii. Clavijo’s account was disseminated widely

in the early modern Iberian Peninsula.
76 Father Meneses to Everardo Mercuriano, [Goa], 15 November 1579, in
DI, vol. XI, p. 733. Tambirão derives from the Malayalam Thampuran (‘Lord’).
On Renaissance debates regarding the origins of the Islamic empires—the
early sixteenth century and the rise of the Safavids marking the endpoint of the
study—see Meserve (2008).
77 On this map, see Monserrate (1914); McFarland (1939). More recently,
Alay (2006), pp. 39–51.
78 Gommans (2002), p. 18 and map 1.4.
 79 Lemos (1862–3), pp. 67–8.

80 These rather strong words are taken from several of Dom Francisco da
Gama’s letters to the king, written from Goa during his term in office. See BNP,
Reservados, cod. 1976.
81 Silveira (1996), pp. 201–2.

82 Philip II to Viceroy Dom Francisco da Gama, Lisbon, 15 January 1598, in

APO, fasc. III, pp. 814–15. In another letter, also addressed to Dom Francisco
da Gama, Philip II noted that Akbar aimed ‘to become universal lord of those
parts of India’ (Lisbon, 8 January 1598, in APO, fasc. III, p. 801).
83 Father Gomes Vaz to father João Álvares, Cochin, 21 December 1600,
ARSI, Goa, vol. 15, f. 18r.
84 Akbar’s farman to Viceroy Aires de Saldanha, [Burhanpur], 29 March
1601, in Guerreiro (1930–42), vol. I, p. 11; English translation in Flores and
Saldanha (2003), pp. 78–9.
85 Guerreiro (1930–42), vol. I, p. 9.
 2
Chessboard Politics between Central Asia and the
Arabian Sea

FROM BUKHARA TO GOA

At first, this chapter does not seem to deal with the immediate
frontier anxieties of the Estado da Índia vis-à-vis the Mughals. It
begins by taking us to regions further away—if viewed from Goa—
and focuses on what the Portuguese then identified as Akbar’s ‘land
enterprises’ (empresas de terra); by these they meant the emperor’s
expansionist projects in northwest Mughal India and his territorial
disputes with both the Shaybanid ruler ‘Abdullah Khan (or ‘Abdullah
II, r. 1583–98) and the Safavid Emperor Shah ‘Abbas I (r. 1587–
1629). For more than a decade, between 1585 and 1598, Akbar
held court in Lahore, a capital city closely bound to Central Asia and
particularly to Kabul via the strategic Khyber Pass. Several reasons
made Akbar revisit Babur’s legacy and privilege Turan while keeping
an eye on Iran.1
The Portuguese rightly portrayed the Mughal ruler as an ‘enemy
from afar’ (inimigo de longe) during this period.2 As we will see
throughout the book, the emperor’s physical distance from or
proximity to the Estado’s strongholds in the subcontinent
conditioned Goa’s perception of the Mughal threat and, therefore,
also influenced how it defined its defence strategy. With Akbar in
Lahore, successive Portuguese viceroys invested in observing,
reporting, and interpreting the power struggles that took place many
miles from the capital of the Estado and involved the main Islamic
political formations of the time. Such efforts were not in the
Portuguese’s (maritime) ‘nature’, but their perception of this ‘infernal
triangle’—as Sanjay Subrahmanyam has coined the relationship
between Mughals, Uzbeks, and Safavids in this period—is
extremely relevant.3 Events in Bukhara, Kabul, Lahore, and Isfahan
were monitored in Goa via the information that was gathered by
several individuals and the stories that circulated widely between
north India, Iran, and Central Asia. These ‘Portuguese’ materials
often correspond, in fact, to ‘local’ evidence or native sources in
disguise and, therefore, ought to be read accordingly.
The Ottoman Empire and the Deccan states, especially
Ahmadnagar and Bijapur, were also part of this geopolitical
equation. Moreover, the Portuguese soon realized that events in
Central Asia could resonate in the Arabian Sea. The present chapter
addresses this metamorphosis wherein a distant and alien political
geography suddenly became close and familiar; on this account
Hormuz and the ports of lower Sind were likely to have been
impacted by political transformations that took place in Qandahar.
While based in Lahore in the 1590s, Akbar seems to have
entertained thoughts about the Persian Gulf; for the Portuguese
viceroys of the Estado, the Mughal emperor quite surprisingly
sought to reconcile his traditional ‘land enterprises’ with a strange
‘maritime enterprise’ (empresa por mar). To that end, Akbar had to
try to solve a complex puzzle, comprising the Safavids, the Uzbeks,
the Portuguese, and the Mughals themselves, as well as the
Ottomans and the western Deccan sultanates.
Twenty years later, ‘Abbas was faced with a similar challenge in
Isfahan. His chess composition was rather demanding, with four
main problems to address: the Safavid–Portuguese conflict
regarding Hormuz (and the former’s putative wider maritime
interests); the Safavid–Mughal dispute over Qandahar; the Iranian
influence over the Deccan sultanates and its sequels in Goa; and
the Mughal–Portuguese tensions along the Deccan frontier. If in the
1580s the Estado could limit itself to merely observing ‘Abdullah
Khan at a distance, the objective in the following decades was to bar
Akbar and ‘Abbas from carrying out their putative expansionistic
endeavours in the Arabian Sea. The regular correspondence
between India and Iberia scrutinizes these three rulers, their
movements, and dealings, and, therefore, it provides—along with
equally telling missionary reports—the bulk of the source material
for this chapter.
This complex and ever volatile scenario was primarily a result of
the ways in which the relationship between Mughals and Uzbeks
evolved after 1585, the year in which Mirza Muhammad Hakim,
Akbar’s half-brother, died. Hakim had always been in conflict with
the Mughal emperor and had ruled Kabul according to the Turco-
Mongol principle of collective sovereignty, that is, shared rule
amongst the members of the imperial family. Munis Faruqui has
rightly noted that Hakim followed in the footsteps of his grandfather
and sought to embody the Chagatai and Central Asian identity of the
Mughals. In sharp contrast, Akbar adhered more closely to
Humayun’s Hindustani vision of the nascent Mughal state, a vision
that to many represented a somewhat spurious manner that did not
truly reflect Mughal ethos. As such, there were two possible
legitimate ways the Mughal Empire could have been conceived and
built––one saw its seat in Kabul and the other in Fatehpur Sikri.
Indeed those rebellious to Akbar’s vision often turned to the first and
saw in Hakim their model and ideal ruler.4 It is not by chance that
the Italian Jesuit Rodolfo Acquaviva went on to state in 1581 that
‘the true Mughals’ (li veri Mogori) were to be found in Kabul.5
Kabul was of the utmost strategic importance for communication
and trade between India and Central Asia, and the political instability
brought about by the demise of ‘the true Mughals’ in 1585 did not go
unnoticed in Bukhara.6 The Uzbek threat to Kabul was real but
Akbar was quick to suppress it by successfully transforming the
semi-autonomous kingdom into an imperial suba. However, long
gone were ‘Abdullah Khan’s days as a mere mansabdar in the
imperial service.7 In 1582, a Jesuit missionary echoed what people
had begun to say of him: ‘Abdullah Khan was ‘as great a sovereign
as Akbar’.8 While Akbar conquered Gujarat, ‘Abdullah Khan
captured Balkh. One decade later, following the death of his father in
1583, he became Khan of Turan as ‘Abdullah II. By the next year the
Uzbek ruler had annexed Badakhshan and promoted the rebellion of
the Afghan tribes of the region against Mughal authority.9 Mughals
and Uzbeks now found themselves face to face, with no territory in
between, with no buffer zone separating empire from khanate. It was
in this context––once ‘the dust of disturbance had risen in
Qabulistan’, to employ Abu’l Fazl’s expression––that the Mughal
emperor made his decision to establish his imperial capital in
Lahore.10
A period of intense (if tense) diplomatic relations between
Mughals and Uzbeks was to follow, always with the foreseeable
‘partition’ of Iran as the backdrop. The search for the ‘perfect
solution’, one that would lessen the probability of a conflict between
the Mughal Empire and the Khanate of Bukhara, was at stake.
‘Abdullah Khan needed to be certain of Mughal passivity once the
time was ripe for him to conquer Khurasan, while Akbar had to be
able to retake Qandahar––lost to the Safavids soon after he rose to
power––without facing competition from the Uzbek ruler.11 The
precarious internal situation in Iran between 1576 and 1587 paved
the way for external intervention. The long conflict with the
Ottomans from 1576 to 1590 resulted in the loss of sizeable portions
of the northern and western regions of the Safavid Empire, including
the emblematic city of Tabriz. ‘Abdullah Khan would also profit from
this process of political degeneration: in 1587 he invaded Khurasan
and took Herat the following year.
The entente cordiale between Mughals and Uzbeks remained in
place until the end of the century. Akbar took advantage of his
diplomatic rapprochement with ‘Abdullah Khan in order to neutralize
the Afghan tribes, particularly the Yusufzai. Around the same time,
the Mughals conquered Kashmir and it would not take long until
Ladakh and Baltistan submitted to them. Akbar’s subjugation of
Qandahar in 1595 marks the culmination of this expansionist period
in Central Asia. This was a timely conquest, since Shah ‘Abbas was
not yet sufficiently strong to oppose Akbar and ‘Abdullah Khan was
far from his previous position of strength.
 As mentioned earlier, this political landscape was monitored in the
capital of the Estado da Índia. However, at that time Goa’s sources
of information on the Mughals were not only scarce but also of poor
quality. Most of the events occurred far to the north, where the
Portuguese had neither substantive interests nor an abundance of
informants. The Jesuit missionaries did not fail to mention in their
reports the arrival at the Mughal court in 1595 of a cast down ‘King
of Qandahar’—that is, Muzaffar Mirza, the Safavid governor of the
city.12 However, the Catholic priests arrived in the imperial capital of
Lahore that same year and one cannot obviously count on their
reports for the previous years. Thus, the sparse news that reached
Goa was mainly gathered in Diu, Sind, and Hormuz. The news was
sparse, and often misleading, as the Portuguese officers openly
admitted. In his attempt to disentagle the web of relations between
Ottomans, Safavids, Uzbeks, and Mughals in 1589, the secretary of
the Estado noted that almost all of the news arriving to Goa via
Hormuz was ‘uncertain and unlikely to be accurate (incertas e de
pouco fundamento)’.13
The Ottoman incursions into Safavid domains were welcomed by
the Portuguese since, as a result of this, it would be unlikely that
Murad III (r. 1574–95) would turn his attentions towards the Estado
and open a front against them in the Indian Ocean in addition to his
assaults on Safavid territory. The fear of an Ottoman offensive in
Hormuz and other cities of the Estado da Índia, a logical sequence
to the 1581 attack on Masqat, was founded on intelligence gathered
in Cairo; the informants were an anonymous Muslim, portrayed as ‘a
well-known friend of the Portuguese’, and ‘another honoured moor,
a merchant from Hormuz’ called Benazir (Benader). Goa equally
relied on news collected on ships from Ahmadnagar that had
recently returned from the Red Sea. In Chaul, information circulated
that the Turks were planning to use the sultanate’s ports as a
springboard to expel the Portuguese from India.14 Nurturing political
ties with Shah ‘Abbas was deemed crucial in such circumstances,
also because a possible alliance with Iran equally served the anti-
Ottoman strategy Philip II (r. 1580–98) had been developing for the
eastern Mediterranean.15
However, the alarm signals reaching the Estado from northwest
Asia were not limited to the political and military struggles between
Safavids and Ottomans. The Mughal–Uzbek conflict also required
close vigilance. ‘With regard to Akbar, I have news that he is
currently busy with the wars against the Tartars and the Pathans, as
well as with building forts in certain passes’, wrote Viceroy Dom
Duarte de Meneses (g. 1584–8) in 1587.16 ‘The Mogor is in Lahore,
finishing some fortresses’, the captain of Chaul confirmed that same
year.17 The Portuguese thus had fragmentary information about the
construction of half a dozen Mughal forts meant to keep the
Yusufzai and other Afghan tribes at bay. Most probably, Akbar
conceived forts as defensive structures and border demarcations in
the context of a liminal space, and as such his purpose in building
them was twofold: protection of his imperial territory and the caravan
trade.18
Caution with the Afghans went hand in hand with fear of the
‘Tartars’. The following was noted in Diu:
King Akbar … left his court and travelled to Kashmir, two hundred and
seventy leagues of distance. He is now in the limits (raia) between his
kingdom and that of ‘Abdullah Khan Uzbek, his enemy. As Akbar
foresees an attack [by ‘Abdullah Khan], he marched to the gates of his
enemy’s kingdom taking with him ninety four thousand cavalrymen and
twenty two thousand elephants.19

Despite such military strength, the image Portuguese sources

conveyed of the Mughal emperor in this particular context was often
that of a weak ruler. The following episode, discussed in Goa and
Lisbon in the late 1580s, fully illustrates how Akbar seemed to have
been fearful of ‘Abdullah Khan’s power:
Akbar was rather uneasy and fearful due to the war waged by ‘Abdullah
Khan King of the Uzbeks and Lord of Tartary. This Tartar went in person
to the extreme limits (confins) of Persia, determined to became Lord of
Persia and profiting from the fact that its King was busy with the war
 against the Turks. After taking a certain fortress, it happened that
‘Abdullah Khan fell in love with a woman who lived therein. While they
were in the bathhouse (em hũs banhos) together, she––upon instruction
by the Persians––handed him a glass containing a poisoned drink.
‘Abdullah Khan realized the danger and made her drink first, which she
did with true masculine determination (cõ animo mais que varonil).
Seeing her drink, the King also drank and so they died together. Upon
‘Abdullah Khan’s death, his army was dismantled and Persia was freed
of its enemy. Also Akbar freed himself of his fears. Consequently, he
ordered great celebrations in his kingdoms. He highly praised this
woman and spent great sums of money to, in his own fashion,
commend her soul.20

This intriguing extract of a letter to Philip II, signed by the Secretary

of the Estado, raises several questions. The format of the narrative
—a treacherous, yet heroic, woman, who seduces the warrior king
in the hammam and poisons him to death––leads the reader to
engage with similar stories and ultimately with common gendered
themes of the time. The episode that the Portuguese echoed in
1588 is somehow comparable to Babur’s attempted assassination in
December 1526 by Ibrahim Lodi’s mother, an event recounted by
Gulbadan Begum and Babur himself that included the attempt by
slave-women to poison the Mughal emperor’s food.21 Likewise, the
Arabian Nights is not lacking in stories set in bathhouses that use
women, treason, and poison as central elements of the plot.22
There is no mention of this rumour concerning ‘Abdullah Khan’s
murder in any other text of the time. Both Mughal and Safavid
chronicles are silent in this respect and so are the main sources
chronicling the history of the Khanate of Bukhara, such as the
‘Abdullah Nama.23 It remains to be known whether the story did
circulate in Mughal India—the news reports are said to have
reached Goa ‘through the Mogores, our neighbours (vizinhos)’24—
and, this being the case, whether it truly sparked in Akbar the
uncontained joy that the Portuguese sources claim. If this rumour
did indeed circulate, then it is odd that Abu’l Fazl, Badayuni, and
Nizamuddin Ahmad all have remained silent on the matter. At any
rate, the rumour reveals a fragile Akbar, tormented by the might of
his Uzbek neighbour. This impression matches the testimony of
other coeval Portuguese sources, particularly a second letter
penned by Duarte Varejão that reiterated Akbar’s exultation over the
presumed death of ‘Abdullah Khan.25 It also corroborates Dom
Francisco da Gama’s (g. 1597–1600) statement in 1599—a year
after the Uzbek Khan ‘really’ passed away—on how ‘his [‘Abdullah
Khan] death was a great fortune, because he gave him [Akbar] too
much trouble’.26 The prevailing Portuguese image of a victorious
and self-confident Akbar that was highlighted in the previous chapter
—one that stems from his imperial military successes in Gujarat,
Bengal, and later in the Deccan––gives way here to an ‘uneasy and
fearful’ Akbar when Central Asia came to the fore.
‘Abdullah Khan however did not die in 1588, and Akbar had to
resort to other measures to weaken the Uzbek ruler. One such
stratagem was to open his court to political exiles such as Mirza
Shahrukh, the ruler of Badakhshan who escaped to Mughal India in
1584. Five years later, a certain Muhammad Zaman Mirza
pretended to be Mirza Shahrukh’s son and challenged ‘Abdullah
Khan’s rule in Badakhshan. But Muhammad Zaman Mirza was an
impostor, to whom Akbar gave secret support, obviously denying
this deceit in his letter to the Uzbek Khan.27 Mirza Shahrukh’s false
son was killed in Kabul in 1594, but soon thereafter a duplicate
would take his post. Claiming to be Muhammad Zaman Mirza and
pretending to have left Kabul in time to avoid his own execution,
another impostor rebelled in 1599. This second false heir of
Badakhshan likewise aimed at receiving Mughal support, and so he
sent an embassy to Akbar while coining currency in the Emperor’s
name.28 Muhammad Zaman Mirza’s shadow troubled the Uzbeks,
now more fragile due to the ‘true’ death of ‘Abdullah Khan and the
fall of the Shaybanid dynasty. The time was ripe for myriad
Badakhshan princes to spring up. According to an Augustinian
missionary, this particular Muhammad Zaman Mirza had at some
point received word that the heads of three of his doubles were
being displayed in different places. But, it seems, the false prince
was fearless, proudly claiming to be the ‘seven-headed serpent’.29
Muhammad Zaman Mirza’s story interweaves identity, legitimacy,
and political struggle, sharing at the same time many aspects with
other similar cases that occurred in India during the same period,
from Sultan Bahadur Shah of Gujarat in 1537 to Aurangzeb’s
brother Shah Shuja‘ in the early 1660s.30 The history of the Deccan
sultanates is full of such tales, but the most striking resemblance to
Muhammad Zaman Mirza’s ‘heads’ is the story of the Mughal prince
Dawar Baksh, or Bulaqi, whose many doubles also crossed paths
with the Portuguese. Sultan Bulaqi was Jahangir’s grandson and in
1627 decided to challenge his uncle, Prince Khurram and later
Emperor Shahjahan’s right to the Mughal throne. 31 He was killed in
January 1628 together with other Mughal princes, but several
‘Bulaqis’ would resurface in different parts of India and Iran in
subsequent years. This led the Portuguese to suggestively identify
the figure(s) as a sort of Mughal King Sebastian.32
The threads that sustain these narratives are invariably the same:
true-false princes that seek to take power and repair injustices;
executions of would-be legitimate sovereigns avoided at the last
minute thanks to the intervention of a loyal servant; meandering and
cyclical ‘apparations’ of these shadowy figures in different places;
uneasy illegitimate rulers. Writing from Goa, Diogo do Couto
incorporated all of these ingredients in his narration of the Principe
de Abadaxam.33 Couto’s version is similar to Badayuni’s, even if
their endings substantially diverge.34 While the Mughal chronicler
argues that the impostor was killed in Kabul, the Portuguese
chronicler does not mention his death and never questions the
identity of the Infante de Badaxan. He sustains that the prince, or
infant, was converted to Christianity by the Augustinian missionaries
in Hormuz and later brought to the convent of the same religious
order in the capital of the Estado, ‘where I went to see him several
times, and he gave me a full account of his life and peregrination’.
Was Couto friends with another false Muhammad Zaman Mirza, an
adventurer who envisaged Goa as the ideal place to secure himself
a comfortable living by marrying (as he did) a Portuguese noble
woman (fidalga filha de portuguezes)? The Augustinians were
obviously invested in presenting this case as a success story, their
success story. However, had Couto been fooled by someone who
had assumed the convenient guise of a converted Central Asian
prince in exile who had turned into a devout Christian and good
family man?
Be that as it may, the prince was subjected to rigorous exams in
the capital of the Estado da Índia so that his identity could be
ascertained. Another Portuguese document states that Dom
Aleixo––the Christian name chosen by the prince, after the
Archbishop of Goa’s, Fray Dom Aleixo de Meneses (g. 1595–
1612)––converted to Christianity in May 1601 the capital of the
Estado, not in Hormuz. From the Mughal court Jerónimo Xavier sent
a letter to Goa providing in minute detail a physical description of the
real Muhammad Zaman Mirza. Upon confirmation that Xavier’s letter
‘mentioned all the signals and features that were seen and
examined in the body of this prince’, it became obvious that he was
not an impostor. Concurrent to this examination, Mirza was identified
by a Mughal ambassador who, according to this source, had been
sent to Goa by Akbar in order to convince the prince to come to the
imperial court. Although Dom Aleixo refused, ‘the ambassador of the
Mogor has recognized him as the prince; he [Dom Aleixo] received
him [the ambassador] with great majesty, while the ambassador
gave the prince news about his son and his father’.35 Two decades
later, in 1623, Dom Aleixo de Meneses Príncipe de Abadaxão was
still living in Goa, with a royal allowance of 1,000 xerafins per
year.36 And he apparently lived there a quarter-century longer,
survived by his wife—Domingas de Morais, ‘a noble woman, born in
this Kingdom [Portugal]’—who as recent widow asked for royal
favour in 1646 of the ‘Prince of Badakhshan and son of the King of
Shahrukh Shah (Saracoxa)’.37 The memory of Shahrukh Shah (or
Mirza Shahrukh) and of his son was still alive in Goa as late as the
mid-seventeenth century.
 Couto’s full version of this story runs as follows: After his defeat
by ‘Abdullah Khan, Shahrukh Shah (Xaroc Xa) ‘left the kingdom in
the hands of the enemy and took refuge in the court of the great
Mughal. The ruler at the time was Akbar Padshah (Hecbar Paxa),
his relative, for they were both fifth grandsons of the great Timur
Lang (Grão Tamerlão), and he gave him shelter by pretending to
imprison him’. Following a long siege in Kulab, Muhammad Zaman
Mirza—Mirza Shahrukh’s son—was captured by ‘Abdullah Khan,
who placed him in the custody of a qazi called Cojagilan. Two and a
half years later, the Uzbek ruler ordered the death of the prince of
Badakhshan. Cojagilan, however, who had served the prince’s
father, decided to hide and help the prince, ‘putting in his place a
young man who very much looked like him’. The real prince was
then smuggled to Istanbul by an Ottoman ambassador to ‘Abdullah
Khan, upon his return to the court of Mehmet III. Muhammad Zaman
Mirza later travelled in pilgrimage to Mecca and, once the hajj was
performed, returned in disguise to Badakhshan. His plan was to
retake the kingdom that had once been his father’s. To this end the
prince soon gathered thousands of cavalrymen and supporters in
Kulab, but was besieged by ‘Abdullah Khan’s son, and was thus
forced to flee to Kabul and ask for Akbar’s protection. However, his
situation in Kabul proved unsettling; ‘afraid of being killed’, the
prince decided to move to Qazvin. He was well received by the
inhabitants of the city; he met many who had been in his father’s
service and were now under Safavid rule. From Qazvin the prince
intended to go to the Mughal court, where his father, Mirza
Shahrukh, was also under protection. Muhammad Zaman Mirza
then travelled to Hormuz, and from there he planned to reach
Lahore via Sind. Once in Hormuz, Couto recounts, the prince was
converted to Christianity by the Augustinians, whereupon he
renounced Mughal support and left for the capital of the Estado da
Índia instead of proceeding to Lahore.
The Portuguese chronicler clearly had access to a source of
information very similar to that used by some Mughal chroniclers.
His version of events resembles that of Badayuni, who identifies the
man who saved the prince of Badakhshan as his own master and
spiritual guide. The Cojagilan in Couto’s account can be identified as
Khwaja Kalan Beg, a member of the Naqshbandi order. According to
Badayuni’s account, Akbar had sent money and weaponry to
Muhammad Zaman Mirza, but the Mughal chronicler closes his
account with the prince’s murder by the son of the governor of
Kabul. As we have seen, Couto’s is a longer tale; he describes the
prince’s journey to Qazvin and from there to Hormuz and to Goa.
The story of the Infante de Badaxan is not the only one Couto
recounts of Mughal India and Central Asia in which someone
changes places with another. Less lengthy, but far more powerful
and troubling, is the chronicler’s version of Akbar’s birth in Umarkot,
Sind, which he included in Década V of his Ásia—completed in
1597, published in 1612. On 15 October 1542, Hamida Banu Begum
(d. 1604) gave in fact birth to a girl, not to a boy. Certain that
Humayun would be disappointed with her failure to produce him an
heir, she decided to trade her daughter for the newly born son of an
elephant driver (cornac), whose wife incidentally did not notice the
switch. A variation of this story, told by some other people according
to Couto, identified Akbar as the son of the cornac; apparently he
was conceived while the Queen travelled on her elephant (que indo
ella no alifante, emprenhara delle).
Abu’l Fazl, who obviously referred to Akbar’s birth in a rather
different manner—‘the unique pearl of the viceregency of God came
forth in his glory’—would never have dared to propagate such a
story even if he had heard it.38 Couto instead used the occasion to
physically describe, and also to detract from, the figure of Akbar. He
went on to note that people were surprised by his strange
appearance: the Emperor ‘does not look like a Magor, because he is
short, black, pockmarked, and unbearded like a Malay (Jáo), when
all the Magores are by nature white, have large bodies and large
faces, and are rather bearded’. Couto reveals his source to have
been a Polishman called Gabriel whom he met in Goa. In the
chronicler’s words, Gabriel was a new Marco Polo who came to Asia
overland via Muscovy and began living in ‘Abdullah Khan’s court. He
travelled extensively in Central Asia before serving Akbar for fifteen
years, which provided him with the opportunity to visit ‘all the
kingdoms of the Magores’, particularly Sind and Gujarat. Couto’s
interlocutor then spent some years in the capital of the Estado and
eventually passed away in Gujarat.39
The rumour of ‘Abdullah Khan’s assassination, the story of
Muhammad Zaman Mirza, and even the fable concerning Akbar’s
birth are rather instructive of the ways in which Goa connected in
this particular period to Bukhara and Lahore. ‘Portuguese India’ and
its capital were an integral part of an extensive system of circulation
of people, news, and stories that spanned a large area from Iran to
Hindustan to Central Asia.40 We speak of extremely mobile people,
such as the Catholic prince of Badakhshan and the ‘Polish Marco
Polo’, who were characterized by their strong ability to navigate
diverse cultural zones. Myriad individuals, including several
Portuguese, could be grouped with these two. Francisco Toscano, a
Catholic mestizo born in Goa around 1566, is a case in point.
Francisco entered adulthood when he was twelve upon falling
captive to the Marakkayars while sailing between Mannar and
Ceylon. He took the name Kutti Ali upon his conversion and was
taken to Cannanore, where he managed to escape. Travelling
overland dressed as a yogi, Francisco took five to six months to
reach the city of Mylapur, or São Tomé de Meliapor; at the
Portuguese settlement here, he managed to procure himself
European clothing and stay on for a month. From Mylapur Francisco
moved to Masulipatnam and lived there for eight months before
travelling to the capital cities of Golconda and Bijapur. Chaul was his
next stop, and from there he sailed to Bassein, where he expected
to meet a relative. When this unammed relative from Hormuz was
not there to meet him, Francisco decided to go to Diu and then
travelled overland to Sind. He covered the distance in the company
of a Bania and dressed in local fashion (se vestio ao modo da gente
da terra). Once in the Portuguese bandel of Sind he changed once
more into his Portuguese clothing before departing for Hormuz.41
Some time after his arrival in February 1586, he was dennounced by
Gaspar Carvalho, which led to his arrest by the Inquisition. To save
his life, Francisco, now twenty-one, assured those who interrogated
him that during his long and convoluted journey between Mannar
and Hormuz, ‘he never had any dealings or close conversations with
Muslims or Jews, or with other people professing the wrong faith’.42
Given the variety of groups with which Francisco travelled, as the
number of times he changed his appearance and clothing clearly
attest, it is not a stretch of the imagination to assume that he had
heard stories similar to those told by Gabriel or Dom Aleixo. The
veracity of the extremely fluid accounts that these peripatetic
individuals narrated or that they themselves represented is difficult
to ascertain, and perhaps that is not what is important. These
people and these stories often expressed fears and expectations
that were either related to court politics or to frontier management,
or even to a combination of both. Some of the figures and events at
stake never truly impacted the Estado, but the Portuguese
nevertheless engaged with them. Even if by means of rumour,
gossip, and improbable tales, Goa was well aware of the place
Mughal India held in the much wider political and cultural geography
of the time.

MUGHAL TARGETS IN THE 1590s: SIND,

QANDAHAR, AND HORMUZ
It was well known in Goa that already from the early years of Shah
‘Abbas’s long reign his subjects thought very highly of him.43 The
Portuguese were not insensitive to the common Iranian expectations
of the new sovereign, which were reinforced (if not triggered) by the
astrologers’ predictions: ‘Abbas was a predestined individual, forged
to achieve success and lead the political and social regeneration of
the empire.44 And yet it took some time before the new Safavid ruler
made an impression on the Portuguese mind. As late as 1597, Dom
Francisco da Gama sustained that ‘the King of Persia is a young
man not very keen on war’; the viceroy went on to voice strong
doubts regarding the Shah’s readiness to respond to the Ottoman
and Uzbek encroachment on his domains.45 Hence, from a
Portuguese perspective, Hormuz was unlikely to face major political
and military threats from Iran.46 Instead, as we have seen, the
authorities of the Estado da Índia were far more worried with a
possible Ottoman offensive following the attack on Masqat by Mir
‘Ali Beg in 1581. This concern, however, was soon to be eclipsed by
fears of losing Hormuz to a somewhat unexpected power: the
Mughals.
In the 1590s, Akbar’s opinion of Shah ‘Abbas may not have
substantially differed from that of Dom Francisco da Gama. The
correspondence between the two rulers in those years reveals the
inequality of their respective statuses. The Shah addressed Akbar in
a rather respectful tone and often placed himself in the position of
the obedient son receiving advice from his father.47 Akbar
meanwhile patronized the Safavid emperor and did not hesitate to
take advantage of a superiority that had even been acknowledged
by his interlocutor. The epitome of this uneven political relationship
is evidenced in a letter written from Lahore in late 1594, in which the
Mughal emperor presents his planned conquest of Qandahar to
Shah ‘Abbas as an inevitability. Together with Kabul, Qandahar—
fortress, city, and province—constituted a nexus of trade between
north India, Iran, and Central Asia. Shah Tahmasp (r. 1524–76)
conquered Qandahar in 1558, and since then it had been held by
the Mirzas, who were not only unable to secure the region against
Uzbek pressure but who also represented a threat to the political
authority of the Shah.48 Thus, Akbar’s reasoned, justifying his
announcement, that the imminent Mughal capture of Qandahar was
really meant to restore Safavid control over the region and
eventually would serve the Shah’s best interests. Akbar further
informed ‘Abbas of his recent conquest of the dominions of Sivistan
and Thatta, noting that the route to Iraq and Khurasan was now
safer and shorter.49
The link between the conquest of Sind (1591–2) and that of
Qandahar (1595), openly suggested by the Mughal emperor in this
document, is worth exploring. A set of five ruq’as penned by Abu’l
Fazl and addressed to ‘Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan in 1589–91
shows that the Mughals envisaged the conquest of Sind and
Qandahar as a single project. Charged with leading this military
campaign, the Khan-i Khanan was expected first to march across
the Safavid limits, as Sind was considered the easier target.50 Was
the recurrent association between Sind and Qandahar—which were
well-connected areas at the time51—just a matter of continental
policy in the minds of the Mughals? Alternatively, does this
association suggest the existence of an underlying integrated
strategy, involving land-based and maritime operations, connected
with Akbar’s expansionist projects at the close of the sixteenth
century?52
It can be argued that the Mughal attraction to the western Indian
Ocean was not limited to the economic significance of Gujarat’s
maritime settlements or to the multiple meanings––religious,
commercial, political––of the route linking Surat and other ports of
that imperial province to the Red Sea and the holy cities of Mecca
and Medina. To be sure, Akbar’s decision to assume patronage of
the hajj from 1576 to the early 1580s, a move the Ottomans viewed
with great suspicion, may be considered a relevant piece of a
maritime puzzle in the making.53 The Mughals seem to have
conceived of their ‘windows’ to the Arabian Sea in much more
elaborate ways than was once believed; they may have viewed the
string of port-cities stretching from Sind and Gujarat down to the
western Deccan54—all of which profited from close connections to
Hormuz—as central to a policy designed to ensure Akbar’s
supremacy in the region vis-à-vis the Shah and his other
neighbours.
Much has been written on the Mughals’ interest in the ports of
Sind and especially Gujarat, but their potential connections to the
Konkan settlements have been largely overlooked. And yet Akbar,
sitting in a capital city as remote as Lahore, still had access to
crucial information regarding the Safavids from his envoy to the
Deccan in the early 1590s; based in Ahmadnagar, Faizi would
gather information that had arrived to the port of Chaul from Hormuz
and then brief Akbar on the recent events in Iran. His reports
included information on the Shah’s persecution of the Qizilbash
—‘Red-Caps’, that is the tribal forces that had brought the dynasty
to power—and the progression of the Safavid–Uzbek conflict over
Khurasan, including a minute assessment of the Safavid forces
involved.55 Another telling example is the letter that Prince Daniyal,
Akbar’s son, wrote to Shah ‘Abbas in 1603, in his capacity as newly
appointed governor of the Deccan. Therein, Daniyal underlined the
geographic proximity of Gujarat and the province he ruled to the
ports of Bahrain and Hormuz, concluding that this could help
strengthen the ties between the two empires.56
Could Akbar suddenly become a maritime ruler and consequently
become a threat to Portuguese Hormuz? At least Goa and Lisbon
toyed with such a scenario towards the end of the sixteenth century.
Strangely enough, a ruler who mastered a continental empire and
who at an early age had been quite removed (physically, and
probably mentally too) from the Indian Ocean was now, at least in
Firangi eyes, ready to pursue an ambitious ‘maritime enterprise’ that
could eventually lead to the conquest of Hormuz.
As noted in the previous chapter, the Mughal conquest of Gujarat
and the control of Surat in 1572–3 had a considerable impact on the
capital of the Estado da Índia. But, it was Akbar’s capture of Sind
two decades later that prompted this heated debate among the
Portuguese on the presumed evolution of the Mughal Empire into a
maritime state, though the Mughal emperor had not overtly targeted
Portuguese commercial activities in the main ports of the new
imperial province.57 The Estado, however, had maintained strong
commercial interests in Thatta and Lahori Bandar since the 1550s,
garnering the lion’s share of textile trade between those settlements
and the Persian Gulf.58 As such, commerce from Sind had always
weighed heavily in the customs revenues of Hormuz, and therefore
it was clear how Goa would perceive Akbar’s annexation of Sind as
part of a bigger menace.59
 In addition, the Portuguese could not ignore the strategic
significance of Sind within the Mughal context, as its incorporation
into the empire would give the Mughals full control of the long
overland route linking Panjab to the Arabian Sea, one of the main
axes of circulation of the Hindustan.60 It is not surprising therefore
that the Portuguese strategy with regard to Sind on the eve of the
imperial campaign focused on lending support, especially by way of
Hormuz and Diu, to the ephemeral resistance led by the local ruler
Mirza Jani Beg.61 According to different sources, there were
Firangis amongst the troops of Jani Beg.62 Abu’l Fazl writes that the
‘ambassador’ of Hormuz was aboard one of the four galleys
(ghurab) that were captured by the imperial army and he further
notes that a Portuguese agent from Hormuz lived in permanence in
Thatta, a man whose company Jani Beg kept to prove to the enemy
that various ‘tribes’ had sided with him in the conflict.63 It was
meanwhile essential for the Estado to prevent the Mughals from
receiving weaponry, horses, and other ‘suspicious’ (suspeitosas)
commodities through Hormuz and the ports of Sind, even though the
Portuguese realized that after 1595, Akbar’s court could also secure
these important items by way of Qandahar.64
The signs of Portuguese unrest over presumed Mughal maritime
projects, particularly Akbar’s alleged interest in Hormuz, are many;
much of this information circulated through numerous channels and
assumed diverse nuances. Based on intelligence gathered by the
Captain of Hormuz, António de Azevedo, Philip II writes in 1598:
‘Even if it is still uncertain whether he [Akbar] will decide to lead a
maritime enterprise it is nonetheless clear that this is what he has in
mind and that he will try his best to pursue it; thus, the safest
attitude is to be prepared for any event.’65 Rumours and patchy
reports probably fostered anxiety and political panic. This is what
may have happened in 1597, when the Jesuit missionaries based in
the Mughal court gained access to the belongings of a Milanese
renegade who died on his way between Kashmir and Lahore.
Among other objects, the priests found ‘some books on gunsmithing
and war machines’ (alguns livros de fundiçõens e machinas
bellicas) and immediately concluded that the deceased had
intended to ‘help Akbar to conquer the fortress of Diu and
Hormuz’.66
Other clues pointing to Akbar’s maritime plans were apparently
more substantial. There was constant talk of the construction of a
huge ship in Sind meant to navigate the Red Sea, ‘which would
certainly cause the total destruction of the customs houses of the
Estado’.67 An anonymous Portuguese observer wrote that the
Mughal Emperor ‘very much desires to enter our domains in India
and therefore ordered in the year of [15]98 the construction of many
galleys, as well as five hundred galeotas and fustas, some of which
are in Sind and the remaining ones in Lahore’.68 We know that
Akbar had shipyards both in Lahore and Thatta; Abu’l Fazl—who
confirms the construction of the large ship mentioned in the
Portuguese sources69—speaks with clear enthusiasm of the
emperor’s naval strategy, comparing ships to horses and camels as
tools of imperial conquest.70 This poetic comparison matches the
equally evocative image conveyed by the Jesuit missionary
Jerónimo Xavier from Lahore in 1596: ‘Hearing the sailors singing is
like very pleasant music to this King [Akbar], something that has
never been seen or heard in this country before.’71
However, the Portuguese soon realized that Akbar’s empresa por
mar would inevitably face its own obstacles. As Dom Francisco da
Gama wrote in 1599, ‘The large ship that Akbar sent from Sind to
the Strait [Red Sea] burned after it had been launched, with God’s
help. No goods were recovered and few managed to escape.’72 The
challenges the Mughals faced were not limited to the logistics of
building in Lahore vessels that would be capable of navigating the
Arabian Sea, but challenges also lay in making them fit to travel the
length of the Indus River, down to Thatta. The emperor would make
a second attempt, this time by transporting ‘a nao on top of a rather
strong barque (fortissima barca), which can navigate shallow
waters, so that it would be possible to negotiate certain sections of
the river with insufficient water’.73 There is no mention of the
outcome of this ‘artifice’, as Xavier referred to it. It is however clear
that the Mughals did not just lack maritime technology and
expertise, they were also hampered by the difficulty of navigating the
Indus River.74
In regard to the smaller ships just mentioned, Jerónimo Xavier
confirmed ‘that in three rivers that move deep inland, he [Akbar]
ordered a great number of fustas as well as three large naos to be
ready, and his purpose can only be to take either the fortress of
Hormuz or that of Diu’. But the Jesuits also understood that as
Akbar’s attention was drawn to the encroaching Uzbek threat, his
apparent maritime aspirations lessened.75 Besides, the vessels
hardly posed any danger to the Estado: ‘These ships did not set sail
once they were finished because they are rather disproportionate
and unseaworthy.’ Xavier was even approached by someone from
Akbar’s entourage (um capitão do Equebar) who tried to convince
him to recruit and bring to the imperial court a Portuguese expert
who could build fustas properly or at least provide a suitable model
of such a vessel.76
The Mughal maritime threat in the Arabian Sea was to prove
ephemeral and by late 1598 there was already talk in Lisbon about
the shallow foundation upon which the Mughal emperor had based
his project.77 Regardless, is is clear that Akbar intended to maintain
some degree of control over Hormuz. A Portuguese report from
around 1600 has him ‘yearning for Hormuz and Masqat, which are
neighbouring ports, because they are very close to his domains’.
The author of this text goes on to note that Akbar had even planted
agents on the island of Jarun so that he could receive updated
information, especially regarding the condition of the Portuguese
fortress. The Mughal emperor’s network of influence grew in the
region, as evidenced by the fact that the wazir (guazil) of Hormuz
used to present himself as a vassal of the Mughal emperor: ‘He
accepts his [Akbar’s] robes of honour (lhe aceita cabaia), which is a
sign of vassalage, and everyone fears him [Akbar] there.’78 We
have no further evidence of the degree to which the elite of Hormuz
recognized Akbar’s political authority. However, considering the
internal political disruption of Hormuz in the late sixteenth century
resulting from a conflict between the king and the wazir, the latter
was possibly trying to find external supporters to back his cause
and, to that effect, Akbar’s weight was undeniable.79
The Mughal emperor may have enjoyed that he was considered a
prime source of legitimacy for the local wazir. He probably felt
comfortable with the status of suzerain of Hormuz, but it is unlikely
that he was eager to exert effective territorial control over the
kingdom let alone claim maritime hegemony in the Gulf region.
Unlike the Ottoman Empire, which used to exert power over insular
territories, Timurid India was a continental continuum and did not
ever try such model.80 Conversely, an experience in suzerainty
might have seemed appealing and had plenty of paralells in Akbar’s
own time: Istanbul and Aceh nurtured a similar relationship in the
late sixteenth century, while the Safavids—and particularly Shah
‘Abbas, as we will see in the following pages—conceived of their
connection with the Deccan sultanates very much in the same
fashion. 81
Hormuz was the focus of Akbar’s designs for good reason.
Economically, it made sense that someone already in control of Sind
and Gujarat would covet the island of Jarun. Politically, it would have
been an instrument to ease expected Safavid designs on
Qandahar.82 In fact, ‘Abbas would consolidate his authority both
internally and externally at the turn of the seventeenth century.83 By
this point the conflict with the Ottomans was slanted in favour of the
Safavid emperor, who profited from the successive deaths of the
Uzbek rulers ‘Abdullah Khan and his son ‘Abdul Mu’min in 1598 to
recapture Herat and stabilize the eastern confines of his empire.
This set the stage for a change in relations between the Shah and
the Sultan. After his conquest of Khurasan, the Safavid ruler was
quick to pen a letter to his Mughal counterpart. As expected, Shah
‘Abbas stressed the reconstitution of what he viewed as his empire’s
natural configuration, urging Akbar to return Qandahar to him.84
The Mughal emperor obviously ignored the Shah’s suggestion.
Notwithstanding, the diplomatic relations between the two states,
now mirroring a more balanced political relationship than earlier in
the decade, were to improve in the years to come.85 Mughal and
Safavid ambassadors began to regularly travel between the
respective capitals via Hormuz, since the overland route was a
dangerous alternative before the death of ‘Abdullah Khan in 1598.
This constant circulation of Indian and Iranian representatives and
their numerous servitors made the Portuguese extremely uneasy.
Not only did these envoys usually fail to pay duties in Hormuz on the
gifts and other commodities they carried, but a close relationship
between Akbar and Shah ‘Abbas was viewed in Goa, Madrid, and
Lisbon as a dangerous liaison that needed to be brought to a halt.86
The perfect scenario for the Estado was one in which the Mughals
and Safavids lived in a tense equilibrium; the absolute supremacy of
one over the other or a firm alliance between the two were highly
undesirable.
In the political conjuncture of this epoch, particularly given the
alarm the Mughal conquest of the Deccan had excited in Goa at its
onset, the Portuguese thought they would be better off with a
stronger Shah ‘Abbas and a weaker Akbar. Indeed by late 1599,
Dom Francisco da Gama held different, more positive views on
Shah ‘Abbas: ‘After the death of ‘Abdullah Khan, King of the
Uzbeks, the King of Persia entered that kingdom and is now lord of
most of it. He has thus proved to be quite different from what one
initially expected of him.’87 The Safavid ruler was no longer that
harmless ‘young man [who was not] not very keen on war’, and the
viceroy of the Estado, who had radically revised his opinion in these
two years, was now convinced that the Shah’s next target could well
be Akbar.88 Consequently, Gama’s successor––Aires de Saldanha
(g. 1600–5)––received instructions ‘to nurture the friendship of this
King [‘Abbas]’.89 In a letter to Philip III (r. 1598–1621) written from
Lisbon in October 1602, a prominent figure, the viceroy of Portugal
Dom Cristóvão de Moura, elaborated on the possible conflict
between the Estado da Índia and the Mughal Empire and went on to
suggest a radical solution: ‘If in the future we decide to put pressure
on the Mogor, the Persiano [‘Abbas] could make war on him via the
Kingdom of Sind, which belongs to the Mogor and borders on
Persia. But we suggest this only in secret, so that the Mogor will not
feel offended.’90

SAFAVID MOMENTUM IN THE 1620s

Cristóvão de Moura certainly gave no second thought to his idea to
make Shah ‘Abbas the ruler of Sind. Could the Safavid ruler turn his
interests towards that Mughal province and away from the southern
region of his own empire? In other words, would ‘Abbas attack
Thatta and neglect Hormuz?
A decade or so before the fall of Hormuz in 1622, the Estado da
Índia already had every reason to be worried about the situation in
the Persian Gulf.91 From a geopolitical perspective, the newly
revealed maritime ‘vocation’ of Shah ‘Abbas clearly influenced the
balance of power in the area. By reducing the authority the Kingdom
of Hormuz had on the mainland and by occupying key positions
such as Bahrain (1602), Qeshm (1608), and Gombroon (1614), the
Shah managed to progressively isolate Hormuz. The intense Iberian
diplomatic activity in Isfahan during this period, which primarily
addressed the Ottoman question, also dealt with the Safavid
expansion in the Persian Gulf but proved to be rather ineffective in
this regard.92 At any rate, the conquest of Hormuz had started well
before 1622 and cannot be fully understood if presented solely as
the result of an Anglo–Persian alliance against the Portuguese. It is
in fact part and parcel of a wider and more complex scenario,
stretching from the unstable continental fringes of the Safavid
Empire—where the Uzbeks still struggled to become a major player,
but to no avail93—to the Deccan sultanates and the ways in which
political developments in the latter states frequently affected
Mughal–Portuguese relations.
The Safavids, however, were not the only regional problem that
the Portuguese had to face. The increased maritime activity of
groups such as the Niquelus (Nikhelus) and the Nautaques
(Nodakhi Baloch) rendered the waters of the Gulf unsafe and,
consequently, the customs houses less profitable.94 Moreover, the
temptation to impose excessively high taxes in Hormuz contributed
to the rise of alternative settlements and to a redefinition of the
regional trading networks. Asian and European (including
Portuguese) merchants alike opted for ports such as Jask and
Sohar, while the overland route through Qandahar became truly
significant with regard to trade volume, rivalling the maritime route
and putting Hormuz rents at risk as trade through town decreased.95
The Armenians, who bitterly complained about being treated worse
than Muslims in Hormuz by the Portuguese, are a good case in
point since they were now doing business primarily via Qandahar
and Lahore.96 To make matters worse, a major conflict between the
Estado da Índia and the Mughal Empire in 1613–15, which will be
studied in Chapter 4, severely affected commerce from Gujarat and
Sind to Hormuz.97
The Safavid factor per se did not pertain exclusively to Hormuz
and the Persian Gulf. If Don García de Silva y Figueroa,
Ambassador of Philip III to the Safavid court in 1614–9, is to be
believed in this regard, the Shah nurtured far more ambitious
projects regarding the southern areas of his domains than
previously thought:
The King of Persia will certainly not waste the chance to become Lord
of the entire Persian Sea, as well as the coastline running from his Strait
[of Hormuz] to the river Sind [Indus]. His plans are well known, since
fourteen years ago, he conquered Bahrain and the Kingdom of Lar,
where the Kings of Persia, ancient and modern alike, have never held
any rights whatsoever. He has also usurped the mainland territories
under rule of the Kingdom of Hormuz, which belong to Your Majesty.
Recently, soon after Don Roberto [Sherley] left Hormuz to come to this
 city [Goa], he rushed to build a fortress in the Bay of Guadel [Jask],
which is a very safe harbour located 80 or 100 leagues from Hormuz,
and about the same distance from Sind. He has dispatched 7,000 men
and conquered the hills of a petty king of the land. This he has done
with the purpose of diverting commerce from Hormuz to Guadel, where
he intends to concentrate all the illegal trade from India, particularly
wood for shipbuilding and also to give refuge to the corsairs arriving
from Europe. This port is very convenient for him, since it is closer to his
court [i.e., Isfahan] than Hormuz, and from there he will have access to
the cáfilas that bring goods from India and Europe.98

Apparently, the Shah entertained plans to conquer the fringes of the

Arabian Sea from the Strait of Hormuz down to the settlements of
Thatta and Lahori Bandar, even if Safavid texts are absolutely mute
about such intention.99 The presumed plans may have included a
desire to transform the port of Jask into a successful replica of
Hormuz, which would undoubtedly lead to the definitive decline of
the original, as Bandar ‘Abbas ‘bled’ Hormuz after 1622.100 The
Spanish ambassador was of course wrong in assuming that Jask
profited from direct connections to the Safavid court, but it was
undeniably closer to the mouth of the Indus River than other Gulf
ports. One cannot say for certain whether Silva y Figueroa spoke of
a real Safavid project of maritime hegemony or if he was simply
biased by the ‘distorted’ Portuguese way of looking at the region.
Accustomed to viewing Asia from the sea—that is, from the margins
or the outside, as Zoltán Biedermann has shown—Portuguese
writers and mapmakers wove Persia and Sind together, creating in
the mind’s eye a unified Southwest Asian region that did not
correspond to Safavid Persia proper.101
At any rate, Silva y Figueroa’s testimony is not unique. The
English seem to have held similar views, judging from a letter
penned by Nicholas Bangham from Burhanpur in July 1622
recounting the recent Safavid conquest of Qandahar: ‘The Kinge of
Persia hath made an inroade into the Mogolls terytory on this side of
Qandahar, and hath sent another army to take Thatta in Sind.’102
Both reports—Figueroa’s and Bangham’s––should be read
alongside Sherley’s direct assumption in his Discurso sobre el
aumento de esta monarquía (1625):
The Persiano has taken from Your Majesty Bahrain, Gombroon, and
Hormuz, and in order to rule over the entire Arabian Gulf he wishes to
control Masqat. He has conquered Qandahar to the Kingdom of the
Magor, which is the key to Sind and Cambay [Gujarat]; and it is certain
that, once [the Shah] knows that Your Majesty is busy in these parts, he
will march through Diu and Chaul to become absolute lord of the
Kingdoms of Sind and Cambay.103

In fact, Qandahar—connected to Isfahan by a tortuous, yet vital road

—formed another important piece of the Iranian puzzle.104 The first
attempt to recover it from the Mughals dates back to 1606 and
marks the beginning of the Safavid campaigns around the Persian
Gulf. Qandahar would finally be retaken in June 1622, in an attack
that, unsurprisingly, coincided with the conquest of Hormuz the
month before. Significantly—assuming that the information provided
by Nicholas Bangham is reliable—the Shah also planned to march
across lower Sind on the same occasion, while a Jesuit missionary
states in late 1624 that the Safavid ruler was preparing an attack on
Kabul.105 Like Akbar in the 1590s, Shah ‘Abbas sought to combine
an aggressive maritime policy with sustained continental expansion
in the 1620s. For both rulers, gaining authority over Qandahar had
everything to do with their political aspirations and symbolic legacies
in the region comprising north India, Iran, and Central Asia. But the
control of Qandahar was equally tied to what, in different moments,
both Akbar and Shah ‘Abbas seem to have projected for Sind and
the Persian Gulf.
An exploration of the close links between the Deccan sultanates
(particularly Bijapur and Ahmadnagar) and Isfahan during this period
helps us to understand the full picture. In 1613, emissaries of
Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, and Golconda were welcomed to the Safavid
court, denoting the renewed relations between the two parties. The
purpose of these movements—Iskandar Beg explains, after
underscoring that ‘the rulers of the Deccan had long been devoted
friends of the Safavid House’—was ‘to seek help from the Shah
against the Cagatay army which, on orders from the Mogul Emperor,
was troubling their borders’.106 Shah ‘Abbas reciprocated and sent
his ambassadors to the Deccan the following year: Husain Beg
Tabrizi went to the court of Muhammad Qutb Shah (r. 1611–26);
Darwish Beg, who meanwhile had been replaced by his son,
Muhammad Beg, was received by Burhan Nizam Shah III (r. 1610–
31); while Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II (r. 1580–1627) welcomed Shah Quli
Beg in Bijapur. Much like their reaction to the Mughal–Safavid
diplomatic rapprochement a few years earlier, the authorities of the
Estado da Índia considered such developments to be undesireable.
Ironically, the circulation of people and commodities resulting from
the flourishing diplomacy between Iran and the western Deccan––
viewed with such wary eyes in Goa––flowed through Portuguese
Hormuz. In addition to the political embarrassment of having
potential adversaries freely frequenting a port city controlled by the
Estado, there were also economic drawbacks to be considered. As
occurred in much of the early modern world—including China with
its tribute system—diplomatic exchange between Isfahan and the
Deccani courts was a convenient way of doing business in disguise.
Gifts, if they were large in volume and of great value, such as
horses, were often tax-exempt in Hormuz. Ambassadors, frequently
travelled in the company of hundreds of people, including
merchants, and routinely expected the Portuguese to provide
vessels for their transport and, at the same time, hoped to make use
of rival ports of the Estado on the Konkan coast, such as Dabhol
and Danda.
Consequently, numerous incidents involving Iranian and Deccani
representatives took place in Hormuz in the 1610s.107 In 1615,
Philip III asked the viceroy of Goa to put a stop to this type of
movement of men and goods in Hormuz, confident that, owing to the
Mughal–Safavid tension over Qandahar, diplomats and merchants
travelling between Iran and India would be unlikely to opt for the
overland route. Thus, the Portuguese king argued, once the ‘door of
Hormuz is closed, the Safavid danger will wane’.108
 Philip III could not have been more mistaken. The conflict
between Shah ‘Abbas and Jahangir concerning control over
Qandahar had little effect on the caravan trade because the need to
preserve the stability of the main trade routes even in times of war
was understood by those who ruled this frontier zone—the Safavids,
the Mughals, and the Uzbeks. The massive presence of Indian
merchants in Iran and Central Asia, as well as of Iranian traders in
northern India ensured that political tensions and military conflicts
were ‘brief’ and not structurally disruptive.109
The events in Hormuz of 1620 exemplify this well. The
ambassador of Ahmadnagar to Isfahan, Habash Khan, was
travelling in the company of Muhammad Beg, the Safavid envoy to
Ahmadnagar, who was returning home. They planned to proceed to
the Safavid capital by way of Hormuz and expected their goods to
pass unchecked and duty-free. When it became clear Goa was not
prepared to accomodate their expectations, the two diplomats
threatened to take an alternative route and to ‘cross the lands of the
Mogor’. Convinced of their intent, the Portuguese retracted and let
them pass.110 In the years to come the ‘door of Hormuz’ would be
left ajar, if not totally open, as communications between the Deccan
and Iran through Hormuz intensified under the passive eyes of the
Portuguese officials. Letters exchanged between Shah ‘Abbas and
the sultan of Ahmadnagar often circulated via Hormuz unchecked.
Somewhat ironically, we know that even the correspondence
between the Augustinian missionaries based at the Safavid court
and the Portuguese captain of Hormuz was frequently transported
by Deccani emissaries enroute from Iran to their homeland.111
The Portuguese deemed the way the Shah cultivated his ties with
the sultans of Bijapur and Ahmadnagar to be a manoeuvre to
annihilate the Estado da Índia. Goa feared the obvious complicity
between the sultanates of the western Deccan and Safavid Iran as
much as the Mughal threat to these sultanates. As we will explore in
Chapter 5, the Estado’s successive viceroys perceived the
permanent flux of Iranians to the Konkan ports and their strong
influence on the political structures of local sultanates to be a ticking
time bomb. ‘The Shah may well take advantage of these Persians to
undermine our situation here’, Viceroy Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo
wrote from Goa in 1615.112
As the Portuguese saw it, one possible Iranian stratagem was to
persuade the Deccani sultans to create artificial political tension
along their borderlands with the Estado, so that Goa would be
unable to send rescue forces to the Persian Gulf when the time was
ripe for an attack on Hormuz.113 The effects of a Safavid alliance
with the Deccan sultans, the purpose of which could well have been
to capture the capital city of the Estado, were thoroughly discussed
among the Portuguese. The king of Portugal was determined to
prevent the Persa from leaving his kingdom to ‘start new enterprises
in India’.114 But the Iranian–Deccani connection, Philip III noted,
was rooted in solid religious solidarity, which had to be taken into
consideration:
It is rather convenient to avoid these relations between the Shah and
the kings of India, but it is also necessary to soften his reaction; and I
am aware that the kings of Persia, ancestors of the present King, never
acted similarly toward the neighbouring kings of the Estado, and in this
regard one may conclude that this novelty, together with what is known
about his claims, is meant to encourage them to make war on the
Estado; more so since we also understand that the Muslim kings of
India are followers of his sect, and uphold him as their religious leader,
which is comparable to the subordination of the Catholics to the Holy
Priest; and they call his name in their prayers, and respect his precepts
and advice.115

This intriguing reflection by Philip III carries two major mistakes.

First, Shah ‘Abbas was not the first Safavid ruler to cast an eye on
India as a potential area of imperial influence: Shah Isma‘il I (r.
1501–24) attempted to exert similar authority in the early sixteenth
century, and it is known that his successor, Shah Tahmasp, built
upon this precedent.116 Not only did Tahmasp urge the Deccan
sultans to fight the Hindu Kingdom of Vijayanagara, his
ambassadors in the local courts routinedly instigated the various
rulers to rise against the Portuguese.117 Second, Ibrahim II was a
Sunni and certainly cannot be portrayed as having belonged to the
‘sect’ of Shah ‘Abbas, who was a Shi’i. But we also know that the
ideological bonds linking the Safavid emperors to the Deccani
sultans formed a composite set of elements within which Shi’ism
was not the primary one.118 Be that as it may, Philip III writes as
though he had read the letter addressed by the sultan of Bijapur to
‘Abbas in 1612–13. In this document, Ibrahim II presents himself as
a ‘humble slave’ of the Safavid emperor and goes on to state that
the Deccan territories were as much a part of the Safavid Empire as
the provinces of Iraq, Fars, Khurasan, and Azerbeijan were.
Moreover, Ibrahim II wrote that the khutba was read under the name
of Shah ‘Abbas in all the mosques of Bijapur and that he himself,
like any ordinary mansabdar, governed the territory under the name
of the Safavid ruler.119
Safavid emperors held some theoretical and symbolic authority
over the Deccan rulers in earlier times, frequently acting as their
protectors and counsellors. Unsurprisingly, thus, Ibrahim II explicitly
asks the Shah to put a stop to the Mughal offensive in his kingdom.
‘Abbas was probably not interested in openly patronizing the
Mughals or participating in an anti-Mughal front. However, he
certainly wished to avoid the expansion of Mughal sovereignty to the
Deccan states; this was also because the local resistance to
Jahangir aided him in resolving the Qandahar question to his
advantage.120
In his dealings with Jahangir on this matter, Shah ‘Abbas portrays
himself as a referee, engaged in the conciliation of two distinct
positions. In assuming this role of the responsible father who curbs
the foolish acts of his children, the Safavid ruler recognized some
degree of Mughal authority over the Deccan sultanates.121 ‘Abbas
no doubt wished to contribute to the failure of the Mughal conquest
of the Deccan without, however, jeopardizing his cordial relationship
with Jahangir, which corresponds to a trend in political and
diplomatic practice among rulers in the Indo-Persian world.122
Suffice it to recall the exchange of highly symbolic gifts between the
two rulers, namely Shah ‘Abbas’s offer of the celebrated Ulugh
Beg’s ruby to Jahangir, which was ultimately connected to the
Qandahar dossier.123 Father Gonçalo de Sousa, a Jesuit of the
Mughal mission, underlined the Shah’s emblematic gesture and its
political implications. By offering the ruby to Jahangir, Sousa noted,
the Safavid ruler was acknowledging the latter as natural heir of
Timur in India and thus conferring political legitimacy to the Mughal
emperor. Concurrently, Jahangir was expected to return Qandahar
to the Safavids, ‘since it is public knowledge that he [‘Abbas] had
rights over the kingdom, as it was the cradle where his progenitors
were raised’. The Catholic priest went on to write that Jahangir was
truly excited about this gift, and yet refused to render Qandahar,
very much against the advice of the Persian nobles living in his court
who considered that ‘by keeping it the Emperor was paying more
than the rents he received’.124
Jahangir seems, therefore, to have been insensible to the appeal
of these unnamed ‘Persian nobles’ to trade a costly Qandahar for
Ulugh Beg’s ruby. Notwithstanding, the emperor had been married
since 1611 to Nur Jahan, a member of a prominent Tehrani family
from Qandahar. The power that Nur Jahan—as well as her father
and brother, I‘timad ud Daula and Asaf Khan respectively—held
over Jahangir is a vexed question in Mughal historiography.125 Was
the imperial family a simple reflection of the alleged over-influence
of the Iranian elite at the Mughal court and ultimately, as Juan Cole
holds, of the voluntary cultural subordination of Timurid India to
Safavid Iran?126 A more nuanced picture—one in which Jahangir
emerges as a stronger political figure, paired with Nur Jahan as an
influential actor of the Mughal court in her own right—is probably
closer to reality.127 The emperor’s insistence on keeping
simultaneously Qandahar and Ulugh Beg’s ruby conforms to these
novel views.
At this particular moment, the Portuguese were certainly more
sympathetic of Jahangir’s dilemma than the Shah’s stance. To be
sure, the Estado da Índia would benefit in more than one way from a
hypothetical large-scale military campaign to defend and consolidate
northwestern Mughal India. By intervening in Qandahar, Jahangir
would be obliged to ease the pressure he was placing on the
Deccan. Concurrently, if the Shah were forced to concentrate more
resources in Qandahar, his control of the Persian Gulf would be less
effective. For this reason, immediately after the fall of Hormuz in
1622, Philip IV urged the Jesuit missionaries living in the Mughal
court to try to persuade Jahangir to go to war against his Safavid
counterpart.128 Similarly, just several months before the loss of
Hormuz, an Augustinian based in Isfahan, at the behest of ‘the
people from Lahore who are presently here’, suggested the viceroy
of Goa send an embassy to the Mughal court to convince the
emperor to defend Qandahar.129

UNSOLVED CHESS PROBLEMS

The sources dating between the early 1590s and the early 1620s
discussed in this chapter bring to light evidence of the ambitious
plans within the Mughal and Safavid agendas to expand their
authority in various directions contemporaneously. It was a rather
risky move in both cases, for imperial expansion and consolidation
implied making choices and setting priorities, as neither Akbar nor
‘Abbas had unlimited human and financial resources at his disposal.
Some of the directions targeted by the two rulers, such as the
frontier zones of Iran, north India, and Central Asia, were
foreseeable ‘battlefieds’. The endless dispute over Qandahar, which
started with Babur’s conquest in 1522 and ended with a series of
disastrous military campaigns organized by Emperor Shahjahan
between 1649 and 1653, is a case in point.130 Shahjahan captured
well the volatile, unbounded nature of this region when he allegedly
observed that Qandahar was ‘like a prostitute, for today it is mine
and tomorrow it will belong to the Persa’.131 At any rate, Mughal
and Safavid visions of these areas were shaped by collective
memory and historic legacy involving nostalgia and ‘homesickness’,
even though it would be overly simplistic to attribute one absolute,
immutable characteristic to the so-called Mughal obsession with
Central Asia.132
Other expansionist paths were more innovative. Both Akbar and
Shah ‘Abbas seemed to have targeted the largely unfamiliar
maritime horizon as part of their newly desired political spaces. As
rulers of traditionally continental polities centred on places such as
Tabriz, Baghdad, Qazvin, Herat, Isfahan, Qandahar, Kabul, Lahore,
Agra, and Delhi, they added a rather ‘unnatural’ dimension to their
authority by venturing beyond landed territory. The first Mughal
emperors and respective elites knew very little about the Indian
Ocean, while the Safavid rulers were always physically distant from
their southern domains. Hormuz and Gombroon, Thatta and Surat,
Dabhol and Goa represented unfamiliar terrain for them, just as the
Portuguese, English, and Dutch who came to frequent and even to
dominate those ports were new interlocutors to them. Still, Akbar
and ‘Abbas combined territorial and maritime ambitions, involving
camels and ships, ritual cities and commercial ports.
It may be argued that the two rulers envisaged gaining
simultaneous control over the routes linking Iran to India: the
caravan route via Qandahar and the sea-lanes from the Persian
Gulf to Sind, Gujarat, and Konkan. The combination and
concentration of the land and sea routes under one rule would
ideally enable either ruler to dominate commercial highways,
pilgrimage routes, and axes of political authority. Both the Shah and
the sultan tried to master the West Asian chessboard at the turn of
the sixteenth century, yet neither fully succeeded. In the 1590s,
Akbar managed to capture Sind and Qandahar. However, his
conquest of the Deccan stalled in its early stages and his aim to
control Hormuz may have just been contemplated. Some thirty
years later, Shah ‘Abbas incorporated Qandahar and Hormuz,
succeeded in influencing Deccan politics, but ultimately did not
venture into Sind.
What about the Portuguese, who had a direct interest in all these
regions excluding Qandahar? They also tried to play the political
chess game of West Asia and yet they, too, failed to solve it. The
economic challenge for the Estado lay not only in controlling the
maritime routes between Iran and India but also to quash the
competition represented by the caravan trade and ultimately
asphyxiate the Qandahar land route. This objective was of crucial
importance for the economic viability of Hormuz during troubled
times. The English followed a similar course. Like the letters that
went back and forth between Goa and Madrid/Lisbon, the
correspondence of the EIC reveals the permanent concern over the
economic damage inflicted on the company’s interests in the
western Indian Ocean by Asian, especially Armenian, merchants
engaged in the caravan trade. In this context, there was even room
for some English adventurers, such as a certain Jackson in 1617, to
attempt to sell impracticable commercial ventures to the EIC. This
‘projector’, as English envoy Thomas Roe referred to him, meant to
divert north Indian merchants and their capital away from the
Qandahar route and redirect them along the Indus River to the port
of Jask aboard EIC vessels. The plan was immediately rejected by
Roe, who considered it to be ‘a meere dreame’:
His second [project], of reducing the caffilaes and merchants of Lahor
and Agra by the River Hindus, that used to passe by Candahor into
Persia, to transport by sea in our shipping for Jasques or the Gulph, is a
meere dreame; some man in conference may wish it, but none ever
practice it. The river is indifferently navigable downe; but the mouth is
the residence of the Portugalls; returnes backe against the streame is
very difficult. Finally, wee must warrant their goods, which a fleet will not
doe; neither did the Portugall ever lade or noise [sic] such goods, but
only for those of Sindie and Tatta, that traded by their owne junckes,
they gave a cartas or passe to secure them from their frigats, and
traded with them […]. Or if all other difficulties were taken away, yet will
the Lahornes never bee drawne downe, being that caffila consists most
of returning Persians and Armenians that knew the passage from
Jasques almost as bad as from Candahor; and for that little on the
confines of Sinde not worth mentioning. 133

From a political perspective, the Estado sought to prevent a single

ruler, whether Akbar or ‘Abbas, from gaining control over all fronts––
Persian Gulf, Sind, Qandahar, and the Deccan—and consequently
ruling over the north and south. The ideal situation was that of a
permanent tension between different actors, wherein a definitive
victory for either side was thwarted. In the 1590s, the Portuguese
wanted Akbar to fail in his empresas de terra around Kabul and
Qandahar against, respectively, the Uzbeks and the Safavids, so
that he would be forced to ease the pressure he was placing on the
Deccan as well as discard his possible plans to seize Hormuz. As
the Portuguese also feared Mughal rule over Sind, which they saw
as the springboard for a structural reconfiguration of Akbar’s empire,
they supported any possible alternative there, from local resistance
to a putative Safavid military campaign.
In the early 1620s, however, the Portuguese adopted a rather
different approach. To prevent Shah ‘Abbas from capturing Hormuz
or from posing an indirect threat to Goa through an increase in his
influence over the Deccan sultanates, the viceroys of the Estado da
Índia were now eager to see the Safavids face major threats along
their continental borders. Therefore, according to the Portuguese
viewpoint, Jahangir should ideally hold on to Qandahar, while the
Ottomans were expected to defeat the Safavids, as they once had in
the 1580s (even if, for the eastern Mediterranean context, the
Spanish Habsburgs looked to form an alliance with the Shah against
the ‘Turk’). In the western Deccan, the Portuguese spent decades
encouraging the local rulers to find effective ways to sustain the
southern enlargement of Timurid India (as we will see in Chapter 5),
but when the sultans of Bijapur and Ahmadnagar resorted to their
political, religious, and personal ties with the Shah to repel the
Mughal military campaigns in their domains, they faced opposition
from Goa. With regard to Sind and Cristóvão de Moura’s 1602
proposal to ‘offer’ the Mughal province to Shah ‘Abbas, it is clear
Philip IV (r. 1621–40) could not possibly approve of it once on the
throne. The geopolitical situation of West Asia proved to be too
convoluted in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for any
single political formation to gain total dominance. Hence, the chess
game remained to be solved.
 It is also worth noting that the political demarcations between
Mughal India, Safavid Iran, and the Estado da Índia did not always
correspond to other divides, namely religious frontiers. Even when,
at the close of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese considered
‘Abbas to be a weak political ruler, they knew that his religious
authority in the island of Jarun was far more effective. António de
Barros, when sent to Hormuz by the Goa Inquisition as visitor,
expressed his worry in 1595 with the growing Islamic fervour in the
city. ‘In this city––Barros informs the Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque
(g. 1591–7)––there are three mosques and one minaret (alcorão)
built right in the middle of it, where day and night one can hear cries
honouring Muhammad (Mafamede)’. The minaret fell under the
protection of Shah ‘Abbas and the viceroy was, therefore, advised to
be prudent in matters of religion in the city. Otherwise, the inquisitor-
visitor held, this ‘very powerful’ king may well decide to raid the
kingdom of Hormuz.134
The Hormuz minaret is thus a relevant example of a tower
separated from the mosque and associated with political power,
rather than with religious architecture, as would later be the case.135
The situation described by the visitor António de Barros in 1595
shows that the Shah’s strong religious currency contributed to
strengthening his political legitimacy in Hormuz. The same also held
true with regard to the western Deccan during the viceroyalty of
Matias de Albuquerque. On one occasion, a qazi tried to substitute
the name of Shah ‘Abbas with that of Akbar while reading the
khutba in the largest mosque of Ahmadnagar. The response was
instantaneous and severe: the Iranians who were present
immediately stabbed and killed him.136
The Estado would continue to behave prudently in the
subsequent years, as the Safavid ruler’s authority was mounting.
Despite the Tridentine stance imposed by Fray Dom Aleixo de
Meneses—the Archbishop of Goa who ordered the destruction of ‘all
the pagodas and houses of gentilic idolatry in Diu and Hormuz’
following the Fifth Provincial Council of Goa in 1606—new mosques
were built in Hormuz and old ones were repaired, while the minaret
referred to by Barros in 1595 was equally restored.137 The only
request the Portuguese did not concede was related to the
rebuilding of the several Hormuz hammams, which were dismantled
(unsurprisingly) when Aleixo de Meneses served also as governor of
the Estado da Índia (g. 1607–9). An unnamed ambassador of Shah
‘Abbas to Madrid (Dengiz Beg?) asked Phillip III to at least allow the
construction of an hammam in Hormuz meant only for those coming
from Persia. However, the Portuguese kept considering these
bathhouses as ‘public schools of sodomy’, with no medicinal
properties whatsoever (sem haver n’elles cousa algũa de medicina),
where young Christians and Muslims dangerously gathered.138
These intriguing cases underscore the complex relationship that
existed between political and religious zones of influence in the
Mughal–Safavid–Portuguese context. Perhaps more interesting is
what seems to have constituted an unusual situation of overlapping
(if not shared) suzerainty in Hormuz between the Portuguese and
the Mughals in the same period. While the King of Hormuz was a
vassal of Philip II, the wazir apparently accepted Akbar’s robes of
honour. In the previous chapter we saw strikingly similar
circumstances unfold in the city of Diu in the early 1570s: the
Portuguese were to maintain control of the fortress after the Mughal
conquest of Gujarat, but Akbar would nevertheless retain the
indispensable symbols of his political authority within its walls. The
next chapter is an investigation into the intricacies of the neighbourly
relations between the Mughals and the Portuguese in Gujarat as an
imperial province.

1 Ansari (1956); Foltz (1998); Haidar (2002), chs 12–13; Haidar (2004).
2 Philip II to Viceroy Dom Duarte de Meneses, Lisbon, 10 January 1587, in
APO, fasc. 3, p. 74.
3 Subrahmanyam (2012).
4 See Faruqui (2005); Subrahmanyam (1994a).
 5 Rodolfo Acquaviva to Everardo Mercuriano, Fatehpur Sikri, 30 July 1581,
in DI, vol. XII, p. 293.
6 Alam (1994); Burton (1997a), pp. 402–4, 443–52.
7 He served Akbar during the first decade of his reign, especially as hakim
(governor) of Malwa. See Ali (1985), AA 4, 10, 23, 40. On Akbar and ‘Abdullah
Khan, see Haidar (1982).
8 Hosten (1912), p. 190.
9 Arlinghaus (1988), ch. vi, pp. 270ff.; Bhanu (1952); Rizvi (1965, 1967–8).

10 Abu’l Fazl (1993), vol. III, p. 703.

11 For an overview, see Burton (1997b).

12 Manuel Pinheiro to João Álvares, Lahore, 3 September 1595, in DI, vol.

XVII, p. 78; Jerónimo Xavier to Francisco Cabral, Lahore, 8 September 1596,
in DI, vol. XVIII, p. 562.
13 Duarte Delgado Varejão to Philip II, Goa, 10 January 1589, AGS, SP, bk.
1551, ff. 741v–2r.
14 Governor Manuel de Sousa Coutinho to Philip II, Goa, 10 December
1588, AGS, SP, bk. 1551, f. 243v; the same to the same, Goa, 10 December
1588, AGS, SP, bk. 1551, ff. 254v–5r; Luís de Mendonça to Philip II, Diu, 26
November 1589, AGS, SP, bk. 1551, f. 664v. On the Ottoman strategies
concerning the Indian Ocean in this period and their impact both in Goa and
the Mughal court, see Casale (2010), ch. 6, pp. 152ff.
15 Gil (2006–9), tom. I; Borges (2014).

16 Viceroy Dom Duarte de Meneses to Philip II, Goa, 6 December 1587,

AGS, SP, bk. 1551, f. 23v; Philip II to Governor Manuel de Sousa Coutinho,
Lisbon, 6 February 1589, in APO, fasc. 3, p. 201.
17 Manuel de Lacerda Pereira to Philip II, [Chaul, 1587], AGS, SP, bk. 1551,
f. 130v.
18 Arlinghaus (1988), pp. 319–21; Richards (1995), pp. 50–1. On fortresses
as markers of possession for the Ottomans, see Brummett (2015), ch. 4, pp.
128ff.
19 Luís de Mendonça to Philip II, Diu, 26 November 1589, AGS, SP, bk.
1551, f. 664r.
20 Varejão to Philip II, Goa, 1 December 1588, AGS, SP, bk. 1551, f. 516v.
 21 Regarding the association between women and poison in early modern
India, see Banerjee (2000).
22 ‘The Vizier’s Son and the Hammam-Keeper’s Wife’, and ‘Abu Kir the
Dyer and Abu Sir the Barber’, in Burton (1885), respectively vols. 6 and 9. For
a recent and fresh view on the Arabian Nights, see Horta (2017). On the social
and cultural significance of the hammam both in the context of Mughal India
and Safavid Iran, see Blake (2011).
23 I thank Audrey Burton who, several years ago, was kind enough to check
whether there was any mention of this story in the khanate’s sources of the
period.
24 Varejão to Philip II, Goa, 15 December 1588, AGS, SP, bk. 1551, f. 535v.
25 ‘Big festivities were made in all the kingdoms of Akbar, King of the
Mughals, because they were really afraid that he [‘Abdullah Khan] would come
to wage war against them’ (Varejão to Philip II, Goa, 15 December 1588, AGS,
SP, bk. 1551, f. 535v).
26 Viceroy Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, Goa, 18 December 1599,
BL, Add. Ms. 28432, f. 16v. Also the same to the same, [Goa], 1599, BNP,
Reservados, cod. 1976, ff. 72v–3r.
27 Akbar to ‘Abdullah Khan, June 1596, in Haidar (1998), pp. 102–4. In
1596 the Jesuits met in Lahore a ‘son of the King of Bataxacão’ (Jerónimo
Xavier to Francisco Cabral, Lahore, 8 September 1596, in DI, vol. XVIII, p.
576).
28 Burton (1997a), pp. 47–8, 67, 78, 90, 105, 115.
29 Hartmann (1967), pp. 77–8.

30 Recounting how Bahadur Shah did not drown after all, and has ever
since wandered in Gujarat and the Deccan, Abu’l Fazl (1993), vol. I, p. 324,
concluded that ‘it cannot be said that in the wide kingdom of God’s power such
things are impossible’. On Shah Shuja‘, see Karim (1953).
31 On the Deccani cases, see Fischel (2015). Also see the story of the false
sultan of Ahmadnagar recorded by both ‘Abdul Qadir Badayuni (1986), vol. II,
p. 335, and Abu’l Fazl (1993), vol. III, p. 605: a man pretending to be Burhan
Nizam Shah came to Akbar’s court but, unable to prove his identity, fled soon
thereafter to join some yogis.
32 Flores and Subrahmanyam (2004). For a recent study on one of the
many ‘ressurections’ of the Portuguese King Sebastian (d. 1578), see MacKay
(2012).
 33 Couto (1974), dec. XII, bk. v, chs 6–7, pp. 483–505. Also in Gouveia
(1611), bk. 1, ch. iii, p. 9.
34 ‘Abdul Qadir Badayuni (1986), vol. II, pp. 366–7, 408–9.
35 BPE, CXV/2–9, ff. 337r–8r. For more details, see Hartmann (1967), p. 79.
On early modern techniques and challenges of authenticating individuals, see
Groebner (2007).
36 AHU, Índia, box 11, doc. 110. A xerafim (plural xerafins) was an Indo-
Portuguese coin worth 300 réis (singular real—the smallest montetary unit,
money of account).
37 King John IV to Viceroy Dom Filipe de Mascarenhas, Lisbon, 4 March
1646, AHU, CU, cod. 208, f. 66r.
38 Abu’l Fazl (1993), vol. I, p. 57. The trope of the cornac’s son as king is
also employed by Cosme da Guarda (alias Caetano de Gouveia) regarding the
accession of ‘Ali II, Sultan of Bijapur (r. 1656–72). See Guarda (1730), pp. 5,
22.
39 Couto (1974), dec. V, bk. viii, ch. 11.

40 On this, see Subrahmanyam (2014). On texts, storytelling, storytellers,

orality, and performance in north India in the early modern and modern
periods, see Orsini and Schofield (2015).
41 Bandel (plural bandéis) is the Portuguese corruption of the Persian word
bandar, port; it meant both port and a Portuguese settlement in a given port of
maritime Asia. Chapter 6 will deal extensively with this.
42 ‘nunqua teve tratos ou estreita conversação cõ mouros ou judeus, ou
outras pesoas erradas na fee’ ( ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, 8450).
43 ‘He is held in high regard, and the Persians have made several
prognostics, predicting him great fortune’ (Varejão to Philip II, Goa, 1
December 1588, AGS, SP, bk. 1551, f. 517r).
44 See Quinn (2000), pp. 57–8; Babayan (2002); Subrahmanyam (2005b),
ch. 5.
45 Viceroy Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip II, [Goa, 1597?], BNP,
Reservados, cod. 1976, f. 8r; Philip III to Dom Francisco da Gama, [Lisbon,
1599], AHU, CU, cod. 282, f. 201r.
46 On the Kingdom of Hormuz and Portuguese Hormuz, see Aubin (1973);
Floor (2006), chs 1–2, pp. 7ff.; Couto and Loureiro (2008).
 47 Shah ‘Abbas I to Akbar, Isfahan, early 1591, in Islam (1982), vol. I, pp.
108–9; Shah ‘Abbas I to Akbar, n.pl. n.d., in Islam (1982), vol. I, p. 125; Shah
‘Abbas I to Akbar, [Qazvin], 1598, in Islam (1982), vol. I, pp. 126–7, 128–9.
48 On the Timurid Mirzas and their connections to the Mughals, see Khan
(1998).
49 Akbar to Shah ‘Abbas, [Lahore], 14 December 1594, in Haidar (1998),
pp. 95, 97–8. Also Abu’l Fazl (1993), vol. III, p. 1013.
50 Islam (1982), vol. I, pp. 105, 110, 113–16.
51 Deloche (1980), tom. I, p. 29. This was also one of the hajj routes, linking
Qandahar to Hijaz via the river Indus. See McChesney (2003), p. 135.
52 A similar assumption may be valid with regard to the Ottomans and their
strategy for the Persian Gulf. See Casale (2011).
53 On this, see Pearson (1994), ch. 5, pp. 113 ff.; Farooqi (1989), pp. 18–
22; Farooqi (1999), pp. 209–22; Casale (2007), pp. 279–81.
54 Alongside the Portuguese–ruled positions of Bassein and Chaul, we refer
to a set of ports that profited from favourable geographical conditions and
played an important role in the economic and political interests of successive
rulers of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur (Deloche [1980], tom. II, pp. 65ff). These are
Rewadanda (or Upper Chaul), Danda, Rajapuri, Janjira—controlled by the
Siddis and later occupied by the Marathas—and Dabhol, which was directly
linked to the Bijapuri court. We are, therefore, reluctant to subscribe to Ashin
Das Gupta’s assertion that Dabhol was crushed in the 1620s by the
commercial hegemony of Surat (Das Gupta [2001], chs 17–18).
55 Faizi to Akbar, Ahmadnagar, 1591, in Islam (1982), vol. I, pp. 117–18; the
same to the same, Ahmadnagar, November 1593, in Islam (1982), vol. I, p.
122. On Abu’l Faiz ‘Faizi’ and his mission to the Deccan, see Siddiqui (1999);
Alam and Subrahmanyam (2012) , ch. 4, pp. 180–92.
56 Prince Daniyal to Shah ‘Abbas, [Khandesh], March 1603, in Islam (1982),
vol. I, pp. 130–1.
57 Philip II to Dom Francisco da Gama, Lisbon, 5 February 1597, in APO,
fasc. 3, p. 672; Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, Goa, 1599, BNP,
Reservados, cod. 1976, f. 72r.
58 Subrahmanyam (2005b), ch. 2, pp. 34–8.
59 Subrahmanyam (1991).
 60 Gommans (2002), pp. 17–18; Deloche (1968). On the Mughal conquest
of Sind, see Zaidi (1998); Bilgrami (1998).
61 Philip II to Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque, Lisbon, 1 March 1594, in
APO, fasc. 3, pp. 419–35.
62 Khwaja ‘Abdur Baqi Nihavandi, Ma’asir-i-Rahimi (English summary in
Elliot and Dowson [1996], vol. VI, pp. 237–43); Tahir Nisyani, Tarikh-i-Tahiri,
quoted by Bilgrami (1998), pp. 42–4.
63 Abu’l Fazl (1993), vol. III, p. 919. When describing the fights between
Mughals and Tarkhans, Abu’l Fazl stresses that Jani Beg was counting on the
military support from the ‘feringhi soldiers of Hormuz’.
64 ‘I am informed that some of these things end up in Mughal domains by
an alternative route that is now open via Agra, without having to come through
Hormuz’ (Dom Francisco da Gama to the Philip III, [Goa], 21 December 1599,
BNP, Reservados, cod. 1976, f. 107v).
65 Philip II to Dom Francisco da Gama, Lisbon, 30 March 1598, in APO,
fasc. 3, pp. 876–7.
66 Annual letter, 1597 (Simão de Sá, Goa, 1 January 1598), in DI, vol. XVIII,
p. 924.
67 Philip II to Dom Francisco da Gama, Lisbon, 30 March 1598, in APO,
fasc. 3, pp. 876–7.
68 Anonymous, ‘Mogor’, c. 1600, in DUP, vol. II, p. 102. Galeotas were
small galleys with oars, while fustas were small armed vessels.
69 Abu’l Fazl (1993), vol. III, p. 1066.
70 Abu’l Fazl (2001), vol. I, pp. 289–92.

71 Jerónimo Xavier to Francisco Cabral, Lahore, 8 September 1596, in DI,

vol. XVIII, p. 545.
72 Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, Goa, 1599, BNP, Reservados, cod.
1976, f. 72r.
73 J. Xavier to F. Cabral, Lahore, 8 September, 1596, in DI, vol. XVIII, p.
545. A nao (nau) was a large ship, a carrack.
74 Gommans (2002), pp. 162–6; Deloche (1980), tom. II, pp. 155ff. Almost
three decades later, an Iranian doctor in Jahangir’s service —Abdul Ghafur—
travelled overland between Lahore and Multan and then sailed down the Indus
until he reached Thatta. The river’s journey took approximately six months (24
December 1624 to 30 June 1625), which gave him plenty of time to copy a
medical treatise and inscribe in it sharp observations about the multiple perils
(both natural and human) of such ‘adventure’. See Richards (2016).
75 Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip II, [Goa], December 1598, BNP,
Reservados, cod. 1976, f. 94r.
76 Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, [Goa, 1599], BNP, Reservados,
cod. 1976, ff. 160r–v.
77 Philip II to Dom Francisco da Gama, Lisbon, 21 November 1598, in APO,
fasc. 3, p. 911. The first signs of relief were given by Viceroy Matias de
Albuquerque as early as 1595—letter from the Governors of Portugal to Philip
II, [Lisbon], 2 May 1596, ANTT, CC, I–113–6.
78 Anonymous, ‘Mogor’, c. 1600, in DUP, vol. II, p. 102. On the importance
of this political ritual in the Islamic world, see Gordon (2003).
79 Cunha (2002), pp. 177–98.
80 On the Ottoman case, see Vatin and Veinstein (2004).

81 The Instanbul–Aceh link has been studied by Casale (2005); Reid

(2014).
82 In Peso Político de todo el Mundo, Anthony Sherley writes that Akbar
cultivated good relations with the Portuguese (mostró muy alegre cara a los
portugueses) because he was counting on their support via Hormuz in the
event Shah ‘Abbas decided to attack Qandahar (Sherley [2010], p. 169).
83 Matthee (1999), ch. 3, pp. 61ff.
84 Islam (1970), p. 64.

85 Islam (1970), pp. 61ff.; Islam (1982), vol. I, pp. 126ff.; Choksy and Hasan
(1991).
86 Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, Goa, 18 December 1599, BL, Add.
Ms. 28432, f. 16; Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, [Goa, 1597], BNP,
Reservados, cod. 1976, ff. 8v–9r; Philip III to Dom Francisco da Gama, Lisbon,
21 November 1598, in APO, fasc. 3, p. 914; Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip
III, [Lisbon, 1599], AHU, CU, cod. 282, f. 201r; Philip II to Dom Francisco da
Gama, Lisbon, 15 January 1598, in APO, fasc. 4, pp. 813–14.
87 Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, Goa, 23 December 1599, BNP,
Reservados, cod. 1976, f. 141v.
88 Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, Goa, 18 December 1599, BL, Add.
Ms. 28432, f. 16r; Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, Goa, 23 December
1599, BNP, Reservados, cod. 1976, f. 141v.
 89 Philip III to Viceroy Aires de Saldanha, Lisbon, 21 January 1601, HAG,
MR, bk. 8, f. 18r.
90 Cristóvão de Moura to Philip III, Lisbon, 16 October 1602, in Alonso
(1989), p. 251; Royal Council, Valladolid, 6 November 1601, in Alonso (1989),
p. 252. Moura served as viceroy of Portugal between 1600 and 1603.
Following the Union of the Crowns in 1580, successive viceroys and governors
based in Lisbon were appointed between 1583 and 1640.
91 Cunha (1995), pp. 27–42.

92 For an overview, see Gil (2006–9); Gulbenkian (1972). More recently,

Borges (2014), ch. 6.
93 Ali (2006), ch. 25, pp. 316–26.

94 On the Niquelus and their relation with the Estado, see Floor (2008).
95 Steensgaard (1999).

96 António de Gouveia, ‘Memorial sobre las cosas de la Christiandad de la

Persia’, Madrid, 2 January 1611, in Alonso (1980), pp. 65–6. On the
Armenians in Hormuz, see Cunha (2007).
97 Silva y Figueroa to Philip III, Goa, 19 December 1614; the same to the
same, Goa, 3 November 1615, in Gil (1989), respectively pp. 188, 201.
98 Silva y Figueroa to Philip III, Goa, 26 March 1616, in Gil (1989), pp. 230–
1. Cáfila (plural cáfilas) was an inland or coastal convoy.
99 Iskandar Beg (1978).

100 On Bandar ‘Abbas (earlier Gombroon) and its commercial and political
takeover by Hormuz, see Floor (2006), ch. 5, pp. 237ff.
101 Biedermann (2013), p. 49, who pays particular attention to the
chronicler João de Barros and the cartographer Lázaro Luís.
102 Ali (1983), p. 25.
103 Sherley (2010), p. 223.

104 Floor (2012).

105 Father Sebastião Barreto, Goa, 15 December 1624, ARSI, Goa, vol. 33
II, f. 771v.
106 Iskandar Beg (1978), vol. II, p. 1079.
107 Viceroy Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo to Philip III, Goa, 31 December
1615, HAG, MR, bk. 12, f. 221r; Philip III to Viceroy Dom João Coutinho,
Madrid, 16 March 1619, in DRI, tom. VI, pp. 62–3; Governor Fernão de
Albuquerque to Philip III, Goa, 8 February 1620, in DRI, tom. VI, pp. 63–4;
Philip IV to Fernão de Albuquerque, Lisbon, 8 February 1622, in DRI, tom. VIII,
pp. 372–3; Philip IV to Fernão de Albuquerque, Lisbon, 25 February 1622, in
DRI, tom. VIII, p. 385.
108 Philip III to Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo, Lisbon, 14 February 1615, in
DRI, tom. III, pp. 239–40.
109 See Dale (1994); Levi (2002); Levi (2007); Alam (1994).

110 Fernão de Albuquerque to Philip III, Goa, 8 February 1620, in DRI, tom.
VI, pp. 63–4. By showing the existence of the regular circulation of Safavid and
Deccani ambassadors through Mughal domains, this episode reinforces the
argument by Naqvi (1969) regarding Jahangir’s caution to interfere in the
relations between Shah ‘Abbas and the Deccan sultans. This author also
argues that Jahangir nurtured his ties with Shah ‘Abbas until a very late stage,
regardless of the Qandahar dossier. A nishan issued by Jahangir before July
1607—roughly one year after the unsuccessful Safavid attack on Qandahar—
to an Iranian merchant called Kamran Beg seems to further reinforce Naqvi’s
position: the document allowed Kamran Beg to circulate and conduct business
in Mughal domains, by the overland route or by sea via Lahori Bandar (Islam
[1982], vol. I, pp. 152–3).
111 Sebastião de Jesus to Dom Francisco de Sousa, Isfahan, 28 September
1621, in Alonso (1973), p. 251.
112 Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo to Philip III, Goa, 3 December 1615, HAG,
MR, bk. 12, f. 221r.
113 Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo to Philip III, [Goa, 1613], in Alonso (1987), p.
86; Silva y Figueroa to Philip III, Goa, 19 December 1614, in Gil (1989), p.
190.
114 Philip III to Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo, Madrid, 22 December 1612, in
Alonso (1987), p. 82.
115 Philip III to Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo, Lisbon, 14 February 1615, in
DRI, tom. III, pp. 239–40; Philip III to Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo, Lisbon, 3
January 1615, in DRI, tom. III, p. 175. Philip III sent a similar letter to the
Captain of Hormuz by the overland route in November 1614 (in DRI, tom. III,
pp. 299–300).
116 Aubin (1988).
117 ‘[These] ambassadors, who are their Sayyds (Ceides), or relatives of
Muhammad, and who they greatly respect, turn them [the Deccan sultans]
constantly against us’ (Viceroy Dom Francisco Coutinho to King Sebastian,
Goa, 30 December 1564, in Wicki [1959a], p. 49).
118 Mitchell (2004).
119 Islam (1982), vol. I, p. 131. There is another letter written in a similar
vein by Ibrahim II and dated 1613–4, also in Islam (1982), vol. I, pp. 136–7.
Correspondence between the Deccani rulers and the Safavid Emperor
published in Persian (with a brief summary in English) in Hamad (1969).
120 The Augustinian Sebastião de Jesus states that Shah ‘Abbas urged the
Sultan of Ahmadnagar ‘to make war on Xaseli [Shah Selim, that is Jahangir]
so that he could take Qandahar’ (letter to Dom Francisco de Sousa, Isfahan,
28 September 1621, in Alonso [1973], p. 251). Also see Fernão de
Albuquerque to Philip III, Goa, 18 February 1622, in DRI, tom. VII, p. 380.
121 See Naqvi (1969); Nayeem (1974), pp. 57–9, 62–5; Ahmad (1969a);
Ahmad (1969b); Mitchell (2004); Anwar (1992).
122 See Richards (1995), pp. 110–12. The correspondence between ‘Abbas
and Jahangir was published by Islam (1982), vol. I, pp. 143ff., and analysed
elsewhere also by Islam (1970), ch. v, pp. 68ff.
123 Ulugh Beg (d. 1449) was Timur’s grandson. On this gift, see Littlefield
(1999), vol. I, pp. 45–9, passim.
124 Gonçalo de Sousa, ‘Relação do que aconteceo no Reino do Mogor’, BL,
Add. Ms. 9855, f. 46v. For the Safavid perspective, see Iskandar Beg (1978),
vol. II, p. 1216.
125 Findly (1993); Habib (1969).

126 Cole (2003), p. 60, goes on to argue that Jahangir alternated ‘between
the Iranian as supportive (as mother, brother, lover, even Self) and the Iranian
as symbol of the Other, of domination or even castration’.
127 On these new interpretations, see Lefèvre (2010); Lefèvre (2007);
Tandon (2015).
128 Philip IV to Dom Francisco da Gama, Madrid, 6 March 1623, in DRI,
tom. IX, pp. 310–11.
129 Sebastião de Jesus to Dom Francisco de Sousa, Isfahan, 28
September 1621, in Alonso (1973), p. 251.
130 The chronology of conquests is as follows: Babur, 1522; Shah Tahmasp,
1558; Akbar, 1595; Shah ‘Abbas I, 1622; Shahjahan, 1638; Shah ‘Abbas II,
1648. Babaie (1994), pp. 125–42, has studied the imperial propaganda around
the Safavid capture of Qandahar in 1648, portrayed by Shah ‘Abbas II as
though it were the conquest of India.
131 ‘…era como meretrix, porque hoje era minha, e amanhã do Persa’—this
sentence was attributed to Shahjahan by the Jesuit missionary António
Botelho, ‘Relação das cousas mais notaveis que observei no Reino do Gram
Mogor em perto de seis annos’ ([1670], BL, Add. Ms. 9855, f. 32r).
132 Subrahmanyam (2014), pp. 63–4.

133 Roe (1990), p. 406.

134 ‘…se tem por certo que mandaria correr a terra e reino d’Ormuz’
(António de Barros to Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque, Goa, 18 December
1595, in Baião [1930], p. 234).
135 On this see Bloom (1989).
136 Vignati (1998–9), pp. 115–17.

137 Philip III to Viceroy Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo, Lisbon, 14 March 1614,
in DRI, tom. III, pp. 137–8; Philip III to Viceroy Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo,
Lisbon, 6 March 1616, in DRI, tom. III, pp. 441–2. On the Provincial Councils
of Goa (a total of five took place between 1567 and 1606) and the Tridentine
Reform, see Faria (2013).
138 Philip III to Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo, Lisbon, 14 March 1614, in DRI,
tom. III, p. 137.
 3
Gujarat
Borderland Experiments I

Gujarat was an arena of intense interactions between the Estado da

Índia and Mughal India from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries. The initial encounters between the two ‘Indias’ took place
here, where, as noted in Chapter 1, the first mutual images were
forged in the mid-1530s. More than three centuries later, when the
Mughal Empire was waning or no longer existed, the imperial
concessions made to the Estado in Gujarat—namely the fiscal and
commercial benefits granted to its feitoria (trading post) of Surat—
continued to be a matter of discussion between Lisbon, London,
Bombay, and Goa.1
The interests at play in the Mughal–Portuguese borderlands of
Gujarat over time were multiple. There were disputes over property
and land rights, control over port cities and customs revenues,
access to the sea and rights of passage, as well as power over the
mobility of the people. Competing modalities of social regulation and
religious discipline were also at stake, not to mention the intricacies
of intra-imperial communication and object exchange in a cross-
cultural context. Subsequent to the imperial conquest of the
sultanate, the crafting of the Mughal and Portuguese spaces and
spheres of authority in Gujarat—and the space within, or the
relations between the two—clearly shaped the region’s daily life.
This chapter considers the early process of ‘Mughalization’ and
‘Lusitanization’ of Gujarat by exploring the parallel construction of,
and frequent tensions between, the imperial Mughal suba and the
Portuguese província do Norte in the final decades of the sixteenth
century. The chapter concludes with the analysis of an event that
took place in Diu in 1593–4, which in some way encapsulates the
challenges that characterized the period wherein the suba and the
província converged and simultaneously clashed. Its protagonist,
celebrated Mughal noble Mirza ‘Aziz Koka, takes centre stage
alongside his firangi counterpart, the Captain of the Portuguese
fortress of Diu, Pedro de Anaia.2

FORGING AN IMPERIAL PROVINCE

Despite the striking success of Akbar’s military conquest of 1572–3,
the making of Mughal Gujarat proved to be a long and convoluted
process.3 As with any other recent imperial space, this involved the
establishment of a political and administrative framework. The
sultanate became a province, in which successive governors
(subadars) ruled from the city of Ahmedabad, the seat of power of
the sultans of Gujarat since 1411. The authority of the Mughal
emperor and the foundations of Mughal political culture were
adopted and assimilated by effecting a set of highly relevant
symbolic gestures and political actions. Mughal provincial courts
sought to replicate the imperial court and consequently became a
privileged place from which to control the local elites and gauge their
loyalty to the new sovereign.
Beyond the subadar’s direct sphere of action, myriad Mughal
officers stepped in; they were responsible for managing the newly
created province and ultimately for integrating the local individuals
and groups into an imperial structure. These anonymous imperial
servants collected revenues, imposed order, administered justice,
and ran the bureaucracy. Thus, in the final years of the sixteenth
century, Gujarat was legitimately considered one of the twelve subas
of the empire. An extensive survey of Gujarat that reflects the
Mughal viewpoint is provided in the A’in-i Akbari (c. 1595) and can
be condensed into the following two paragraphs penned by Abu’l
Fazl:
 This Subah embraces 9 Sarkars and 198 Parganahs, of which 13 are
ports. The revenue is 43 krors, 68 lakhs, 22,301 dams and one lakh,
62,028¾ Mahmudis as port dues. The measured land (except Sorath
which is paid in money by estimate) is 1 kror, 60 lakhs, 36,377 bighas, 2
biswas, out of which 4 lakhs, 20,274 dams are Suyurghal. The local
force is 12,440 cavalry, and 61,100 infantry.4

This summary evidently conveys a dry picture of the imperial

absorption of Gujarat. The author’s intention to emphasize a
measurable, profitable outcome however overshadows the subtle
means employed to achieve such incorporation, Mughal means that
Abu’l Fazl knew well. To accommodate religious differences and
ethnic diversity was one such way; Akbar’s policy of conciliation with
and integration of the Rajputs into the empire was rather successful
and long lasting.5 The Rajputs constitute just one case (if
exemplary) of an overarching Mughal principle and strategy
consisting of the incorporation of regional elites into imperial service.
Among the numerous personal stories and political trajectories of
Gujaratis who were transformed into committed imperial servants is
that of Hakim Ruhullah (or Mir Ruhullah Bharuchi); as a physician
from Broach, he waited on Princes Murad and Daniyal before being
brought under the much-desired patronage of ‘Abdur Rahim. Once
he entered royal service, Hakim penned a book of medicine
(Fawaidul Insan) upon Akbar’s request and went on to serve (and
treat) both Jahangir and his wife Nur Jahan.6
By focusing on Aurangzeb’s Deccan, and specifically on
Aurangabad, Nile Green and Simon Digby have underlined the
importance of other devices used in the ‘Mughalization’ of newly
conquered territories. These range from the imperial patronage of
shrines or text production by migrant Sufis to the social and religious
impact of the Mughal military camp.7 The integrative power of the
latter is easily captured in a 1595 Jesuit description of the imposing
mobile court-camp (arraial) of Sultan Murad, Akbar’s second son, as
he moved around Gujarat.8 To these tools of imperial amalgamation
one can add another that was equally effective, namely the process
of tailoring the landscape through Mughal architecture—which was
in itself quite open to influences from the different provinces, Gujarat
included.9 Subadars of Gujarat and other important Mughal officials
of the province were often patrons and builders of mosques,
mausoleums, garden-palaces, and caravanserais, and these
buildings became landmarks of Mughal authority in the province.10
A good case in point is the Bagh-i Fath (Victory Garden), a garden
and pleasure house built by ‘Abdur Rahim in Sarkhej—an old site of
the sultans of Gujarat—to commemorate his victory over Sultan
Muzaffar in 1584.11 Upon an imperial visit to Gujarat, such as the
one Jahangir made in 1617–18, Mughal officials took initiatives to
further ‘imperialize’ the territory. While the emperor was travelling
from Mandu to the capital of the suba, Muqarrab Khan—whom we
will encounter in the next chapter—commissioned a quick
reconstruction of the ruined quarters of the sultans of Gujarat in
Ahmedabad, ‘and made other necessary places for sitting, like a
public and private jharoka’.12 Although they were less visible than
architectural works, libraries, books, workshops, and paintings also
contributed to the ‘Mughalization’ of the area. During their service in
Gujarat, some of the individuals discussed here—the most
prominent being ‘Abdur Rahim and Mirza ‘Aziz Koka—proved to be
active ‘subimperial patrons’ with regard to the manuscripts,
paintings, and art they commissioned. Some decades later, during
his aforementioned visit to Gujarat in 1617–18, Jahangir was known
to have given books from the royal library to local shaykhs, a
gesture that was visually recorded by a court painter. The emperor’s
decision to inscribe on the books the date of his arrival to the suba
constitutes another form of ma(r)king imperial space.13
Abu’l Fazl’s somewhat static portrait of Gujarat, moreover,
conveys the idea that the integration of the territory into the Mughal
imperial web was complete and perfect. On the contrary, achieving
the Pax Mughalica in the new province was a tumultuous operation
that took more than two decades. After 1573, as Farhat Hasan
argues, the Mughals were faced with strong social resistance ‘from
the constituents of the political domain that were hierarchically
placed at a level below the upper crust’. Hasan refers specifically to
‘warrior clans, tribal lineage groups, religious heads, soldiers,
peasants and common urban dwellers’.14 Interestingly enough, this
description matches the Portuguese perception of the Mughal
conquest of Gujarat. An anonymous text dated c. 1600 seems to
give voice to the voiceless of the former sultanate. It calls attention
to the illegitimate character of the Mughal occupation, presenting it
as an act of true pillage that eventually forced the local population to
flee: ‘With a sudden assault in the year 1572, the Great Mughal
conquered it [Gujarat] without suffering a single wound or losing a
single man. From [Gujarat] he took many riches, artillery, and four
thousand selected women. The kingdom is now drained of the
common people (“gente pelebeia”), since they cannot stand the
tyranny of the winners’.15 The stormy passage of Prince Murad
through Gujarat on his way to the Deccan in 1595 is rather telling in
this respect; according to the Jesuits, Khambayat was paralysed
(tudo estava como hintredito) and all bulls had to be hidden so that
the Mughal soldiers could not seize them. Murad is said to have
‘bled’ the city by forcibly collecting 200,000 cruzados worth of
money and objects before travelling to Surat.16
The hopes of those who, like the Khambayat residents, felt the
oppressive ‘tyranny of the winners’ must have risen when Muzaffar
Khan—the last sultan of Gujarat—rebelled in 1583. Muzaffar lived
under Mughal captivity for a decade but managed to escape while
he was being moved between the imperial capital and Bengal, and
thus returned to Gujarat to organize the resistance. Given that the
Estado da Índia nurtured expectations for Muzaffar’s rebellion, it is
understandable that Diogo do Couto recounted this event in detail.17
The Portuguese chronicler describes how the overthrown sultan
travelled in disguise and at great danger to himself (‘em trages
mudados, e por caminhos differentes, sempre embrenhado, e com
muito risco de sua pessoa’) until he reached Khambayat, seeking
refuge in a Bania’s house. Couto goes on to identify Muzaffar’s chief
allies in this new context: Jam (Jambo), ‘one of the captains who
rebelled during the Gujarat revolts’, and Amin Khan Ghuri, who
sealed the pact by offering one of his daughters in marriage to
Muzaffar Khan. With this support—counting 30,000 cavalrymen
altogether—the sultan besieged the jagirdar of Broach Qutbuddin
Muhammad Khan and marched towards Ahmedabad, where
defenceless subadar Mirza ‘Aziz Koka could only hope to receive
timely military backing from the imperial capital.
Akbar came to the aid of his subadar and promptly suppressed
the revolt of 1583, which cost Qutbuddin Khan his life. Using the
same blitzkrieg strategy employed in Gujarat back in 1573, the
emperor sent ‘Abdur Rahim to the threatened province; Rahim
defeated Muzaffar Khan in early 1584 and, consequently, was
appointed subadar of Gujarat with the additional attribution of the
significant title of Khan-i Khanan. However, during his time as
provincial governor between 1584 and 1589, ‘Abdur Rahim was
faced with hostile Rajput groups, such as the Jarecos, who even
suceeded in attacking Ahmedabad. The Rajputs of Marwar note that
only after the death of a certain Jago Jareco, Gujarat ‘fell completely
under Patsahji’s control’.18 Moreover, Muzaffar Khan was still at
large and sought to form a new army. The rebel’s political survival
depended on his ability to recruit soldiers from among the many
warriors who roamed Hindustan in their search for new labour
opportunities. The author of Mirat-i Sikandari called into question the
sultan’s ability to raise another army following his defeat of 1584,
and yet five years later the Portuguese Captain of Diu, Pedro de
Anaia, wrote: ‘King Muzaffar (Modafar), natural king of Gujarat and
son of Sultan Muhammad (Mamude), is now in these lands close to
Diu, in the company of the Rajputs (Rexbustos), strong men from
the bushes who are natives (omês rebustos dos matos que são
naturais).’ Luís de Mendonça went on to state there were between
7,000 and 8,000 cavalrymen gathered, but unfortunately failed to
mention their lineage.19 They probably belonged to a spurious clan,
or to the lower groups of a thriving military labour market.20 Be that
as it may, it is worth noting that the Captain of Diu understood the
rules of military marketing in Gujarat, its apparent flexibility, and its
consequences in regional politics and diplomacy.
 Mendonça had a vested interest in monitoring Muzaffar’s moves
because the rebellion could well favour the Estado da Índia’s
interests in Gujarat. In fact, in 1587 Philip II ordered that he be
informed about ‘all matters concerning the Mogores, especially
those which regard the relationship between them and the new King
that has now risen in Cambay [Gujarat]’.21 Meanwhile, the ‘petty
king (reyzinho) Mudafar’—as Viceroy Duarte de Meneses (g. 1584–
8) referred to the rebel sultan—had met with the Captain of Diu and
announced that he would soon write to Goa and ask for Portuguese
assistance in order to recover his kingdom.22 The prevalent
conviction in the capital of the Estado was that Surat could be
conquered—a project desired by the Portuguese since at least the
1560s—by taking advantage of the apparent political turmoil in
Gujarat; Couto aptly recalled the proverb: ‘muddy river, fishermen’s
profit’.23 And, like in the 1530s, when Governor Nuno da Cunha
negotiated simultaneously with Bahadur Shah and Humayun, the
Estado was now equally ready to play a double game and converse
with both parties at the same time.24 The Portuguese thus decided
to support Muzaffar Khan while simultaneously offering assistance
to Qutbuddin Khan’s family, which was at the time still under siege in
Broach. This offer notwithstanding, the Mughal official’s widow
decided to hand herself and her children in to Muzaffar, who
promptly seized all the family assets.
The Mughals eventually captured Muzaffar Khan in 1593, a
triumph that Akbar did not fail to mention in a letter to the Uzbek
ruler.25 This time, however, the deposed sultan decided to commit
suicide on his way to the imperial court. Nonetheless, the Gujarati
resistance against the Mughals would not evanesce with the death
of the last ruler of the sultanate. Akbar’s dispensation in 1605 and
the uncertainties surrounding the imperial succession seem to have
nourished new rebellions. As late as 1606––more than three
decades after the imperial conquest—a Jesuit missionary indeed
wrote that ‘the Gujaratis, to whom this kingdom belongs by right and
which the Mogor has tyrannized, have rebelled and waged war
against the Mogores’. For this priest, as for other Portuguese writers
of the time, ‘tyranny’ was the key to understanding Mughal
Gujarat.26
The ‘Mughalization’ of the coastal areas of the new suba posed
additional and somewhat different problems. The imperial control of
these regions depended on the ability to craft appropriate formulas
capable of dealing with port cities, sea vessels, maritime trade, and
(rather diverse) merchant communities.27 The immediate Mughal
desire to master this novel economic and social landscape is
captured well in a brief but intriguing ‘Persian–Portuguese’
document. In a letter sent to the Portuguese Captain of Diu, Aires
Teles, in December 1572 by the first subadar of Gujarat, Mirza ‘Aziz
Koka—of which only a summary in Portuguese has survived—Teles
is asked to seize all the ships owned by the influential Gujarati noble
I‘timad Khan, which now belonged to Akbar.28 ‘Aziz Koka’s concern
somehow symbolizes an active and long-lasting engagement of the
Mughal rulers and the empire’s elite with the commercial world that
had been opened to them by Gujarat and other maritime regions.29
From a politico-ideological perspective, the port cities of Gujarat
provided easy access to the Red Sea, and consequently became
religious gateways to the holy cities of Islam. This was of particular
relevance for Akbar in the period following the conquest of Gujarat,
especially between 1576 and 1581. During those years the emperor
cast himself as a pious Muslim, sponsoring an annual pilgrimage
from India to Mecca and making generous donations to the holy
places. At one point, he even toyed with the idea of becoming a haji
himself. The Indian pilgrims who travelled to Mecca from the ports of
Gujarat—including rather eminent ladies of the imperial family—
could avail themselves of a newly created imperial department
(daftar-i-hajj) and the guidance of a superintendent (mir-i-hajj). The
Mughal hajj reflected the domestic reality of Gujarat and mirrored
the fluctuations of the imperial religious policies as well as the
political trends in the court—indeed, those who fell into disgrace
often crossed the political desert by journeying to Mecca as pilgrims.
Concurrently, the Mughal pilgrimage caravan was a matter of
external relations (in which the royal women played no small part);
Akbar saw his patronage of the pilgrimage as a means with which to
gain the upper hand in his relationship with the Ottomans and the
Uzbeks and to affirm his superior status in the Islamic world.30
The late 1570s represent the golden years of this relationship
between Abkar and orthodox Sunnism, and this favourable
association had a sizeable impact in Gujarat during the early stages
of Mughal rule. Akbar’s triumph over Muzaffar Shah in 1572–3 was
achieved with the support of Gujarati nobles such as Saiyid Hamid
Bukhari and Mir Abu Turab Wali. The latter frequently advised Akbar
on matters related to the new province, including the choice and
appointment of its subadars.31 In 1577, he travelled to Mecca as
mir-i-hajj and brought back a stone marked with the alleged footprint
of the Prophet.32 Saiyid Hamid Bukhari and Mir Abu Turab Wali
along with other people bearing a similar profile expected that
Akbar’s control of Gujarat would translate into the revival of orthodox
Sunnism in the region. The first faces of imperial Gujarat—those
who filled the main posts of the newly created province and
contributed to eliminating movements of resistance to the imperial
authority in the 1570s–80s—mostly came from Central Asia: Mirza
‘Aziz Koka, to whom we will return later in this chapter, served thrice
as subadar of Gujarat; Qutbuddin Muhammad Khan, ‘Aziz Koka’s
uncle, was granted Broach as jagir; Qilij Muhammad Khan Andijani
was appointed governor of Surat in 1573 and became subadar of
Gujarat in 1578–9; and Shihabuddin Ahmad Khan, an Iranian and
not a Turani, was appointed subadar in 1577.33
However, making the maritime fringes of Gujarat Mughal
constituted a considerable challenge since the emperor was unable
to claim full authority over all port cities of the new province.
Portuguese control of Diu and other ports, together with the Firangi
mastery of the sea (or of certain ‘jurisdictional corridors’, as Lauren
Benton put it), was essentially a problem of free transit or lack
thereof.34 But in practice, it also transformed the new maritime
frontier of the Mughal Empire into an embarassing ‘border’.
Unrestricted access to the Arabian Sea was not determined by the
imperial court and, from the words written in 1581 by Jesuit Rodolfo
Acquaviva, one gets an inkling of how Akbar must have felt about it:
We do not know whether he considers the king of Portugal to be his
friend or enemy; it is clear however that some things do not please him,
since he sees himself as the greatest King of all and cannot stand that
the King of Portugal is Lord of the Sea, and that his ships are forced to
pay a tax (gabella) in the ports belonging to the King of Portugal. We
fear that because of this there will be war some day.35

The drowning of Sultan Bahadur Shah of Gujarat off the coast of Diu
that was attributed to the Portuguese in 1537—graphically related
by an Akbarnama manuscript and offered to a Mughal court
audience in the early seventeenth century—provided suggestive
‘historical proof’ of the undesired existence of a Mughal–Portuguese
‘divisory line’ along the southern fringes of Gujarat.36 Only ships
holding a cartaz could sail, make business, and transport pilgrims;
those owned by the Mughal emperor and members of the imperial
elite were no exception to this rule. True, the cartaz was a letter of
transit of sorts. Notwithstanding, it became the mark of a ‘liquid
border’ that divided Mughal India from the Estado and, to the
unpleasant surprise of many at the imperial court, it was also an
instrument of religious humiliation—there were passes showing
images of Jesus and Mary. The requirement to carry them led to
bitter complaints on the part of Badayuni and his subsequent advice
to simply renounce undertaking the pilgrimage.37 In such
circumstances, Abu’l Fazl could only praise a military campaign led
by Qutbuddin Muhammad Khan against the Portuguese in 1580–1
and its ultimate purpose—‘to remove the Faringis who were a
stumbling-block in the way of the pilgrims to the Hijaz’.38
Conflicts between the first generation of Mughal officers in
Gujarat and the Portuguese increased in frequency. Men such as
Qutbuddin Muhammad Khan, Qilij Khan Andijani, and Shihabuddin
Ahmad Khan are truly diabolized in Couto’s Ásia. Such a biased
portrait is rooted in what the Portuguese chronicler believed to be
the responsibility of these imperial servants concerning the
permanently feared Mughal attacks on Daman and Diu and the
‘illegal’ circulation of Mughal ships between the Gujarati ports and
the Red Sea without a cartaz.39 The official correspondence
exchanged in the late sixteenth century between successive
viceroys of the Estado and Philip II provides a similar picture. The
harsh treatment given to the Portuguese private merchants in
Gujarat, who were forcibly deprived of their weapons and
arquabuses (just as their European competitors would later be, on
the grounds of safety) was denounced in Goa.40 During Akbar’s
reign, it was often argued in the capital of the Estado that the
Portuguese who traded in the province ran the risk of being
imprisoned and losing their merchandize. Some viceroys went on to
sustain that it was preferable to carry out all Portuguese trade
through Bania shipping.41 But not even local merchant communities
were completely invulnerable to these risks. In an observation that
would prove to be an accurate prediction, Viceroy Francisco da
Gama wrote in 1599 that Akbar could ‘very easily capture’ the 100
plus ships—owned by Portuguese and Bania traders alike—that
were engaged in considerable business in the Mughal-controlled
ports.42 Gama’s observation was firmly grounded in the events of
the time. Already in 1593, some Portuguese traders had been taken
captive in Khambayat and were later freed due to a successful
negotiation between the Captain of Diu and Mirza ‘Aziz Koka.43 Ten
years later, in 1603, two ships were seized off Khambayat and fifty
Portuguese fell prisoner to the Mughals. They were sent to Agra
where their release was later mediated by Jerónimo Xavier in a
negotiation in which ‘Aziz Koka, Prince Salim, and Akbar himself
were the priest’s interlocutors.44
The picture, thus, is one marked by political tension and maritime
violence, with successive episodes that can be classified as piracy
privateering, mirroring the clash between the Portuguese self-
assumed right to the sea and the Mughal right to retaliation.45 But
this jurisdictional dispute has to be considered together with an
eminently ideological problem. During this period, Akbar had
distanced himself from Sunnism in order to promote his own ‘heretic’
religious experiments at court and, therefore, was no longer
interested in promoting the hajj. Badayuni wrote that the Mughal
ruler expressed annoyance every time the pilgrimage was
mentioned in his presence and even viewed those who wanted to
undertake it as criminals.46 Needless to note, due to this change in
his stance, Akbar became an obvious target for orthodox Sunnnis
such as Qilij Khan Andijani or Qutbuddin Muhammad Khan. The
Jesuit Antonio Monserrate understood well the political relevance of
these two men and went on to state in 1580 that they were both
willing to join any revolt against Akbar. Monserrate further asserted
that the two had high hopes for Mirza Muhammad Hakim as putative
Mughal ruler, while also entertaining the idea of an alliance with
Amin Khan Ghuri (Amiqhan), ‘the claimant to the kingdoms of
Cambay [Gujarat]’.47
Akbar, at this point finding himself lodged between a rock and a
hard place, chose to play a double game (as the Jesuit priests in his
court suspected) by instigating and simultaneously condemning the
conflict with the Portuguese in Gujarat. On the one hand, he sought
to persuade the latter that the actions taken against them—assaults
to Daman, an alleged attack on Diu, Mughal merchant ships sailing
without a cartaz—had been planned by Mughal officials whose
behaviour he was unable to control fully from the court. He even
encouraged Goa to punish these imperial servants; this ultimately
meant Akbar was using the Portuguese to subdue the ‘captains, his
enemies’. On the other hand, the emperor not only had to appease
these ‘captains’ of Gujarat but also to impress Sunni rulers such as
‘Abdullah Khan. To do so he had to publicly fashion himself as
protector of Islam and fierce enemy of the Firangis.48
Creating the suba of Gujarat was a successful but multifaceted
enterprise and was often stalled by several manifestations of local
resistance as well as by internal Mughal contradictions. The Estado
da Índia tried to navigate both with an eye to carving its own space
in the imperial province. Akbar’s ascending religious eclecticism
enabled the Estado to somehow juggle between a ‘tolerant’ emperor
at the court and an ‘intolerant’ circle of imperial servants in the
province, wherein the Catholic cartazes became symbols of a
Mughal–Portuguese ‘border’ along the shores of Gujarat.
Concurrently, by supporting acts of political sedition—namely the
rebellion of Muzaffar Khan between 1583 and 1593—and by voicing
(if not amplifying) movements of popular defiance of Mughal
authority, the Portuguese hoped to maintain, if not expand, their few
‘islands’ of influence in Gujarat. They understood that moments of
disruption enhanced their odds of negotiating territory in Gujarat, as
the history of the sultanate in the 1530s–40s so proved. Considering
the turmoil that affected the province in the 1580s, from the down in
Goa, Surat seemed to be an achievable target; in addition to its
commercial significance, the capture of Mughal Surat would
translate into a stronger Portuguese Daman.

FOSTERING THE NORTHERN PROVINCE

‘Through the negligence of the ministers of state and the
commanders of the frontier provinces, many of these Sarkars are in
the possession of European nations, such as Daman, Sanjan,
Tarapur, Mahim and Base [Bassein] that are both cities and ports.’49
Abu’l Fazl certainly viewed these districts as Frankish ‘stains’ that
ought to be removed from Mughal Gujarat. Conversely, according to
the Portuguese writers of the time, these districts were essential
elements of the Northern Province; the ability to defend the
província depended largely on the Portuguese capacity to
undermine the suba.
Over a long period of time, the Northern Province was a highly
contested territory and polity. The Mughals had exposed it to intense
levels of stress from the 1560s–70s onwards, while continued
Marathi pressure from the mid-seventeenth century eventually led to
its downfall in 1739–40. In addition to these major players are the
lesser actors, including the sultanate of Ahmadnagar with its sieges
of Portuguese Chaul from the 1570s to the 1610s and the Omanis
and their attacks on several cities of the província in the 1660s–
80s.50 Permanent tensions were nurtured by numerous forest-
based chiefs, from the spurious Rajputs to other semi-nomadic
militarized groups such as the Kollis, which were often portrayed by
both the Portuguese and Mughals as common ‘bandits’ and
‘thieves’.51 The 1615 map of Gujarat sketched by Manuel Godinho
de Erédia gives considerable relevance to these groups; their
names and ethnicity (Coli or Resbuto) are marked down in the lands
neighbouring the hinterland of several important cities such as
Bassein, Daman, Balsar, Surat, and Broach.52 Agriculture, trade,
communication, and protection in the vicinity of the hilly regions
under the control of these ‘forest states’—namely Ramnagar (the
Choutea, or the Sarceta), Jawhar (the Colle), and Peth (the Vergi,
from the title of Bahirji)—were determined by accords;53 both the
Portuguese and the Mughals had to sometimes concede to the
demands of these lesser kingdoms, the contentious payment of the
chauth probably being the most apparent of all.54
Attacks, sieges, raids (razias), and pillages (or the expectation of
all these) shaped daily life in the Portuguese província do Norte.
The ways in which the Estado da Índia sought to protect it vis-à-vis
the Mughal Empire represent the nearest thing there was to the
existence of a border between Hindustan and Firangistan. A farman
issued by Akbar in March 1573, probably in Broach, came close to
creating specific boundaries between the Mughal and the
Portuguese territories in the Daman region. No Persian version of
this imperial order seems to have survived, but it appears the
chronicler Diogo do Couto had access to its Portuguese translation.
The question is whether Couto’s version was simply a Portuguese
misrepresentation, or whether it indeed faithfully conveyed the
substance of the original document. Regardless, this farman was
issued following a meeting aboard a galley anchored just off the
shores of Daman that took place between Viceroy Dom António de
Noronha (g. 1571–3) and a Mughal ambassador. Similar to other
prior relevant documents having to do with Gujarat—such as the
correspondence exchanged between Humayun and Dom Nuno da
Cunha in the mid-1530s that we have addressed in Chapter 155—
this farman speaks vaguely of ‘our lands’ and ‘theirs’, but becomes
more precise at the point in which it defines the status of Daman:
the imperial officials, Akbar determines, ‘shall not take nor order that
Daman and its lands, which he [Noronha] holds and are in his
possession, be taken. Nor shall you enter these lands for any
reason, nor approach its limits (extremos)’.56 Assuming that the
Portuguese translation conforms to the Persian original document in
this passage, it seems that the Mughal emperor had in mind both
land and jurisdiction.
Yet, which ‘limits’ was Akbar referring to? We know that the
emperor, or his bureaucrats for that matter, could be rather precise
when it came to people’s movements within imperial territory. A
farman dated 1590, and related to the preparations of the second
Jesuit mission to Akbar’s court, reveals an accute awareness and
knowledge of the travel routes between Gujarat and Lahore. Akbar’s
order stipulates that the priests were allowed to travel the entire way
without paying any duties. Successive Mughal ‘captains’—some
named in the document—were responsible for the missionaries’
journey between Khambayat and the imperial court, and seven
specific cities along this route were mentioned. Akbar concludes
with his instructions by noting that ‘this is the route that I order the
Fathers to take’.57 At any rate, the Mughal–Portuguese border along
the outer ‘limits’ of Daman—and in Gujarat after 1573, broadly
speaking—was not meant to be a clear-cut demarcation. The
concept of demarcation is not truly at stake in this instance; bilateral
border commissions were never created and boundary markers
were never put in place.58 Like in most early modern cases, we are
confronted with an ill–defined political space, a territory subjected to
pendular authority exerted by the Portuguese, the Mughals, and a
plethora of local actors who held considerable independent agency.
A sort of ‘bamboo border’—flexible, prepared to bend with the wind
but never breaking—divided the suba from the província, with plenty
of room for cross-cultural exchange in a permanent state of war.
Still, all parties involved seemed to have had a certain sense of the
spatial ‘limits’ and boundaries of this territory. Indeed when it came
to selecting a place to celebrate an agreement between the Estado
and the Ramnagar from just outside Daman in 1615, a ‘neutral’
village (aldeia)—neither located ‘in our lands’ nor in ‘theirs’—was
chosen.59
Daman, seized in 1559, was the last piece of a patchwork the
Portuguese referred to as the província do Norte. The província
began to take shape in 1521 with the conquest of the seaport Chaul,
which was geographically and politically linked to the sultanate of
Ahmadnagar. As such, the port town was more directly connected to
the problems of the western Deccan and the northern Konkan than
to those of Gujarat proper. Yet the Mughal web was also strongly felt
in Chaul even before the imperial conquest of the Deccan began
later in the century, as the siege of 1570–1 on the Portuguese
fortress shows: during the siege, a canon ball (pelouro) hit the tent
of the sultan of Ahmadnagar and killed the ‘captain of the Mogores’
while he was playing chess with Murtaza Nizam Shah I (r. 1565–
88).60 Bassein was granted to the Estado by the sultan of Gujarat in
1534, when Bahadur Shah found himself under serious threat from
Humayun; after further appropriations in 1556, the concessions
comprised a territory 115-kilometre-long and 30-kilometre-wide.
History repeated itself a year later with the concession of Diu for the
exact same reasons. Mughal pressure over Gujarat forced the
reigning sultan to take refuge on the island of Diu; as he was unable
to count on immediate Ottoman assistance, the sultan sought an
agreement with the Portuguese that included the permission to
construct a fortress there. Much like Chaul, Diu was a fortressed
port city with various rents to collect and a flourishing business to
run, but it had very little territory in its possession to administer.
Conversely, land was an abundant and vital element of the
economic, political, and social fabric of Bassein and Daman.
Strategically situated in Bassein’s hinterland, Thana seems to have
played a key role in the terrestrial communication within the
Northern Province. Several major religious orders—Augustinian,
Franciscan, and Jesuit—had a foothold there, and a holy house of
mercy (misericórdia) had existed in Thana since at least 1614. It is
not by chance that when this misericórdia requested financial
support from King Philip IV in 1632, it spoke of Thana’s gifted
geographical position—‘in the middle and on the way between the
fortresses of Chaul, Bassein, Diu, and Daman’—and the
brotherhood’s additional responsibility of sheltering ‘all poor, sick,
and wounded soldiers and cavalrymen’.61
At its peak, the Northern Province consisted of a territory that cut
inland c. 50 kilometres and ran the length of 215 kilometres of
coastline, comprising dozens of major administrative divisions
among which were the kasbas (caçabés) and especially the
parganas (praganas), c. 750 villages (aldeias), and myriad smaller
circumscriptions and landholdings. The management of such a
diversified space was anchored in prior Portuguese territorial
experiences, such as the donatory system (capitanias donatarias)
that had been implemented in the South Atlantic and the land grant
system (prazos) that had been adopted in East Africa.62 The Estado
da Índia thus rewarded military services by granting lands and rents
in the Northern Province—many of which were granted for long
periods of time or even in perpetuity—mostly to Portuguese middle-
ranking nobles. In exchange, these appanage-holders (foreiros)
were expected, in most cases, to settle there with their families and
ensure that their new land was both productive and protected. In
what Goa viewed as an all too frequent and much undesired
absence of these appanage-holders from their lands, it was not
uncommon for undesignated tenants (rendeiros) to take over. In so
doing, these rendeiros were effectively able to maintain contact with
a veritable army of voiceless indigenous farmers (corumbins).63
This Portuguese model was fruitfully combined with widespread
Islamic precedents, such as the iqta (revenue assignment), that had
been adopted by the sultans of Gujarat well before they began to
lose territory in the 1530s. In the same vein, the Estado generally
embraced the existent agrarian structure and its fiscal framework in
their newly acquired territories; several local rents and taxes
remained in place albeit referred to by the Portuguese corruptions of
the native names.64
The Portuguese Crown had a recurrent need to map (therefore to
master) the Northern Province. After the Tombo Geral do Estado da
Índia prepared by Simão Botelho in 1554, the first sizeable and
more localized attempt to survey the territory dates back to the
1590s, when the land and revenue registers (tombos) of Chaul,
Daman, Diu, and Bassein were compiled by Francisco Pais—
purveyor of the royal treasury of the Estado—with the assistance of
Diogo Vieira.65 It seems that similar instruments were regularly
prepared thereafter––in the 1610s, 1620s, and 1630s––even if most
of them are lost today.66 The surviving documents read primarily as
a means to systematically document the Crown’s rights over
property, rents, revenues, and manpower in a given territory. They
likewise constituted an effective tool to realign space, label people,
underscore legitimacy, and reaffirm sovereignty. Such operations
required extensive paperwork, and more specifically relied on the
ability to reorder and revive documents in which long-forgotten
decisions and concessions had been previously recorded. The
tombos of the Northern Province should, therefore, be regarded as
loci of power;they were the appropriate site––from the Portuguese
Crown’s viewpoint––in which the Crown could produce history and
promote the recovery of memory as the basis for its rule and
authority.67
As expected, the tombos tell us much more about the ways in
which the Estado da Índia would have wanted the Northern
Province’s borders than how the Mughal Empire saw its limits in
Gujarat. The tombo of Diu constitutes an excellent case in point;
although it is a short document, it is crammed with references to
ancient books, past contracts, and oral testimonies by old residents
(peçoas muito antigas). Furthermore, it includes full transcriptions of
agreements in Portuguese signed by the Estado with not only the
sultans of Gujarat in the 1530s, but also with a Mughal candidate to
Bahadur Shah’s succession in 1537—Mirza Muhammad Zaman,
Humayun’s brother-in-law––who at the time promised the Estado full
control of the lands between Daman and Bassein.68 Moments of
commotion, such as that which followed the assassination of Sultan
Mahmud Shah in 1554, also provided the Portuguese with
opportunities to expand their territory and appropriate rights.
Predicting political and social anarchy (and ‘in order to defend and
protect the residents’, the document justifies), the captain of Diu
seized ‘all the income from the customs house and its rents, as well
as all the rents and properties that the Kings of Cambay [Gujarat]
held in this fortress and island of Diu and its limits (termos), which
are now in possession of the King our Lord’.69 Conversely, when
strategizing about the suba of Gujarat or mulling over what to do
about Diu, Akbar and his officials surely ignored the actions of the
Portuguese captains, the rhetorical devices employed by Pais as he
wrote the tombo, as well as—if they ever even saw them—the
‘contracts made with the Kings of Cambay’.
The tombo of Daman equally contains telling examples of
Portuguese ‘legal fictions’ in the província. When Francisco Pais
began compiling it, one of the local parganas—that of Kortogadh
(Gortogar)—did not fall under the control of the Portuguese Crown.
But Pais decided to further investigate and, between old records
(lembranças antiguas) that were contained in some books and other
information that had been meanwhile assembled (enformações que
tomey), he concluded that actually ‘this pargana pertains to His
Majesty’ and it should therefore fall under the jurisdiction of Daman.
In fact, the pargana had been rented to the ‘King of the Sarcetas’
immediately following the Portuguese conquest of 1559; this was
the only way the Portuguese could attempt to control the territory
because of its distant and dangerous location—‘deep inland and
close to his lands’, permanently harrassed by ‘thieves and
highwaymen who are also Sarcetas’ (ladrõis e salteadores dos
mesmos sarçetas). The Sarcetas never paid, the Portuguese never
collected, and Pais now sought to revive the long forgotten
concession in order to claim—albeit only on paper—the Estado’s
authority over the long-lost pargana.70
 The occupation of land, of cultivable and cultivated land, was key
to upholding and even expanding the Portuguese zone of influence.
The lands pertaining to the província do Norte had to be possessed
and their rents to be collected, otherwise the Mughals would replace
the Portuguese. Indeed to do otherwise had rather negative
consequences for the Estado, as the case of the pargana of Butsad
(Boticer) in Daman demonstrates. The Portuguese tombo of 1592
remarks that ‘since it is close to the lands of Surat it is now fully
possessed by the Mughals. They eat this pargana and face no
obstacles whatsoever, given the scarce resources that the residents
of Daman count on to defend it. [Our] careless attitude gave them
[the Mughals] gradual possession of the pargana and it will now be
difficult to recover it’. Gradually, and with no need for a stunning
conquest, uncontested use translated into acquired rights; a piece of
the província corresponding to c. 400 square kilometres, therefore,
became part of the suba. In the suggestive wording of the
Portuguese tombo, the Mughals simply ‘ate’ (or ‘ate from’) the
pargana of Butsad, and it is well known how efficient they were in
surveying their parganas and extracting the respective resources.71
As in Bengal, the spread of the imperial authority in Gujarat—and its
clash with the Portuguese província do Norte—was also about
control of productive and populated lands.72
The need to possess profitable land—equally a necessity for the
suba and the província—came into contrast with the recurrent use of
violence. In the aftermath of the Mughal–Portuguese crisis of 1613,
which will be discussed in the next chapter, the ‘North’ is said to
have been totally destroyed: ‘there is no single tree or palm tree
standing in the villages’, one Portuguese writer remarked, also
noting that it would take more than twenty years before revenues
could again be collected by the Estado in those villages.73 To raid
arable lands controlled by the enemy was a legitimate act of war
and often led to political recognition in one’s home society: Dom
Pedro da Silva, a Portuguese nobleman who had been living in
Bassein since 1610, had a long military career in the Northern
Province; this included chopping off several heads (cortando muitas
cabeças) and burning fields (queimando campos) over the course of
two major battles with the Mughals in the Daman region in 1628–
9.74 Considering the limitations of the available source material in
this respect, we can only glimpse the effects of such destructive
distruptions to the daily life of the populations living (and often
forced to move around) in the Mughal–Portuguese borderlands,
including the strong ecological imprint that such episodes might
have left.75
The Northern Province––from the most remote villages and
parganas to the main fortressed cities and their peripheries
(arrabaldes)––was to a great extent moulded by warfare and a
permanent state (and fear) of conflict. In the city of Diu, perhaps the
city most exposed to the Mughals’ physical proximity and political
authority, the enemy was often within––‘inside the walls’ (das portas
adentro), as the Portuguese realized in the late 1590s.76 In Chaul, a
walled city with arrabaldes but with virtually no land outside of the
city proper, the fortress was itself the ‘border’. Here, bells were
deemed essential; in the event of an attack, people had to be
warned in a timely manner and, therefore, Goa instructed the
municipal council not only to ensure that there were enough bells,
but also simultaneously to prevent those in the churches and
monasteries being stolen or ‘borrowed’.77 In Daman, the Mughals
could equally be seen from the city walls, as was the case during
the major attack of 1638.78 However, the Estado’s primary concern
lay understandably with land defence (guarda das terras), which is
clearly reflected in the 1592 tombo.79 The great majority of the
overwhelmingly Portuguese foreiros in both Daman and Bassein
were expected not only to be residents in their lands (though they
seldom were, as has already been noted) but to also contribute
towards the defence of the territory with horses, men, and
firearms.80 Bordering Mughal domains, Daman’s hinterland
necessitated special attention; as a form of supplementary
protection, a mobile military unit was moved from fort to fort in the
region, the movements of which were dictated by the defence needs
of the moment.81
The principal cities of the Northern Province were, in fact, nodes
of a wider and complex defensive system comprised of fortresses
and forts, (fortified) religious buildings and manor houses, towers
and tower houses.82 Mughal attacks were sometimes recorded and
remembered through urban inscriptions, as was the case in Daman
in 1581.83 Military service and prowess against the Mogores figured
prominently in the petitions of those who served in the província,
such as that of Cristóvão de Brito de Noronha in the late 1640s,
amongst others.84 Losses and setbacks were the flip side of the
coin. Take the death of one Manuel da Gama, who was ‘killed by the
Mogores in the service of His Majesty’ in the 1580s and was
survived by his wife Gracia Gomez in Daman.85
This is a story that has also been told in the competing books and
drawings produced on both sides of the battlefield. While copying
the Iskandar Nama and the Timur Nama, one poet from the
Nizamshahi court decided to date his work by remarking that he
completed it in the year ‘the Islamic sovereign came to conquer the
fort of the Franks’, and more specifically, ‘on the battlefield with the
Franks’.86 Thus this poet was working while the 1570 siege of Chaul
by the Sultan of Ahmadnagar unfolded before his eyes, and his
intellectual endeavour was in some way shaped by these
surrounding events. On the other side of the ‘fence’, once the siege
was lifted the following year, one Portuguese decided to write ‘a
booklet about the affair of the siege’ (hũ caderno…do suçeço do
serquo sumariamente). This booklet was sent to Lisbon for the King
to view, together with two intriguing (today lost) ‘paintings of Chaul,
one as it was before the siege and another showing it after the
siege’.87
The main walled cities of the Northern Province—Chaul, Bassein,
Daman, and Diu—were, to a large extent, Portuguese cities. The
fortresses themselves were the result of Western fortification
science and warfare, even if local previously erected fortifications
throughout the província were often maintained and adapted.
Portuguese military organization was established and Portuguese
administrative units (paróquias, freguesias) prevailed.88 The
sociopolitical life of these places as well as their urban fabric was
primarily shaped by influential European or specifically Portuguese
institutions, such as the municipal council (senado da câmara), the
holy house of mercy (misericórdia), the church, and the hospital.89
These cities were described in coeval reports, such as the Livro das
cidades e fortalezas que a Coroa de Portugal tem nas partes da
Índia (c. 1582).90 Throughout the first half of the seventeenth
century, text was often paired with images; indeed, the main urban
and fortified structures of the Northern Province were frequently
portrayed in such books. A supplement to the tombos, the livros das
plantas––of which António Bocarro’s work (1635), with illustrations
mostly by Pedro Barreto de Resende (1635), is an exemplary
case––conveyed comprehensive descriptions and orderly (too
orderly) views of the província’s cities and fortifications.91
Just below the surface—inside the city walls or right outside them
—the human landscape proved in fact to be far more complex and
diverse than the quiet, almost frozen scenery that was depicted in
Bocarro’s book and alike. These were frontier cities, where rigidity
and fluidity often went hand in hand, and where strategies for the
enforcement of religious and ethnic distinction were contradicted
daily by diverse social practices that lead to interaction and
transgression.92 No mention has been made of anti-Muslim (anti-
Mughal) public spectacles being organized in these cities; such
festivals were commonly performed in the second half of the
fifteenth-century in the main plazas of the Castilian cities facing
Muslim Granada as a means to artificially reinforce antagonisms
and foster holy war.93 But it is not difficult to imagine situations of
strong contrast between what was ‘preached’ within the urban walls
of the província do Norte and what actually occurred outside (and
even inside) these fortressed-cities.
 The population, especially in places such as Diu, was
overwhelmingly native. In the late sixteenth century, Diu was
expected to have 350 men ready to fight, but it was common to
count no more than fifty homens d’armas. Fifty men could do very
little against the 2,000 Muslim inhabitants of the lands pertaining to
the Estado and the additional 1,000 ‘foreigners’—primarily Mughals
and Iranians—who made Diu their home during the monsoon
season.94 Indeed many of the rents in Diu were collected by
Muslims and Hindus. Closer inspection of the little property available
reveals interesting cases of inter-religious transfer, some of which
were even unexpected if not ironic. Property changed hands
frequently, regardless of the religion or ethnicity of those involved;
we see hajis in Diu buying a ground plot––a chão, where they could
rest when travelling to, or from, Jiddah. This particular property
belonged to the cathedral of Goa and so Catholic procurators
mediated the transaction between the two parties.95 And there were
Portuguese ‘old Christians’ such as Baltazar Fernandes, who owned
a chão contiguous to the great mosque of Diu.96
One could argue that Diu might have been the exception, since
the prevalent tendency over time in the província—and equally in
other cities of the Estado, such as Malacca—was to find Portuguese
militarized societies well-established within the walls, defensive to
the point ethnic diversity and bustling trade were pushed to outside
areas.97 The Estado conceived of ‘Little Daman’ (Damão Pequeno)
in Diu—which had lived under the protection of Fort São Jerónimo
since 1614—as the appropriate venue to attract Gujarati merchants
and their business to the Portuguese sphere of influence in times of
conflict with the Mughals. But ‘Little Daman’ obviously never
succeeded in commercially annihilating Surat.
Conversely, several regions of the província were quite appealing
to Catholic reinóis (born in Portugal), who had not always lived up to
the expectations of the authorities in Lisbon and Goa. In Chaul,
some Portuguese had chosen to live in the native city—the so-called
Chaul de Cima (Upper Chaul); there, they possessed lands and
even behaved like local thanadars (commander of a military post),
as was the case with Francisco de Revoredo at the turn of the
seventeenth century.98 In Bassein or in Daman it was common to
see Portuguese fugitives from justice (homiziados) who had
abandoned the cities to embrace life among the ‘gentiles’ and
‘moors’.99 In some exceptional cases, such as that involving the so-
called Melo brothers in Bassein in the 1650s–60s, individuals
inhabited both spheres and could be described as ‘swinging
pendulums’ between the província and the suba. After having
murdered three Portuguese residents of the city (one of the victims
being no less than the local judge, or ouvidor), Diogo Melo de
Sampaio and Francisco Melo de Sampaio fled Bassein in 1656
accompanied by a number of their followers. Once they had
established themselves in Kalyan, they began to raid villages under
Portuguese control while trying to attract other moradores of
Bassein to follow their example and move to Mughal India. The two
brothers were keen on being publicly seen in the vicinity of the
Portuguese city dressed in Mughal garb, though they did not seem
to have converted to Islam. Soon after, Diogo and Francisco
travelled to the imperial capital, where they apparently gained the
favour of the Mughal emperor. Several years later, in the early
1660s, the Melos surfaced again as double agents, providing
valuable intelligence to the Estado regarding a possible Mughal–
Dutch attack on the main cities of the província do Norte.
Consequently, a royal pardon was issued in Lisbon in 1664 and both
Diogo and Francisco were free to return to Portuguese India.100
In the eyes of the Portuguese Crown, the província do Norte
constituted a religious demarcation line. A string of churches,
convents, and other religious buildings pertaining to all major
missionary orders as well as to the secular clergy literally formed a
visible Catholic landscape. A telling example is Bassein c. 1615,
with its fifty-two religious buildings, which belonged to Franciscans,
Jesuits, Dominicans, Augustinians, and secular clerics.101 These
Catholic sites owned villages, collected rents and land revenue,
converted people, instituted social order, and kept Western
libraries.102 The very act of political possession of some of these
locations, as the conquest of Daman illustrates nicely, was a
moment of simultaneously abrupt and violent religious change.
Immediately following the conquest of the city by Viceroy Dom
Constantino de Bragança (g. 1558–61) in 1559, the Jesuit Gonçalo
da Silveira appropriated its main mosque (mesquita principal dos
mouros). Once there, in the heated words of the Jesuit Luís Fróis,
Silveira ‘slapped the devil, or Muhammad to that effect, by saying
the first mass in the mosque and hanging crosses therein’. That
same day, the ‘devil’s temple’ was transformed into a three-altar
church; the chief altar was devoted to Our Lady of Purification while
the other two were consecrated to Saint Francis and Saint
Thomas.103 The main doors of the fortresses of Chaul and Bassein,
as many other portals and bastions throughout the province, were
decorated with Catholic, typically Jesuit, imagery.104 Not without
local Portuguese resistance, the Society of Jesus was often called
upon by the Estado with the task of managing the fortification works
of the main cities. Thus cities and Catholicism alike moulded heavily
the colonial space, and the província do Norte represents an
appropriate, if smaller, Portuguese parallel to New Spain in this
regard.105 A bold comparison may also be made with Bengal and its
Islamization, a process in which the mosque and the shrine played a
role similar to that of the church and the chapel in the making of the
Portuguese província.106
Conversion was a tool used to augment the Estado’s area of
influence in the província. Several foreiros of small land plots
situated in the kasbas of Bassein and Agaçaim and exposed to
Muslim attacks in the early seventeenth century were Hindu farmers
converted to Christianity and bearing Portuguese Catholic
names.107 But conversion also had its limitations. Indeed
indigenous communities living close to the city of Bassein in the late
1660s ‘very much embraced the Portuguese ways, both with
regards to their houses and their persons, and few are those who do
not dress like the Portuguese’.108 However, the social world of the
parganas looked quite different: ‘There were many gentiles, because
we speak of deep inland areas and close to the lands of the Great
Mughal; His vicinity … strongly prevents the expansion of
Christianity.’109 Missionary work in such regions was sporadic and
often crossed over into forced conversion, a much-debated topic in
the Estado, the Iberian Peninsula, and within the Society of Jesus.
In those circumstances, Hindus often reacted by fleeing to Islamic
lands, the effect of which was depopulation and rent decrease for
the província.110 In order to avoid such outcomes it was not only
important to carefully document (that is, to count and classify) but
also to contain non-Catholic natives living in the Northern Province.
At one point in the seventeenth century, ‘Portuguese’ Thana counted
899 Muslims and 2,540 ‘gentiles’ (gentios); it is impossible to say,
however, how many from rather different ‘nations’ were grouped by
the Estado officials into the single category of gentios.111
Thus, the effectiveness of a Catholic província—and, indirectly,
the effectiveness of the Portuguese–Mughal ‘border’—was
dependant on the ability to both conquer new souls in remote rural
areas and screen the indigenous residents in areas presumably
under Portuguese control. Likewise, the província resorted to
restricting the movements of its old believers native to Portugal,
namely by preventing free access to key cities of the suba. It was
necessary to avoid uncontrolled circulation of the Portuguese in
Mughal Gujarat since, as discussed earlier, both men and goods
would have become easy targets in the event a conflict broke out. At
a certain point, Akbar and Jahangir successively issued farmans
granting permission to open churches in Khambayat and
Ahmedabad and assuring the protection of the padres, documents
that were received with great enthusiasm by the Jesuit
missionaries.112 However, what seemed to be a convenient
opportunity to expand the Catholic influence in the region was
perceived by the Estado da Índia as a dangerous trap. Backed by
the captains of the fortresses of the Northern Province, Viceroy Dom
Francisco da Gama argued in 1599 against establishing churches in
these cities, maintaining that a Jesuit church in Khambayat would
become the ideal venue for unruly people in a land where ‘there is
no justice and men live freely’. ‘It is certain—he further notes—that
they will abandon the Northern fortresses and will go to live there,
thus becoming useless in the service of Your Majesty and turning
into Akbar’s captives, whenever he wishes to imprison them and
take their property.’113
The Estado feared that Gujarat would turn into a second Bengal
(discussed in Chapter 6), or another area of Portuguese private
initiative and social disorder that would fall out of Goa’s control. As
such, the Estado moved to keep outlaws within the province’s side
of the ‘border’ and prevent them from fleeing to Islamic lands. In
1566, a village in Daman that had been granted a few years earlier
to Francisco Gomes Colaço was taken from him by the Estado
when, as a fugitive from justice, he chose to live in ‘the lands of the
Moors’ (andar omiziado em terra de mouros).114 Given its proximity
to Mughal India, and the obvious concern with its defence, Daman
became a couto de homiziados in 1610, a criminal settlement
where, as punishment, convicted men were forced to live and
serve.115 As late as 1691—already within the context of Marathi
pressure over the província—the Portuguese Crown was eager to
reward people such as Nicolau Pereira de Sousa for having handed
over to the Inquisition of Goa twenty-one arrenegados (true
renegades or just rebels?) who had ‘crossed the line’ into the Thana
region to mingle with the ‘gentiles’ (‘andavão na terra firme com os
gentios’).116
Concurrently, it was necessary to avoid the spread of Islam within
Catholic territory. An examination of a visit from the Inquisition of
Goa to the ‘Northern lands’ (terras do Norte) conducted by Inquisitor
João Fernandes de Almeida between early 1619 and late 1620
reveals intriguing cases. To follow or practice Islam was the third
most frequent crime—the first two having to do with all sorts of non-
Catholic rituals and ceremonies, simply labelled by the Inquisitor as
gentilidades; indeed, 51 of 434 people were accused on those
grounds, 21 of whom were slaves of Asian origin, namely Chinese,
Japanese, but also native Christians.117
 Nowithstanding, the Northern Province could not survive were it
to be conceived as a rigid Catholic limes. The cities of the província
resembled delicate biological entities and balance had, therefore, to
be constantly maintained. Owing to its geographical location and
economic profile, Diu was a particularly sensitive case. The viceroys
of Goa recognized the need to preserve the status quo there or risk
seeing the Bania merchants move to another place; were these to
do so and leave behind ‘their houses and goods’, the commercial
and social fabric of the city would be damaged.118 The ‘people of
Diu’ used to petition the king of Portugal in Portuguese language
whenever they felt harmed by the Estado da Índia’s decisions.119
One documented case speaks of a certain Kavasji Doshi (‘Caugy
Dossy’), an established resident Bania of Diu (baneane, cazado e
morador na Fortaleza de Dio, mercador tratante) whose well-
developed network of maritime business in the Arabian Sea was
crucial for the Portuguese customs house in 1630. It seems Kavasji
Doshi filed a complaint with Philip IV about the behaviour of the
captain of the fortress as well as that of several local officials of the
Estado; his request was duly attended.120 It is also possible Kavasji
Doshi was among those Banias who, some years later, pressed the
Portuguese Crown on matters concerning inheritance; in 1647 the
Overseas Council in Lisbon confirmed an earlier decision by viceroy
count of Linhares (g. 1629–35), according to which Portuguese law
governed the family transmission of property—that is, inheritance
laws—and was applicable to all Gujaratis living in Diu or in Goa. In
this case, the Estado and the Crown adopted (or were required to
adopt) an inclusive policy irrespective of belief, community, and
place of birth; despite the obvious lack of ‘Portugueseness’, the
Banias of Diu were to be considered Portuguese, not Mughal,
vassals.121
People living within, regardless of their ethnicity and religion,
ought to remain on the ‘right’ side of the border. However, in late
1594 land was granted in Daman to a Marathi called Tejaji
(Tezoassy), even though he and his father Tanoji (Tanossy) had
crossed the ‘border’ (se passou aos mouros) the year before,
apparently to join the Nizamshahi forces in a major attack on
Portuguese Chaul. Tanoji was killed on that occasion, but Tejaji
returned to Daman and, what may have at first seemed odd, was
granted a few villages by Matias de Albuquerque. The viceroy’s
gesture is justified by the fact that Tejaji and Tanoji had travelled to
Ahmadnagar for a good reason: they went to rescue their wives and
children, who had been taken as captives by the enemy. Moreover,
they had both spied for the Estado during the war with Ahmadnagar,
and Tejaji had even killed a number of (Portuguese?) rebels.122
In light of this history, several questions surface: Did Tejaji and
Kavasji Doshi consider themselves members of one and the same
territorial and political community? Was there a strong nexus
between the people and the land in the Northern Province? Did the
existence of a Portuguese província, with its capital city in Bassein,
translate into solid sentiments of belonging among its residents, at
least among its Catholic residents? Unfortunately, we do not know
enough about the ways in which communal identity and agency
worked in this case to be able to give a clear response. Tamar
Herzog, who has recently studied the Spanish–Portuguese border in
novel ways, rightly refuses to speak of a priori divides between ‘us’
and ‘them’ and rather insists on the need to consider how
‘communities and territories were constructed concurrently and
interdependently’.123 In fact, one would need an in-depth study of
how people in Gujarat lived at the margins of the two empires—
Mughal and Portuguese—the assumption being that ‘peoples on the
frontiers … sought to make the world around them coherent, and
boundaries had a role to play in local definitions and agenda that
might be quite distinct from those of the empire’.124 It is quite
possible therefore that the ‘Middle Ground’ worlds of both Tejaji and
Kavasji Doshi were far more complex than were portrayed by the
Estado.125
Were we to move again from the realm of individuals and groups
to the broader canvas of institutions and states, would it be possible
to say whether the Northern Province was a coherent,
homogeneous territory? Was the província as Portuguese as the
suba was Mughal? It probably was not. True, there was a
recognizable Portuguese landscape, shaped by a handful of cities
and myriad forts, churches, and houses, together with sizeable
portions of land owned by Catholic reinóis. And yet one is faced with
a discontinuous space, like most early modern spaces. The
província was a disjointed territory in which its extremes—the
southern pole (Chaul) and particularly the northern one (Diu)—were
geographically separated from the heartland of the province
(Bassein and Daman). To improve the defensive and organizational
structures of these four nodal points was in itself a problem. There is
constant talk in the Portuguese sources about obras, or the need to
undertake construction and maintenance works in the fortressed
cities.126 Money and resources, however, were chronically lacking;
as a result, the fortification of both Bassein and Daman proved to be
extremely slow and highly controversial endeavours that were
eventually considered finished in the 1620s, but left behind an
impressive paper trail of criticisms and accusations between the
parties involved.127
Inland areas, distant from the main coastal urban settlements,
were rather difficult to govern. We know very little about the land
movements of people, goods, and news in the província, although
myriad patamares—anonymous indigenous messengers and
runners—are often mentioned in the Portuguese sources. There
was a royal project in the early 1620s to create a regular overland
mail service between Goa and Daman: ten patamares, distant ten
leagues from each other at four xerafins a month each, could well
ensure the circulation of ciphered letters and news dispatches
(avisos) between the capital of the Estado da Índia and the northern
tip of the província do Norte.128 Understandably, Philip IV’s idea
was never implemented; the poor roads and lines of communication
made it difficult to traverse the region, even if fluvial traffic in many
areas might have lessened the adversities. As such circulation
within the Northern Province was primarily maritime and riverine in
nature.129
 Significantly, there are no contemporary Portuguese maps of the
província do Norte—just visions of its relevant fragments and
pockets, such as those included in the books of cities and
fortresses. Most likely, the available geographical knowledge was
insufficient to make a ‘full’ and ‘modern’ map, which reflects the
impossibility of the Estado to go beyond the control of some of the
region’s routes and ‘corridors’. By representing in his 1615 map of
Gujarat a road linking Bassein to Daman to Surat to Broach, Manuel
Godinho de Erédia certainly intended to emphasize the connections
between some of the most relevant ports of the imperial province
and the primary cities of the Northern Province.130 What was
important to Erédia was the movement between the suba and the
província, not the província itself. The scenario is thus rather similar
to that which occurred in New England in the exact same period,
where the English political narrative of a harmonious and ‘tamed’
territory did not always correspond to reality.131

THE BORDERLAND AT WORK: DIU AND THE ‘AZIZ

KOKA AFFAIR (1593–4)
In order to further explore the ways in which the Portuguese–Mughal
borderland in Gujarat was handled by both parties in this period, a
case study has been selected that is quite different from those
typical of the agrarian setting of such cities as Bassein and Daman.
In fact, the event examined is not related to the control of remote
parganas, disputes over land revenue collection, or the expansion of
territorial control through the conversion of the natives. The focus is
on Diu and the analysis seeks to assess how the rupture between
Emperor Akbar and his renowned courtier Mirza ‘Aziz Koka in 1593–
4 impacted the local Portuguese fortress and the Estado’s authority
in the region. With its epicentre in Diu, this incident led to strong
political reverberations in Goa and Lisbon, exposing Portuguese–
Mughal relations to considerable strain in the final years of the
sixteenth century.
 Mirza ‘Aziz Koka (c. 1542–1624) was a powerful member of the
Mughal elite whose long career spanned the reigns of both Akbar
and Jahangir.132 A learned scholar, ‘Aziz served in different
campaigns and provinces, but nurtured a long-standing connection
with Gujarat, where he eventually spent half a century after taking
on his first position in the then newly created imperial province;
Agiscoca, as the Portuguese called him, was chosen by Akbar to be
the first subadar of Gujarat following the Mughal conquest, an
appointment the emperor would repeat twice more, in the late 1580s
and again in the early 1600s. The son of Shamsuddin Ahmad
Ghaznavi (d. 1562)—an influential Turani who was in both
Humayun’s and Akbar’s entourage—‘Aziz was a member of the
powerful Ghazni-based Atga clan. He further profited from his
mother’s influence as one of Akbar’s wet nurses (anaga) and, it is
known, Jiji was particularly close to the emperor. ‘Aziz Koka was
thus the emperor’s foster brother (koka), but his privileged position
did not exempt him from experiencing major setbacks during his
extended political trajectory.133
‘Aziz’s worst moments occurred during Jahangir’s reign, since
Akbar’s koka was accused from the start of not having favoured
Salim’s ascension to power in 1605.134 Soon after, he would be
labelled as a supporter of Khusrau’s failed rebellion against
Jahangir; the emperor’s tough reaction and ‘Aziz’s painful
punishment were minutely recounted by the Jesuit Jerónimo Xavier
in 1607.135 In 1612–13, ‘Aziz Koka openly disagreed with Jahangir
concerning the ways in which the ethnic balance of the imperial elite
should be handled: the Mughal ruler chose to promote the
Shaihkzadas (Indian Muslims) over the Rajputs and the Chagatais,
while ‘Aziz Koka, as a Turani, obviously favoured the status quo.136
Notwithstanding, disagreements between Akbar and his foster
brother had been frequent since the 1570s and ultimately led to the
latter’s loss of political influence, and even resulted in his sentence
to home confinement in Agra between 1575 and 1580. The 1580s,
however, signal a rapprochement between the two men; ‘Aziz Koka
was promoted to the rank of 5,000 zat, granted the title of Khan-i
A‘zam, and saw his daughter married to Prince Murad in 1587.
However, he repeatedly opted to distance himself from court, and
therefore cut himself out of the main Mughal redistribution
mechanism. Once in power, Jahangir would take advantage of such
tensions to nail ‘Aziz Koka by confronting the ‘ingrate’ with a letter—
rather critical of Akbar—that he had written and addressed to Raja
Ali Khan (d. 1597), the last effective ruler of Khandesh.137 In fact,
Khan-i A‘zam was very vocal in condemning several imperial
decisions that had been taken and did not hesitate to pen
successive petitions and letters of complaint, addressing them to
Abu’l Fazl and Akbar himself. The divergences between the two
foster brothers were both political and ideological; indeed, ‘Aziz
Koka stood as a declared opponent of the religious policy promoted
by Akbar. Being rather close to the Naqshbandi Sufi order, he was
sympathetic to the arguments employed by those who criticized
Akbar for being distant from the ‘true’ Islam and was not pleased
with the influence that the brothers Abu’l Fazl and Faizi exerted over
the emperor. Khan-i A‘zam even went as far as to say to Akbar in
writing that ‘there have been rulers who commanded great power
and authority but it never occurred to anyone of them to advance a
claim for prophethood and strive to abrogate the religion of
Muhammad’.138
A lively example of the ideological gulf that lay between the two
men is provided by the arrest of Shaykh Mustafa Gujarati (d. 1576)
immediately following the Mughal conquest of the sultanate. Koka
considered the leading Mahdavi of Gujarat to be a heretic and
decided to subject Shaykh Mustafa to a harsh interrogation in
Ahmedabad before sending the prisoner to the imperial court. Once
in Fathpur Sikri, Shaykh Mustafa met with the emperor, who instead
called for three sessions (majalis) at the Ibadat khana (Hall of
Prayer) in order to openly debate the extant contradictions between
the Shaykh’s views and those of other learned religious men. During
those discussions at court, the ulema were just as severe with
Mustafa as Koka had been in Ahmedabad. Akbar, however, adopted
a totally different stance and amused himself with the ongoing
disputes.139
The rupture between the two brothers came in the form of a
symbolic gesture: Koka opted for exile. In early April 1593, he
embarked at the Gujarati port of Balawal on the ship Ilahi that was
headed to the Red Sea and went to perform the hajj. In that same
month, Akbar wrote to him an intriguing letter, bitterly criticizing his
decision to leave for Mecca without first seeking imperial
permission. Akbar went on to ask ‘Aziz Koka to return to the Mughal
court and assured him the imperial favour upon return. ‘Aziz Koka
eventually returned in December of the following year. 140
Koka’s unauthorized voyage to Mecca, in the company of his
wives, children, attendants, and treasuries, could hardly go
unnoticed. On the one hand, the Mughal noble had to inevitably
negotiate his departure with the officers of the Estado da Índia in
Diu, the same who issued cartazes and controlled the customs
house. On the other hand, he could not afford to raise both Akbar’s
suspicions and those of the Mughal provincial authorities.
Apparently, his solution to this dilemma was to simulate a public
conflict with the Portuguese while at the same time reaching an
agreement in secret with them. To incite the Mughals, ‘Aziz Koka
wrote ‘very arrogant letters’ to the Portuguese captain of Diu, Pedro
de Anaia (or Anhaia), in which he ‘asked for rather extraordinary
things’—demands that were never truly intended to be met. Koka
went on to make public through a Bania that he was planning to take
the Portuguese fortress of Diu; Anaia played the game and did not
hesitate to kill the unnamed Bania, who evidently made the perfect
sacrificial lamb. Soon thereafter, the Portuguese captain received a
letter from ‘Aziz Koka requesting permission to ‘load one nau in this
same fortress and depart in it to Mecca with his wife and children’. In
exchange, Akbar’s foster brother promised to release all the
Portuguese who were being held captive in Khambayat at the
time.141
Imperial chroniclers also registered ‘Aziz Koka’s departure to
Mecca, but only Abu’l Fazl mentioned the agreement he had
reached with the Portuguese.142 Fazl’s version of the events does
not, however, include reference to the discrete letter Koka sent to
Anaia, most likely indicating that the Mughal chronicler (and the
Mughal court?) had fallen for the farce. According to Abu’l Fazl,
‘Aziz Koka announced his intention to conquer Diu and managed to
freeze the port’s commercial activity by preventing all Gujarati
merchants from doing business there. When faced with the prospect
of a strict commercial ban, the Portuguese were forced to
compromise and, much against their economic interests, authorized
Koka’s ship to sail to the Red Sea with all his entourage and goods
aboard.
Regardless of the substance of the arrangement between Anaia
and Koka, we know that a deal was indeed reached, and this
exposed the captain of the Diu to heavy criticism in the capital of the
Estado. Following his deal with the Mughal noble, Anaia must have
found himself in a rather difficult situation. If the rupture between
‘Aziz Koka and Akbar was staged, as some then argued in Goa and
Lisbon, the voyage should have been avoided at all costs. Its true
and ultimate objective, the Portuguese reasoned, might have been
to get someone very close to the Mughal emperor to Istanbul in
order to acquire galleys, people, and naval expertise. Was this the
case, it would have enabled Akbar to destroy the Estado’s positions
in Gujarat, Sind, and the Persian Gulf. The argument—very much in
line with the Portuguese concerns explored in the previous chapter
—corresponds to Francisco Rodrigues Silveira’s version of the story;
a veteran soldier of the Estado da Índia, Silveira, severely attacks
Anaia in a text called Reformação da Milícia for how he chose to
handle the situation.143 Even if the conflict between ‘Aziz Koka and
Akbar was real, the captain of Diu should not have hesitated to
seize the vessel, as imperial retaliation would have followed swiftly
once Akbar realized his foster brother had managed to flee to the
Red Sea under Portuguese protection: ‘the Mogor will resent this
permission we gave to ‘Aziz Koka and this might give him a pretext
to break with the Estado’, Philip II concluded in 1595 upon receiving
this information from Goa.144
 The version of the ‘Aziz Koka affair provided by Jorge de Lemos
—scrivener of the royal treasury to the Estado—is different, and
most probably closer to reality. Lemos reports at length from Goa in
late 1593 confirming the tense relationship between the Mughal
emperor and his foster brother. He further insists that Akbar ordered
Agiscoca to conquer Junagadh or otherwise leave the imperial lands
and travel to Mecca. As it were, Khan-i A‘zam did both.145 He
began by taking the ‘impregnable mountain of Junaguer’, with the
help of many Portuguese soldiers in his service whom the captain of
Diu had failed to pay and feed (por se lhes não pagarem quartéis
nem mantimentos). In fact, these defectors should have instead
been eating the rice that Pedro de Anaia sold illegally to ‘Aziz Koka:
the Portuguese captain simply diverted the grain from the fortress
he commanded and therefore left ‘the people in need’ (passar o
povo necessidades).146
Once Junagadh was handed over to Mughal control, and through
the ‘mediation of a Portuguese casado [permanent resident] his
friend’, ‘Aziz Koka started preparing for his passage to the holy
cities. He acquired the necessary Portuguese permission to leave
Gujarat by dispensing generous sums of money among the
influential officers of the Estado in Diu: 10,000 pardaus to Anaia and
5,000 to the captain of the armada do Norte. Aditionally, 3,000
pardaus were paid to Anaia’s father-in-law, who, no less, was
Francisco Pais—the proveyor of the royal treasury of the Estado
that, as we saw earlier in this chapter, had just finished compiling
the tombos of the cities of the província do Norte.147 Bribes paid,
‘Aziz Koka departed for the Red Sea, carrying with him many riches:
10 million in gold, in addition to endless pearls and a wealth of
precious stones.
Jorge de Lemos goes on to note that Viceroy Dom Francisco da
Gama reacted strongly to this incident. Ever since word reached
Goa—by way of an unnamed individual on his return from the Red
Sea—that ‘the fugitive [Koka] had been well received by the Pasha
(Baxá) who governed the said Province and, that along with rich
gifts, he had been given five farmans in golden lettering from the
Turk [that is, Murad III, r. 1574–95]’, a Turkish attack was feared
among the Portuguese. Lemos wraps up his account by predicting
that ‘were he [Koka] to return, as Akbar wishes and as the Emperor
has promised to his [Koka’s] mother [Jiji]—whose milk he [Akbar]
drank, and to whom a ship and permission to bring him [Koka] back
will be given—I am certain that he [Koka] will be our cruel
enemy’.148
The ‘Aziz Koka Affair as recounted by Jorge de Lemos is rather
telling. Lemos perceived the rupture between Koka and Akbar to be
real, and he rightly emphasized the close relationship between the
emperor and his foster mother. He was equally convinced of the
existence of a ‘pact’ between Koka and Anaia. Moreover, we learn
that the emperor’s foster brother nurtured significant bonds with the
Portuguese in Gujarat: aside from bribing three high officials of the
Estado, Koka was able to recruit firangi soldiers to his service, and
one of them—the one who mediated the negotiation with the captain
of Diu—was even considered to be ‘his friend’. Finally, Lemos
places emphasis on the ‘Turkish menace’ that Koka’s journey to
Mecca embodied and also predicts his return to the Mughal court
and ultimate reconciliation with the emperor.
The impact ‘Aziz Koka and his controversial hajj had in Goa and
Lahore was considerable. In 1599, some years after Koka’s return
from the holy cities and when he was again on friendly terms with
the emperor, the case was once more brought up among the
Portuguese. Even then unsure about Koka’s real intentions, Dom
Francisco da Gama elaborated on the implications of this voyage:
With regard to ‘Aziz Koka’s voyage, it was a great mistake to allow him
to travel to the Strait. Had the Turk been more at ease and He would
have accepted the offer put forward, since Koka took with him a large
treasure to spend. With this treasure, Koka could have acquired as
many galleys as he wanted from the Turk. Those who could have
prevented this voyage were well aware of this and yet allowed him to
leave aboard a large ship that should have had otherwise been
confiscated. The ship was loaded with gold and silver, which would
have been very useful for this Estado to meet its needs. This did not
necessarily imply the peace and friendship with the Mogor would have
 been broken—Koka was fleeing after all, and did not have his [Akbar’s]
permission (even if we came to know later that it was in fact the
opposite, judging from the good reception Akbar gave to Koka upon his
return). In this manner we would have avoided all the wrongdoings that
we fear, every year, judging from what ‘Aziz Koka has done and
continues to do.149

The viceroy criticized the captain of Diu for granting Koka

permission to travel to the Red Sea, but equally conceded that it
would have been difficult to predict Koka’s later reconciliation with
Akbar. In fact, upon his return to the Mughal court, Khan-i A‘zam
was made wakil (chief minister) and keeper of the royal seal, while
holding a considerably high mansab of 7,000 zat/7,000 suwar. The
Jesuit missionaries met him at the imperial capital in 1596 and
reported that the atmosphere between the two brothers was rather
relaxed then. ‘Aziz Koka was asked by Akbar to listen to the
Portuguese stories that the Catholic priests would narrate at court
and recount these stories back to the emperor in Persian. ‘Since
they went to Mecca four years ago’, Jerónimo Xavier explains, ‘this
captain and one of his sons became curious of these’.150 Xavier
arrived at the imperial court the year before and he had not yet
mastered the Persian language, while Koka must have had some
knowledge of Portuguese from the time he had spent in Gujarat.
The stories that apparently interested the emperor were likely
transmitted orally from Xavier to Koka and then to Akbar, in a
mixture of two broken languages.
Koka’s interactions with the Portuguese in Gujarat, together with
his Ottoman experience, might have contributed to strengthening his
role as cultural mediator at the Mughal court upon his return in 1594;
he was now seemingly more ‘cosmopolitan’ than twenty years
earlier, when he served as subadar of Gujarat for the first time. In
fact, the Sunni Muslim favoured the company of firangi friends and
accomplices in Diu before leaving for Mecca and, once back from
the Red Sea, took pleasure in the European stories the padres used
to narrate in Lahore. It is difficult to assert whether Mirza ‘Aziz Koka
was simply more ‘open’ now or alternatively had become the
complete dissimulator. Not long after, in the early years of Jahangir’s
reign, ’Aziz was heavily involved in the religious discussions that
were taking place in the imperial court between Catholics and
Muslims. And, while the Jesuit priests kept a fairly positive image of
Agiscoca, the Mughal intellectual ‘Abdus Sattar remarks that ‘Aziz
used to instigate people to speak against the missionaries.151
The incident of Diu in 1593–4, or the ‘Aziz Koka affair, tells us
much about the Mughal–Portuguese interactions in Gujarat. It offers
a rich mixture of politics and religion, trade and war, court and
province, individual agendas and geopolitical strategies,
dissimulation and realpolitik, orthodoxy and accommodation. The
latter combination, among others, brings into relief why we are
dealing mainly with a frontier zone. Koka, who used to criticize those
who ‘preferred infidels over Muslims’, did not hesitate to incorporate
Catholic soldiers into his army or form friendships among the
firangis living in the suba of Gujarat.152 At the same time, the
zealous Francisco Pais, the Portuguese official responsible for
surveying the Crown’s property rights and other rents in the
província, was open to receiving bribes from a Mughal noble, which
notoriously harmed the finances of the Estado. While the following
chapter also focuses on Gujarat, it moves into the seventeenth
century and explores a different context, a context in which
Agiscoca’s hajj would seem démodé.

1 Moniz (1918); Pereira (1948).

2 I am very grateful to Tamar Herzog for her close and stimulating reading of
this chapter.
3 For a classical survey of Mughal Gujarat, see Commissariat (1957). For
an excellent and more recent analysis of the imperial incorporation of the
sultanate, see Hasan (2004), pp. 12–30.
4 Abu’l Fazl (2001), vol. II, p. 257.

5 Chandra (1993); Gordon (1994), pp. 183–92.

6 Tirmizi (1968), pp. 78–81.
 7 Green (2012), pp. 128–9, 146ff.; Digby (2001), pp. 6–7. On the royal
camp, see Gommans (2002), pp. 100–11.
8 Annual letter of Francisco Cabral (Jesuit Provincial of India) to the Jesuits
in Europe, Goa, 29 November 1595, in DI, vol. XVII, pp. 371–2.
9 Koch (1988).

10 Asher (1992); Koch (2014); Burton-Page (2008), pp. 94–7.

11 Naik (1966), pp. 209–16; Koch (1997).

12 Jahangir (1999), p. 244.

13 Seyller (1999), pp. 27, 31–2, 55; Jahangir (1999), p. 251.

14 Hasan (2004), pp. 27–30.

15 DUP, vol. II, p. 99. Emphasis added.

16 Annual letter of Francisco Cabral to the Jesuits in Europe, Goa, 29

November 1595, in DI, vol. XVII, p. 371. Cruzado was a Portuguese silver coin
worth 400 réis.
17 Couto (1974), dec. X, pt. I, bk. iv, ch. 6, pp. 428–33.

18 Saran and Ziegler (2001), vol. I, pp. 146–9.

19 Sikandar Ibn Muhammad (1990), pp. 320–7; Luís de Mendonça to Philip
II, Diu, 26 November 1589, AGS, SP, bk. 1551, f. 664r.
20 See Kolff (1990), pp. 117ff., who elaborates on the concept of spurious
clan.
21 Philip II to Viceroy Dom Duarte de Meneses, Lisbon, 10 January 1587, in
APO, fasc. 3, p. 74.
22 Viceroy Dom Duarte de Meneses to Philip II, Goa, 6 December 1587,
AGS, SP, bk. 1551, ff. 23v–4r.
23 Couto (1974), dec. X, pt. I, bk. iv, ch. 6, p. 431. Philip II favoured the
conquest of Surat, ‘which for a long time has been desired and sought’ (‘que
de tantos tempos a esta parte se deseia e procura’); Philip II to Governor
Manuel de Sousa Coutinho, Lisbon, 6 February 1589, in APO, fasc. 3, p. 201.
Regarding the Portuguese attempts to take Surat in the 1560s, see Couto
(1974), dec. VII, bk. ix, chs. 8–9, 11–14; father Gonçalo Álvares to father
Francisco Borges, Goa, 5 December 1569, in DI, vol. VIII, p. 120.
24 Alam and Subrahmanyam (2012), pp. 58–68.
25 Akbar to ‘Abdullah Khan, June 1596, in Haidar (1998), p. 107.
 26 Father Gaspar Fernandes to Claudio Acquaviva (Superior General), Goa,
6 November 1606, ARSI, Goa, vol. 33 I, f. 164r. Political unrest in Gujarat
following the death of Akbar is also referred to in a letter from the city of Goa to
Philip III, Goa, 1606, in APO, fasc. 1, pt. II, p. 172.
27 Pearson (1976) provided the first comprehensive reflection on the
relationship between merchants and rulers in Gujarat, but his ‘three-legged
stool’ (the third leg being the Portuguese) is one excessively marked by the
idea of an ontological distance between state and locality, politics and trade.
Pearson’s views on Mughal Gujarat have meanwhile been challenged by
Hasan (2004), pp. 33–4, and Subrahmanyam (2005a), pp. 42–70.
28 Flores and Saldanha (2003), p. 64. On I’timad Khan, his political
ascendancy in pre-Mughal Gujarat and the crucial events of the 1570s, see
Sikandar Ibn Muhammad (1990), pp. 303–17; ‘Ali Muhammad Khan (1965),
pp. 99ff. For a contemporary and rather negative Portuguese portrait of I’timad
Khan (Itimicão), see Pereira (1987), bk. I, ch. iii, pp. 15–21.
29 Chandra (2003), ch. 10.
30 Faroqhi (1994), ch. 6, pp. 127ff.; Pearson (1994), ch. 4, pp. 87ff.; Casale
(2010), pp. 153–4; Farooqi (1999), pp. 209–22; Farooqi (1989), pp. 18–22. On
the agency of Mughal royal women undertaking the hajj, see Lal (2005), pp.
208–13.
31 Rizvi (1975), pp. 187–9.
32 Abu’l Fazl (2001), vol. III, pp. 410–11.

33 Abu’l Fazl (2001), vol. I, pp. 380–2, 353–4, 352–3; Shah Nawaz Khan
(1999), vol. II, pp. 534–9, 545–8, 846–9 (the latter’s information, however,
does not always match the data gathered by Ali [1985] concerning these three
figures). On the political, ideological, and ethnical bonding of this group, see
Subrahmanyam (2005a), pp. 53, 66.
34 Benton (2010), ch. 2, pp. 104ff.

35 Rodolfo Acquaviva to Everardo Mercuriano, Fathpur Sikri, 30 July 1581,

in DI, vol. XII, pp. 292–3.
36 Painted by La’l, c. 1603–4, BL, Or 12988, f. 66a. On this incident, see
Alam and Subrahmanyam (2012), pp. 53–5.
37 ‘Abdul Qadir Badayuni (1986), vol. II, p. 206.
38 Abu’l Fazl (2001), vol. III, pp. 409–10.
 39 Couto (1974), dec. X, pt. I, bk. ii, chs. 4–8, 15; bk. iii, chs. 4–5; pt. II, bk.
viii, ch. 7.
40 Dom Duarte de Meneses to Philip II, Goa, 6 December 1587, AGS, SP,
bk. 1551, f. 24r. A farman of Shahjahan dated 24 February 1637 (9 Shawwal
1047) allowed both the Dutch and the English to conduct trade in Surat, but in
a rather regulated way. Among the several conditions imposed on them, the
European merchants were required to deposit their arms and weapons in the
customs house (farza) when entering the port of Swally. See Tirmizi (1989–
95), vol. II, p. 60, no. 81.
41 Matias de Albuquerque to Philip II, [Goa, 1596], AHU, CU, cod. 281, f.
376v; ‘Lembrança das cousas que se hão de tratar com Mathias
d’Albuquerque’, BNP, Reservados, cod. 1973, ff. 55r, 56r.
42 Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, [Goa], 1599, BNP, Reservados,
cod. 1976, f. 73r. Gama instructed the captains of the fortresses north of Goa
to prevent Portuguese ships from calling on the port of Khambayat in order to
avoid their possible capture by the imperial authorities (Dom Francisco da
Gama to Philip III, [Goa], 1599, BNP, Reservados, cod. 1976, f. 160v).
43 Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, Goa, [1599], BNP, Reservados,
cod. 1976, ff. 56v, 58r–v.
44 Annual letter of 1603 (Father Gaspar Fernandes), Goa, 2 December
1603, ARSI, Goa, vol. 33 I, ff. 125v–6r. Xavier penned a vivid report about their
presence in the court in his letter to the Jesuit Provincial of India, Agra, 6
September 1604, in DUP, vol. III, pp. 9–12.
45 For a broader (conceptual and geographical) discussion of this set of
problems, see Benton (2010), pp. 141–5; Clulow (2014), pp. 135ff.
46 ‘Abdul Qadir Badayuni (1986), vol. II, p. 246.
47 Hosten (1912), p. 208. On Amin Khan Ghuri, see Sikandar Ibn
Muhammad (1990), pp. 313–14, 321, 323.
48 The last paragraph adopts the fresh view (anchored in a variety of
Portuguese and Mughal sources) offered by Subrahmanyam (2005a), pp. 62–
8. For an earlier and different perspective, see Pearson (1976), pp. 57–60.
49 Abu’l Fazl (2001), vol. II, pp. 249–50.

50 For a general picture of the província do Norte, see Ames (2008);

Antunes (2006). For the consideration of the província in the context of the
coeval territorial experiences of the two Iberian empires, see Subrahmanyam
(2007).
 51 The complex relationship between early modern states and ‘rogue’
groups has been studied with regard to the Ottoman and Chinese cases. See
Barkey (1996) and Robinson (2001), respectively. Regarding Mughal India,
see Guha (1999).
52 ‘Taboa do Reino Gozarate com a Enseada Cambaia’, in Cortesão and
Mota (1987), vol. IV, pl. 416 E. João Baptista Lavanha’s map of Gujarat (also
dated 1615 and published in Barros’s Década IV, in Cortesão and Mota
(1987), vol. IV, pl. 424 B) represents a Reino dos Colliis, north of Ahmedabad.
53 Gommans (2002), pp. 76–7; Guha (1999), ch. 3, who coined the
expression ‘forest-states’. On ‘hill polities’ and the ‘contrast between civilized
plains and primitive mountains’ in history, see Benton (2010), ch. 5, pp. 222ff.
54 On the chauth (chouto) and the Estado’s policy regarding its payment,
see Saldanha (2005), pp. 677–82, Pissurlencar (1939); Matos (2001), pp.
289–95.
55 In his reply to a letter from Nuno da Cunha, concerning a possible
Mughal–Portuguese collaboration towards the conquest of Gujarat in 1535,
Humayun states that he is willing to offer to the Estado the sea ports of the
sultanate and their respective rents. The Mughal emperor also invites the
Portuguese governor to take ‘the lands which are close to you’ (‘as terras que
esteverem perto de vos podereis tomar’), but notes that he himself will come
to conquer the distant ones (‘e não cureys das de longe, que tempo virá que
as tomarey’) (Castanheda [1979], bk. viii, chs. 99, 101 [vol. II, pp. 723–3,
736]).
56 Couto (1974), dec. IX, ch. xiii, pp. 82–4; English translation in Flores and
Saldanha (2003), p. 66.
57 Farman to the officials of the Empire, Lahore, [October] 1590, in Flores
and Saldanha (2003), pp. 75-6.
58 There are some coeval attempts to determine precise boundaries, the
Sino-Russian borderline as established by the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689)
being a case in point. See Perdue (2005), pp. 166–172.
59 Bocarro (1876), vol. II, ch. 87, p. 389. A few years later, knowing that an
old woman—a relative of the rulers of Ramnagar and Peth (Reis Chouteá e
Vrigi)—was unjustly held captive in Daman by the captain of the city, the
viceroy ordered her immediate release in May 1619, specifying that she should
be escorted by Portuguese officials ‘until her release in the limits of her lands’
(‘até a pôr livremente nos limites de sua terra’) (viceregal alvará [decree], Goa,
13 May 1619, in APO, fasc. 6, p. 1177).
 60 Castilho (1573), ff. 31v–2r.

61 Holy House of Mercy of Thana to King Philip IV, Thana, 9 January 1632,
AHU, Índia, box 16, doc. 16.
62 Saldanha (2001); Rodrigues (2013).

63 Teixeira (2010), pp. 259–65.

64 Thomaz (1994), pp. 207–43; Lobato (1985); Antunes (2002); Antunes
(2015); Miranda (2015).
65 Felner (1868), pp. 161–205; Matos (2000); Matos (2001); Ferrão (2001);
Matos (1999); Matos (1995). Bassein’s tombo did not arrive safely to Lisbon,
for Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque was asked in 1595 by Philip II to send
another copy (Teixeira [2010], pp. 266–7). The only surviving tombo of Bassein
dates from 1727–30 and was published by Teixeira and Pires (2007), but an
early survey of the lands and villages of Bassein prepared in c. 1570 by the
Jesuit Francisco Rodrigues pays considerable attention to the native farmers
and villagers. See Wicki (1959b).
66 Teixeira (2010), pp. 266–8.

67 We share this view of the tombos with Herzog (2015), pp. 247–8, who
elaborates on the production of similar books in the context of the early
modern Spanish–Portuguese border and goes on to note how these materials
were often dismissed by coeval jurists.
68 Matos (1999), pp. 53–71, 73–8.

69 Matos (1999), pp. 78–9.

70 Matos (2001), pp. 286–7.

71 Matos (2001), p. 286. An earlier use of this image—the Mughals wanting

to ‘eat’ some lands close to Daman under Portuguese control in c. 1580—was
employed by Monserrate. See Hosten (1912), pp. 210–11. For a enlightening
analysis of the Mughal management of a particular pargana—that of Adilabad,
in Khandesh—in the late seventeenth century, see Gordon (1994), ch. 6, pp.
122–50, esp. 127–35.
72 Eaton (1997), pp. 194–227.

73 Letter from Brito Pedroso, [1614], AHU, Índia, box. 3, doc. 149.
74 AHU, CU, cod. 435 (consultas da Índia, 1651), ff. 107r–8r.

75 For a stimulating analysis of the shifting ecology of an early modern

region exposed to external pressure, namely the Japanese expansion in Ainu
lands between the late sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries, see
Walker (2001).
76 Viceroy Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, [Goa], 1599, BNP,
Reservados, cod. 1976, ff. 56v, 58r–8v.
77 Matos (2000), p. 65. I thank Tamar Herzog for calling my attention to the
fact that bells likewise demarcated jurisdiction; in early modern Europe, the
jurisdiction of villages could be everywhere were the bells could be heard.
78 ‘…estarem os mogores a vista dos muros’ (Goa, 9 December 1638, in
ACE, vol. II, p. 241).
79 Matos (2001), pp. 299–300.

80 This was also true for the land grant holders (encomenderos) in the New
World, and obviously goes back to medieval Europe and the nobility’s
expected role in defence. For a detailed identification of the foreiros of Daman
and their expected duties in 1592, see the tables presented by Matos (2001),
pp. 325–473. Regarding Bassein, see Teixeira (2010), pp. 302–19. For a
possible comparison between Bassein and Daman c. 1610, see ‘Relação de
todos os que têm obrigação de cavalos nas terras de Damão e Baçaim, por
ordem do rei, mandada executar por Francisco Sousa Falcão’, n.pl. 25
September 1611, AHU, Índia, box 3, doc. 93.
81 Rodrigues (1995), p. 258; Mendiratta (2012), pp. 573–4.

82 This system was thoroughly studied by Mendiratta (2012), ch. 3.

Specifically on Bassein, see Teixeira (2010), pp. 124–54.
83 Mendiratta (2012), p. 273.

84 Noronha’s petition, analysed by the Overseas Council in Lisbon in 1648,

underlines his actions against the Mughals in Bassein (1636) and Daman
(1638) (Lisbon, 13 February 1648, AHU, Índia, box 34, doc. 9).
85 Matos (2001), p. 117.

86 Richard (2000), p. 247.

87 ‘…dous Retratos de chaul hũ de como estava antes do serquo e outro
depois delle posto’ (Luís Freire de Andrade to King Sebastian; Goa 30
November 1571, ANTT, CC, I–109–75, in Goertz [1985], pp. 286–7).
88 Rodrigues (1995).
89 For a study of the municipal councils in the Portuguese Empire, see
Boxer (1965). Regarding the holy houses of mercy of Daman, Bassein, and
Diu, see respectively Pinto (2000); Pinto (2003); Pinto (2007). On the
Portuguese holy houses of mercy in an overseas context, see Sá (1997).
90 Luz (1960). Also see their regulations (regimentos), dating back to 1565,
in Pissurlencar (1951).
91 Bocarro (1992), vol. II, pp. 69–76, 84–126, vol. III, pls. xv–xxvi.

92 On early modern frontier cities, see Gitlin, Berglund, and Arenson (2013).
93 Devaney (2015).

94 ‘Apontamentos que se derão a Sua Magestade sobre cousas tocantes

ao bem e conservação da fortaleza de Dio’, [1597], in APO, fasc. 3, pp. 680–1.
95 Matos (1999), p. 120.

96 ‘…na cidade, dos muros pera dentro, detraz da misquita grande nas
costas della’; Matos (1999), p. 100.
97 Malacca is a good case in point, for which see Pinto (2012).

98 Mendiratta (2012), pp. 515–18, quotes ‘Lembrança das cousas do Norte

pelo ouvidor-geral por Francisco Monteiro Leite’, 25 June 1602, BNP,
Reservados, cod. 11410, ff. 77r, 78v.
99 ‘In Portugal proper they were invited to become citizens of new border
towns/villages and were promised immunity’ (Tamar Herzog, personal
communication).
100 Fernandes (1987), pp. 117–18. On the Melo de Sampaio family and
Bassein, see Teixeira (2010), p. 313.
101 Teixeira (2010), p. 162.

102 A survey of the number of convents and religious men in Bassein

(including a list of rents and villages owned), Diu, and Daman was taken in
December 1621 and can be found in AHU, CU, Índia, box 10, docs 125, 145,
147. For the study of a conventual library of the província do Norte––that of
the Franciscan convent of Santo António de Taná, Bassein––see Buescu
(2001).
103 Luís Fróis, Goa, 16 November 1559, in Pissurlencar (1951), p. 376.

104 Mendiratta (2012), p. 607.

105 On New Spain, see Melvin (2012).

106 Eaton (1997), ch. 9, pp. 228ff.

 107 ‘Rol dos foreiros das hortas dos Cassabes de Bacaym e Agaçaim que
não podem pagar foro por ficarem destruídas dos mouros…’, Proceedings of
the Revenue Council, Goa, 6 May 1616, in Gune (1979), pp. 49–55.
108 Teixeira (2010), p. 184, quoting the ‘Relação da Cristandade do Norte
… ano de 1669’, ARSI, Goa, vol. 35, f. 68r.
109 Teixeira (2010).

110 Teixeira (2010), pp. 166–7.

111 ‘Lista de toda a gente assim gentios de diversas naçoinz como mouros
moradores por toda a iurisdição de toda a Fortaleza de Taná’, n.d.
(seventeenth century), AHU, Índia, box. 73, doc. 70.
112 Farman of Akbar addressed to the officials of Khambayat, 4 April 1597,
in Tirmizi (1989–95), vol. I, pp. 72–3 (also in Felix [1916], pp. 10–11, who
dates this document from 14 April 1598); farman of Jahangir addressed to the
mutasaddis of Gujarat et al., 2 October 1612, in Tirmizi (1989–95), vol. I, p. 88.
113 Viceroy Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III (Goa, December 1599),
BNP, Reservados, cod. 1976, ff. 184r–v.
114 Matos (2001), pp. 265–6.
115 Philip III to Viceroy Rui Lourenço de Távora, 12 November 1610, DRI,
tom. I, pp. 402–3. Take the example of Manuel Vaz Barreto, one of the
individuals found guilty of a mutiny in Colombo, Ceylon, and consequently
condemned in 1621 to a eight-year long exile (degredo) in Daman (Governor
Fernão de Albuquerque to Philip III, Goa, 20 February 1621, in DRI, tom. VII,
p. 186). On internal and overseas exile in early modern Portugal and its
empire, see Coates (2001).
116 Lisbon, 10 December 1691, AHU, Índia, box 65, doc. 119.
117 See Souza (2014), pp. 29–32, whose work is based on data from João
Delgado Figueira’s Repertorio geral (1561–1623). Also see ‘Reportorio. Uma
base de dados dos processos da Inquisição de Goa (1561–1623)’, prepared
by a team of Brazilian historians coordinated by Bruno Feitler: available at
http://www.i-m.co/reportorio/reportorio/home.html (accessed on 4 March
2016).
118 Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, Goa, 1599, BNP, Reservados,
cod. 1976, ff. 56r, 58r–v.
119 A number of these petitions from the 1640s have survived, inter alia, the
letters from the ‘Gujaratis of Diu’ to King John IV, Diu, 10 September 1642,
AHU, Índia, box 23, doc. 110; or the letter from the ‘people of Diu’ to King John
IV, Diu, 24 December 1644, AHU, Índia, box 28, doc. 63.
120 Petition, Goa, 25 August 1630, in APO, fasc. 6, pp. 1252–3; viceregal
decision (on the King’s behalf), Goa, 11 September 1630, in APO, fasc. 6, pp.
1251–2. A similar and contemporary case involving two other Banias of Diu,
the brothers-in-law Meghraj Parekh (Mega Pareca) and Khurshah (Curgia)
may be found in in APO, fasc. 6, pp. 1250–1.
121 ‘…que as heranças e sussessões de seus bens fossem governados e
julgados segundo as leis e ordenações deste Reino’; Lisbon, 13 February
1647, AHU, Índia, box 32, doc. 51; royal alvará, Lisbon, 18 June 1647, in APO,
fasc. 6, pp. 1267–73.
122 Matos (2001), pp. 282–3.
123 Herzog (2015), p. 261.

124 Crossley, Siu, and Sutton (2006), p. 19, for similar developments in
early modern China.
125 White (1991).

126 See, inter alia, the survey of the Northern fortresses prepared by the
chief engineer (engenheiro-mor) of the Estado da Índia upon viceregal order in
1633; AHU, Índia, box 16, doc. 85. The reports on the maintenance and
expansion of the fortresses sent from India to Portugal were often
accompanied by drawings, as in Chaul’s case, 1625–6; Philip IV to the
Revenue Council, Lisbon, 13 March 1626, AHU, Índia, box 14, doc. 66.
127 On Bassein, see Teixeira (2010), pp. 126–31; on Daman, see Matos
(2001), pp. 301–2n176.
128 Philip IV to Dom Francisco da Gama, Lisbon, 22 February 1622, in DRI,
tom. VIII, pp. 374–5.
129 Quoting Abbé Carré, Deloche (1968), p. 60, shows that Europeans in
the 1670s avoided travelling over land between Daman and Rajapur owing to
the poor road conditions.
130 Cortesão and Mota (1987), vol. IV, pl. 416 E. Likewise, the Lavanha
map of Gujarat (Abbé Carré, Deloche [1968], pl. 424 B) includes Chaul,
Bassein, and Daman but does not give prominence to the província as such.
131 Grandjean (2015), pp. 5–13.

132 On Mirza ‘Aziz Koka and his family, see Husain (1999), pp. 45–69. His
political path is traced in Ali (1985), A37, 75, 129, 146, 257, 293, 336, 450,
487, 819, 913 (Akbar period), J261, 271, 355, 435, 524, 664, 1266, 1334,
1392, 1400, 1446 (Jahangir period). The Mughal texts obviously pay great
attention to this figure: Abu’l Fazl (2001), vol. I, pp. 343–7; ‘Abdul Qadir
Badayuni (1986), vol. II, passim; Nizamuddin Ahmad (1992), vol. II, passim.
For an eighteenth-century Mughal biography of ‘Aziz Koka, see Shah Nawaz
Khan (1999), vol. I, pp. 319–34. Mirza ‘Aziz Koka was represented twice in
Akbar’s company by the Mughal painter Manohar (c. 1602–4). On these
images, see McInerney (1991), pp. 53–68, figs. 9–10.
133 On Mughal foster mothers and foster brothers, with specific reference to
Jiji Anaga and ‘Aziz Koka, see Faruqui (2012), pp. 73–4.
134 Jahangir (1999) often expresses strong critical views of Mirza ‘Aziz
Koka in his personal memoirs.
135 Xavier’s description is included in one of his letters to the Jesuit
Provincial of India, Lahore, 4 August 1607, in DUP, vol. III, pp. 102–3.
136 Faruqui (2012), p. 262; Husain (1999), pp. 64–8, 215–17.

137 Jahangir (1999), p. 63.

138 Petition of Mirza ‘Aziz Koka (following a letter by Akbar endorsed to him)
in Husain (1999), pp. 215–17 (citation on p. 217).
139 MacLean (2002).
140 April 1593, in Haidar (1998), pp. 72–8.

141 Philip II to Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque, Lisbon, 18 February 1595, in

APO, fasc. 3, pp. 475–6; the same to the same, Lisbon, 27 February 1595,
ibid., fasc. 3, p. 513.
142 Abu’l Fazl (1993), vol. III, pp. 979–82; ‘Abdul Qadir Badayuni (1986),
vol. II, pp. 400–1.
143 Silveira (1996), pp. 59–60.
144 Philip II to Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque (Lisbon), 1595, AHU, CU,
cod. 281, f. 296v; Philip II to Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque, Lisbon, 27
February 1595, in APO, fasc. 3, p. 513.
145 Apparently, ‘Aziz Koka expected Junagadh to be assigned to him—
following a successful conquest and a rich booty—but it was instead given to
Rai Singh. See Haidar (1998), p. 75.
146 The Mirat-i Sikandari confirms the scarcity of grain among imperial
troops; Sikandar Ibn Muhammad (1990), p. 326.
 147 Francisco Pais was accused of several misdeeds and consequently had
to step down from his position as proveyor of the Casa dos Contos of Goa. He
was eventually absolved and recovered his office in 1605. On Pais and the
Casa dos Contos of Goa, see Miranda (2009); Miranda (2012). Pardau was a
silver coin worth 360 réis.
148 Lemos (1862–3).
149 Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, [Goa], 1599, BNP, Reservados,
cod. 1976, ff. 56v–7r.
150 Jerónimo Xavier to Francisco Cabral, Lahore, 8 September 1596, in DI,
vol. XVIII, pp. 571–2. Even Jahangir, in his ‘necrological note’ on ‘Aziz Koka,
exalted the latter’s multifaceted intellectual profile, specifically underlining that
he was ‘without equal in recounting anecdotes’; Jahangir (1999), p. 431.
151 Alam and Subrahmanyam (2012), pp. 277, 291–2, 301–2, 305.

152 Koka’s quote in Husain (1999), p. 217.

 4
Gujarat
Borderland Experiments II

A NEW AGE: TRIFLES IN LIEU OF PILGRIMS

Travelling in the company of his wife Nur Jahan, the Mughal
emperor Jahangir arrived in Khambayat on 19 December 1617 and
glimpsed, in his words, the ‘salted sea’. Once on shore, Jahangir
went for a short boat ride off Khambayat, which he recounts in his
memoirs together with some thoughts on the history and commercial
importance of that port.1 Meanwhile, in Goa, the viceroy of the
Estado was noticeably concerned with the intentions behind this
potentially threatening visit and consequently made use of his local
informants to follow any developments closely. As with each and
every time a Mughal sovereign approached their areas of influence,
the Portuguese were watchful and tense. In this instance, the
viceroy’s suspicions were at least partly allayed by a report that
Empress Nur Jahan—born far from the sea, on a caravan travelling
from Tehran to India—had simply asked her husband to take her to
the seaside because she wished to see the ocean for the first time.2
In contrast to their strategy and behaviour of almost a half-century
earlier, the Portuguese did not send anyone to greet the Mughal
emperor in 1617. According to the Jesuit missionary Francesco
Corsi, Jahangir was, almost two years later, still ‘offended with the
Portuguese for not having paid him a visit in Gujarat’.3
On the surface, this episode appears to be a perfect replay of the
gestures performed by Akbar in Gujarat back in 1572, as discussed
in Chapter 1. However, since then, the local conditions had changed
considerably in Gujarat. Following the suppression of the rebellions
and the pacification of the political situation, it had become
decisively more Mughal. To a certain extent, the map of the region
prepared by Godinho de Erédia two years before Jahangir’s visit to
Gujarat—‘Map of the Kingdom of Gujarat with the Bay of Cambay’
(Taboa do Reino Gozarate com a Enseada Cambaia), 1615—could
have been drafted just as easily by a Mughal cartographer. Gujarat
is not depicted therein as an independent sultanate but rather as an
imperial province. As the title indicates, the map gives relevance to
maritime Gujarat and its port cities (enseada), but it simultaneously
emphasizes the continental dimension of the reino. It is a
considerably land-oriented rendering that seems to aim primarily at
charting a territory with a clear political configuration and orientation:
to the north, and in addition to a reference to Lahore—a city that had
been the Mughal imperial capital more than once prior to 1615—the
reference point of Erédia’s map is DELI, definitely transmitting its
Mughalness.4
Moreover, the Portuguese were no longer the only Europeans
with a marked presence in the ports of this imperial province. By the
late 1610s the chief maritime settlements of Gujarat were
frequented by more (and more diverse) European visitors than was
the case in the early 1570s. Both the EIC and the VOC gained
ground against the Estado da Índia in the early seventeenth century.
Had he wished to travel to Jiddah towards the end of his life, ‘Aziz
Koka would not necessarily turn to Diu and the Portuguese as he
had in 1593; ‘Aziz could have simply sailed from Surat, backed by
either the English or the Dutch. The English, who had kept an eye
on Mughal India since the 1580s, established a factory in Surat in
1612–13 and dispatched an ambassador (the famed Sir Thomas
Roe) to Jahangir’s court in 1615.5 The Dutch also managed to open
a trading post in the same port as early as 1618, a factory that soon
became the nodal point of a VOC network comprising other Gujarati
cities (Khambayat, Broach, and Baroda), the provincial capital of
Ahmedabad, and two major political–economic centres of the
Mughal empire—Agra and Burhanpur. The key Dutch actor of this
initial period is Francisco Pelsaert, who not only served as factor in
Surat and successively in Agra but also authored a detailed report
on Mughal India.6 Some Frenchmen, such as Augustin Beaulieu,
mastermind of a plan in 1624 to establish trade relations with the
Mughals, attempted to follow in the footsteps of the English and the
Dutch, but with little success.7 All the same, Beaulieu also embodies
the figure of the European private merchant-adventurer trying his
luck in Mughal India, and he certainly was not alone. In this period, a
multitude of independent Western travellers entered the empire via
the port towns of Gujarat: for example, the Englishman Thomas
Coryat, the German Henrich von Poser, the Frenchman Augustin de
Hiriart, and the Flemish Jacques de Coutre. Mughal Gujarat had
thus become a ‘fashionable spot’ for different groups of Europeans,
who engaged in a sort of ‘Great Game’ out of time and place.
The landscape—commercial, political, social, and even spatial—
of maritime Gujarat somewhat changed, as did the challenges the
Portuguese were faced with. The buildings of the European
companies’ factories in Surat, and the life within, became an integral
part of the city.8 Ironically enough, those (the Portuguese) who had
sought to conquer Surat since the 1560s and had controlled Diu
since the 1530s were now the only Europeans with major interests
in the western Indian Ocean that had not yet set foot in the main
port of Gujarat. Several Portuguese merchants and informers made
frequent visits to the city, but the Estado had no institutional
presence by way of a feitoria until later. The EIC and VOC
compounds figure prominently in contemporary Western drawings,
and Surat gained central importance in European minds as far as
the Mughal imperial province is concerned. In juxtaposition to
Eredia’s map of 1615, which plainly depicts Gujarat as a province,
Albernaz’s 1630 map unmistakably conveys the importance Surat
had gained by the detail and attention with which the city is
represented. Indeed the province as a whole is almost eclipsed in
the map by the dominant representation of its main city; the
cartographer zooms in on the harbour—Descripção do poso e barra
de Surrate—marking the ‘tents of the English’ (tendas dos Ingrezes)
and the ‘tents of the Dutch’ (tendas dos Olandezes).9
European information about the Mughals acquired a strong
economic tone, as the predominantly commercial correspondence of
the VOC and the EIC competed more and more with the politically
oriented reports of the Estado and the religious letters of the Society
of Jesus. Trade, commodities, negotiations, costs, and prices
gradually dominated the European vocabulary when speaking of
Mughal India as seen from the ‘doorway’ of Gujarat. This trend goes
hand in hand with the growing imperial involvement in maritime
trade that took advantage of what was a particularly dynamic and
geographically gifted suba. To be sure, the ports of Gujarat acquired
in time a primarily commercial meaning also in the minds of the
Mughals. By the time Jahangir visited Khambayat in 1617, Akbar’s
concern with pilgrims and the pilgrimage to the holy cities of Islam
subsequent to 1576 belonged to a distant past. Imperial discussions
regarding Gujarat no longer seemed to revolve around the hajj as
much as they had before. Pilgrims, or at least the attention given to
them, had been replaced by commodities in the extant sources,
even if both pilgrims and commodities continued to travel together
aboard the exact same ships.
Jahangir, members of the royal family, and the most prominent
Mughal mansabdars, all nurtured strong interests in maritime trade
between Gujarat and the Red Sea. The English sources often
provide information on the identity of merchants, agents, and
crewmen, as well as ships, freights, and commodities.10 Anecdotes
such as that which involved Shahjahan and his wazir did not escape
the Europeans’ attention either; the Mughal Emperor asked the VOC
in 1653 not to attack his own ships heading to Aceh and, according
to the Dutch, Sa‘dullah Khan was puzzled to see ‘a King that had
always been so haughty’ concerned with a minor thing such as the
mere concession of a simple safe conduct.11 This wealth of Western
records regarding the Mughals and the sea also includes
Portuguese documents. A small, yet rich set of archival sources
dated 1618–22 minutely documents the attribution of cartazes by
the Estado to several of Mughal vessels travelling to the Red Sea
ports that were the property of Jahangir, Khurram, and the
emperor’s mother, Maryam-uz-Zamani.12 The names of a number of
the ships involved were documented—Jahangiri, Shahi, Mubarak
Shahi, and Gunjawar—as was a rough idea of the size of their crew
(between 70 and 100 men) and military capability (10–20 artillery
pieces). Though less frequently, information regarding the name of
the ships’ captains (mostly Iranians) and the ports of departure
(Surat and Gogha) was noted down. We equally know the identity of
those who, from a distance, requested the Portuguese safe
conducts: this went from the influential Asaf Khan (Jahangir’s
brother-in-law) to Prince Khurram as well as the mutasaddi of Surat
and other port officials of Gujarat. Additionally, these documents
reveal the names of the Hindu Banias who actually travelled to Goa
from Gujarat to negotiate the cartazes; Kishandas mediated on
behalf of Prince Khurram with the Portuguese viceroy in 1618, while
Bhimji Parekh and Kanhoji Parekh represented the mutasaddi of
Surat on two successive occasions (1619, 1622) in the capital of the
Estado da Índia.13
Overall, the European sources match the picture provided by the
available Persian documentation on the matter. A collection of
documents related to Surat and compiled in the late 1640s by an
anonymous Mughal official reveals that while he was still a prince,
Khurram owned a ship built in Surat before 1617 called Shahi (a
vessel equally mentioned by the Portuguese and the English) that
conducted business in the Red Sea ports.14 Shahi became an
imperial vessel after Khurram’s accession to power as Emperor
Shahjahan in 1628, after which it was known to have also traded
with the ports of sultanates such as Bijapur and Aceh. Vessels such
as the Gunjawar (likewise mentioned in the Estado’s records) and
the Sahebi have similar stories.15 It is possible to conclude using
documents pertaining to the same collection as well as other
Persian materials that contrary to what Dutch and English
testimonies recurrently imply, the Mughal officials of Gujarat
themselves fostered European commercial activities given the
different ports of the province were often in open competition with
each other.16 There was of course no advantage or intention
whatsoever to give preference or grant exclusivity to some
Europeans—be they English, Portuguese, or Dutch—and dismiss
others, despite the Estado’s unrealistic push for monopoly.
At this point, one ought to revisit the vexing question of the
relationship between merchants and rulers in Gujarat, which was
touched upon in the previous chapter. Of particular relevance to this
matter is the profile of the Mughal officials of the suba, especially of
those in charge of maritime and commercial affairs. The work of
Farhat Hasan, and other historians, provides us with an accurate
picture of the office of the mutasaddi as well as of the identity of
those serving in that position between the late sixteenth and the
early eighteenth centuries in the major maritime settlements of
Gujarat. At times, the governors of Surat also acted as governors of
the subsidiary port of Khambayat. When this was not the case,
‘there was acute competition between them to attract merchants and
a larger share of revenues from overseas trade’. Hasan further
notes that the governors of Surat, being merchants themselves,
constituted the central node of impressive local webs of commercial
strength and political influence, networks that were comprised of a
large caste of characters, ranging from the shahbandar, noble family
members, and affluent local merchants as well as members of the
Hindu service gentry.17 Consequently, the author argues, ‘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’. Moreover,
these positions were heavily subject to office-farming until at least
1640, which further eroded the distinctions between state office-
holding and private interests.18
While we do not entirely subscribe to this view, it is obvious that
the classic and somewhat rigid distinction between merchants and
rulers, which has shaped much of the modern scholarly literature
about early modern India and the Indian Ocean, is contradicted by
the trajectories of many Mughal port officials, the careers of which
may in part be reconstructed by combining European and Indo-
Persian sources. Far from suggesting the existence of a clear-cut
opposition between land and sea, their profiles seem instead to fit
best into a model in which continental politics and maritime trade are
intertwined.19 As we shall see in the next section of the chapter, an
intriguing blend of power rituals and mercantile practices existed,
and Mughal officers easily switched from political language to
commercial talk depending on who they were addressing and what
they were speaking about. This rich combination comprised an
additional skill: the ability to select and acquire—mostly in the port
towns of Gujarat and mostly from the Europeans—exquisite and
‘exotic’ goods for the emperor.
In Jahangir’s memoirs, a good many of the brief references made
of the Europeans are specifically related to strange and ‘curious’
objects, animals, and fruits they used to bring to Mughal India. The
emperor distinctly mentions pineapples that reached him via the
‘Frank’s ports’ as well as the European rarities brought to him from
Gujarat by several Mughal nobles, particularly Muqarrab Khan, to
whom we will return later.20 When the Jesuits Manuel Pinheiro and
José de Castro returned to the Mughal court in 1610, Jahangir
ordered all the goods transported in their caravan to be shown to
him—he ‘took an interest in the curious objects more than in the rich
ones, which were either immediately offered to him by their owners
or acquired for a fair price’.21 In another recorded instance, the
Samarqandi poet Mutribi, when recounting his third meeting with the
Mughal ruler in 1627, makes reference to the tribute presented by
‘Frankish merchants’ and the emperor’s enthusiastic reaction to the
pencils brought by them.22
The Portuguese perception of such imperial taste for the ‘exotic’
is coloured by prejudice. Jahangir is often portrayed as a wealthy
and spoiled adult child who had the power to take whatever object
he desired, from the most valuable items to mere trinkets.
Missionary António de Andrade remarked from Agra in 1623 that ‘all
the rich and curious objects are in this king’s hands, and it is as if
the entirety of Europe is producing these for him’.23 Roughly a
decade earlier, Viceroy Rui Lourenço de Távora was harsh on
Jahangir in his comment to his son-in-law in Lisbon that ‘whoever
has trifles (bugiarias) … and wants to send them here will make
good profit, should the Mogor still be as excited about them as he is
now, because that is what he presently loves’.24 Obviously, neither
the missionary nor the viceroy cared to look at the heart of the
matter. They both failed to take into consideration that Jahangir was
a learned collector, patron, and naturalist, which explains, in part, his
desire to possess everything.25 Such aspiration might also be
related to Jahangir’s ambition for universality; indeed a collection of
rare and strange objects could communicate Jahangir’s privileged
relationship with distant places located beyond his realm. This
concern was already apparent when still as young Prince Salim, the
future emperor started to nurture a taste for miniature albums.26
Finally, Távora’s and other like comments did not take into
consideration the redistributive function of the Mughal court, or of
any court for that matter. They ignored or were ignorant of what
were fundamental social and political practices of the court, namely
the typical service-reward mechanisms and the entrenched and
well-developed gift-giving economy.27 A contemporary Jesuit
treatise on Jahangir’s court and household (1610–11) in some way
‘corrects’ this lacuna:
Since this King is so curious and has such an appetite for trinkets,
objects and jewels, everybody caters to his likes.
It is customary that every person, regardless of quality and station,
must first give a gift to the King before speaking with him. The gift could
be something of great worth or little, each according to his means.
When one arrives to see the face of the King he should know that the
best sign of love and recognition he could show his King is to give him
something. For this reason, and to win his favour, his captains seek to
bring dinars, trinkets and precious objects to offer him.28

Putting aside the meaning and function of these objects (trifles

included) once they had reached the imperial court, what matters
most within the context of the present chapter—focused as it is on
Gujarat and its Mughal–Portuguese borderland—are the ways in
which goods in transit were able to regularly move across the
borders and shape relations between individuals and communities
from both sides of the ‘fence’, including moments of acute tension or
even conflict. Such a phenomenon clearly inscribes itself in what are
currently en vogue historical research fields, for example, material
culture, consumption studies, new diplomatic history, and visual
culture, all of which are interested in studying things in motion and
their multiple ‘careers’. However, the mobility of early modern
objects and their potentially transcultural character have, to date,
been overlooked in frontier and borderland studies. The Mughal–
Portuguese frontier zones may be able to offer some food for
thought on this matter.
The remainder of this chapter focuses primarily on the trajectories
and challenges of two Mughal mansabdars who held key positions
on the Mughal Empire’s ‘waterfront’ during the first half of the
seventeenth century, Muqarrab Khan and Mir Musa. Each was faced
with a major conflict with the Portuguese in 1613–15 and 1630
respectively, incidents that were to shape the liquid border of Gujarat
during their service as mutasaddis of Surat.29 Despite the troubled
times, these two men found themselves in a privileged position of
being able to cross the borders by resorting to a number of talents
and tools, objects included.

MUTASADDIS, FIRANGIS, AND LIQUID BORDER

WARS
Even if they had some skill dealing with the Portuguese, individuals
such as Mirza ‘Aziz Koka or his uncle Qutbuddin Khan—the roles of
which were recounted in the previous chapter—would certainly be
out of place in Gujarat of the 1610s. Religion and a strong
ideological stance seem to have lain at the core of their concerns
while serving in Gujarat in the last three decades of the sixteenth
century. But the times had changed; in order to meet the new
commercial and political challenges posed by a mounting foreign
presence on the province’s shores, it was important to ‘suspend’
Islamic orthodoxy and make more shrewd choices regarding the
nomination of port officials. Unlike his father, Akbar, Jahangir did not
privilege members of the Afghan nobility when assigning relevant
positions in Gujarat. Instead, he defined a different profile, and for
the most part selected ‘cosmopolitan’ Indian Muslims and Iranians
for these roles.
Muqarrab Khan and Mir Musa embody these new times and the
new tenor of the Mughal–European interactions in Gujarat. In
exploring their roles in this period, particular attention will be placed
on the analysis of the frontier relations between the Mughal Empire
and the Estado da Índia. Both men fostered long-term connections
with maritime Gujarat by serving as mutasaddis of Surat between
the 1610s and mid-century. The one and the other were what can be
defined as ‘imperial mavericks’; these Mughal officers knew how to
juggle the many interests at stake (including their own) in ports such
as Surat and Khambayat during those years. Muqarrab Khan and
Mir Musa were at the same time committed and yet fairly free
‘soldiers’ of the new ‘army’ with which the Mughals sought to deal
with the Firangis and tackle the European rush to Gujarat. To a large
extent, Jahangir and Shahjahan saw Goa through their eyes.
This long section concludes with a reflection on the complex
figure of the mutasaddi and the role this played in the first half of the
seventeenth century; the mutasaddi was someone who could be at
once merchant and political entrepreneur, diplomat and collector of
rarities, ‘Christian’ and Muslim, patron of churches and mosques.

Muqarrab Khan and the ‘Disaster of Surat’ (1613–

15)
One of the figures who is present both in Mughal and European
sources from this period is a certain Shaikh Hasan, who was later
granted the title of Muqarrab Khan (‘royal confidant’) by Jahangir.30
Born in the Kairana province of Delhi, Muqarrab Khan was the son
of a distinguished doctor and surgeon and when he was of age
followed in his father’s footsteps; in 1596, the two worked in tandem
to save Akbar’s life when he was struck by a deer at his court in
Lahore.31
Following this episode, Muqarrab Khan’s notable political career
became increasingly closely associated with Jahangir, and the new
emperor’s strategy of promoting the Shaikhzadas within the imperial
elite, as the attribution of the extremely high rank or mansab of
5,000 zat/5,000 suwar given to him in 1615–16 seems to indicate.32
Like many Mughal nobles, Muqarrab Khan had several enemies in
the imperial court.33 But various sources show he managed to
maintain his status as a member of Jahangir’s inner circle for a long
period of time;34 tellingly, his advice was taken into consideration
when the emperor deliberated executing Mirza ‘Aziz Koka.35 It is no
coincidence that a number of Mughal miniatures—painted by
important artists such as ‘Abid, Balchand and Abu’l Hasan—depict
Muqarrab Khan at Jahangir’s side at some of the more significant
moments of the latter’s reign.36
Numerous European observers understood the dynamics of this
close relationship. Jesuit missionaries and Portuguese officers alike
regularly underscored the fact that Muqarrab Khan was one of the
most prominent among the emperor’s favourites (valido, privado).37
The EIC servants placed in Gujarat were of the same opinion:
Thomas Aldworth wrote in 1613 that Muqarrab Khan was ‘a great
man with the King and a politic [that is, ingenious]’ individual.38 Two
years later, Thomas Elkington noted that ‘the present Governor is so
favored, and the King ruled by hym, that whatsoever good is to be
exspected from the courte must bee by meanes of this man hear,
the King referring all concernynge us to hym and will not do any
thinge in our behaulfes but what from hym he shall bee advised’.39
Muqarrab Khan served in a number of different capacities in
various imperial provinces, but the positions he occupied in Gujarat
for at least fifteen years (1608–23) were certainly among the most
relevant.40 Consequently, during that period, he was a key figure
where Mughal–European interactions were concerned. Shah Nawaz
Khan notes that the emperor may have chosen him to occupy such
positions owing to his substantial knowledge of the jewel trade and
because the Gujarati ports were a ‘mine of rarities and a centre of
wealth’.41 It is well known that Muqarrab Khan, in fact, continuously
sent rarities to the imperial court, ranging from European paintings
and ‘Frankish’ hats to bejewelled items and exotic animals.42 Shah
Nawaz Khan also goes on to state, however, that once he became
subadar of Gujarat, the emperor’s favourite proved unable to rule
the province effectively or to control the army, prompting Jahangir to
replace him in 1617 with his own son, Prince Khurram.43 It is thus
possible that Muqarrab Khan, who had proved to be quite efficient
and effective when dealing with the affairs of individual maritime
settlements, was not up to the challenge of ruling over the entire
province of Gujarat.44 This possible explanation is reinforced by a
nishan issued in 1618 by Prince Khurram to the Portuguese, in
which the future Mughal emperor states that his father had chosen
him as subadar with the explicit charge to improve the economic
and social situation of the province.45
Shortcomings notwithstanding, there is little doubt that Muqarrab
Khan was one of the first Mughal nobles appointed to the province
of Gujarat to fine-tune and master the empire’s relationship with the
Europeans. One sign of his ability to manipulate the rivalries
between the various firangi groups in the province is that no one
community—Portuguese, English, or Dutch—was ever fully satisfied
with his behaviour.46 More importantly, Muqarrab Khan understood
how to manoeuvre the Europeans to meet the needs of the empire
and the desires of the emperor, without, however, losing sight of his
own material interests and personal agenda. Like many other
members of the Mughal elite, the governor of Surat owned vessels
and engaged in private trade in maritime Asia and did not hesitate to
take advantage of strategic partnerships with people such as the
affluent Khwaja Nizam.47 Moreover, Muqarrab Khan’s performance
as a political and economic entrepreneur certainly benefited from a
well-established family network; he could count on his brother,
Sheikh Abdur Rahim, who was also based in Surat, as well as his
son-in-law, who was described by his contemporary Nicholas
Downton as ‘a very ingenious young man’.48
Muqarrab Khan’s relationship with the Estado da Índia was
shaped by two major events that took place during his extended
stay in Gujarat. The first of these occurred in 1611 when, in
adherence to a practice established by Akbar in the 1580s, the
‘royal confidant’ was sent as Jahangir’s envoy (hajib) to Goa in the
company of the Jesuit priest Manuel Pinheiro. The existence and
frequency of such embassies implied that there was considerable
movement of people and goods between Mughal Gujarat and
Portuguese Goa; furthermore, it is known that previous Mughal
ambassadors, who, like Muqarrab Khan, frequently hailed from
Gujarati ports, were typically seen by the Portuguese to be nothing
more than merchants and spies. The most well-known figure is that
of Tahir Muhammad, who visited Goa in 1579–80 and significantly
was the son of Imaduddin Hasan, the incumbent mutasaddi of
Khambayat at that time. A learned informant and not a mere trader,
Tahir Muhammad penned the Rauzat ut-Tahhirin (‘The Immaculate
Garden’) that contained ‘A brief description of the Kingdom of
Portugal which is under the rule of the Emperor of Firang’.49
In the capital of the Estado, Muqarrab Khan seems to have made
a stronger impression still. An excerpt from an anonymous
unpublished Jesuit chronicle provides us with a rather detailed
account of the events surrounding his visit to Goa in 1611.50
According to this text, Muqarrab Khan travelled by sea from
Khambayat to Goa accompanied by 300 people and was received
by the Portuguese Viceroy Rui Lourenço de Távora (g. 1609–12) in
accordance with all diplomatic conventions. In addition to watching
and performing the usual rituals and gestures common to these
occasions (formal audiences, dinners, and public festivals),
Muqarrab Khan exchanged gifts, discussed commercial matters with
his Portuguese counterpart, and, as expected, spent some time
acquiring expensive rarities on Jahangir’s behalf.51 He bought
several ‘trinkets and expensive pieces’ (peças coriozas e de preço)
and yet failed to secure an exquisite piece of furniture costing more
than 30,000 cruzados—a crystal and blackwood fall-front cabinet
(escritório) and the property of one Fernão—the emperor later
criticized him for having left behind such a precious object. Among
the objects brought from Goa to the Mughal court was a turkey,
which was received with great excitement by Jahangir; not only did
the emperor describe the animal in his memoirs, but he also ordered
the celebrated painter Mansur to depict it.52 Indeed another Mughal
miniature painted by Bulaqi c. 1625 shows Muqarrab Khan
presenting to the emperor this and other exotic animals he brought
back from Goa.53
The most intriguing section in this chronicle, however, is that
which narrates the alleged conversion of Muqarrab Khan to
Christianity in Goa by Father Nicolau Pimenta, the Jesuit Visitor.
According to the text, the conversion was kept secret to avoid
uprisings among the Muslims, and the Portuguese viceroy was thus
unable to take advantage of what would from then on be likely
considered a victory across the Catholic world. True, Goa was not
Rome, but a century earlier Pope Leo X (d. 1521) managed to
transform the public baptism of al-Hasan al-Wazzan, or Leo
Africanus, into the triumph of Christendom over ‘the Turk’.54 The
Portuguese may have aspired to a somewhat similar triumph,
considering that three of Jahangir’s nephews had been recently
baptized at the Mughal court with the emperor’s permission, and
high hopes reigned among the Jesuit missionaries concerning
Jahangir’s possible conversion.
Muqarrab Khan apparently never wrote about this religious
experience of his. This decision to convert, if he indeed converted, is
one that can today be interpreted in various ways that range from an
Islamic strategy of dissimulation (taqiyya) to a personal expression
of spiritual curiosity.55 For someone as familiar as Muqarrab Khan
was with the eclectic approach to the world of religion exhibited by
emperors such as Akbar and Jahangir, the latter hypothesis also
stands as a strong possibility. In the end, a fundamental and
inevitable misunderstanding seems to have occurred: the
Portuguese envisaged Muqarrab’s conversion as full and definitive,
while we know today that the approach towards and eventual
conversion to Christianity in different cultural areas of the premodern
world was often a complex process of appropriating the new
religion. Generations of historians have heretofore believed in the
existence of straightforward divides between religions and cultures
in this period and have, therefore, been puzzled with the apparently
contradictory and incoherent signs that accompanied many of these
conversions; as a result they often interpreted them the way early
modern European Catholics wanted them to be: incomplete,
superficial.56
Be that as it may, the Portuguese were truly excited by the
prospect of this ‘conversion’. The conversion was facilitated by
Muqarrab Khan’s closeness to Manuel Pinheiro and was preceded
by a number of hints as to his intentions, including his devotion to
Christian imagery and the baptism of his adopted son in 1608.57 As
it were, the metamorphosis of Muqarrab Khan into Dom João de
Távora—he adopted the family name of his local host, Rui Lourenço
de Távora—did not take long to disappoint the Portuguese: as early
as December 1611, the Viceroy of Goa noted bitterly that this
‘crooked muslim’ (mouro velhaco) had already returned to his
previous religion and had failed to meet his new spiritual and
temporal commitments.58
The story of Muqarrab Khan’s relationship with the Portuguese
does not end here, however. A second face-to-face meeting with the
Firangis of Goa occurred during an outbreak of open hostilities
between the Mughal Empire and the Estado da Índia. Worried about
the growing threat posed by other European rivals in the region, as
well as with the number of ships circulating between the Red Sea
and Gujarat without a cartaz, a Portuguese captain captured a large
and rich ship off Surat in August 1613.59 This act proved to be
controversial even in Goa and Lisbon and sparked a violent reaction
by Jahangir; the incident provoked a major crisis between the
Mughals and the Portuguese that took two years to be resolved.
This was because this nau de Meca (that is, a ship returning from
Jiddah) laden with goods and carrying hundreds of people who had
been escorted to Goa was none other than the Rahimi, property of
Jahangir’s mother, Maryam-uz-Zamani.60
In acting as the emperor’s mediator, Muqarrab Khan took the lead
in the negotiations; he eventually signed an agreement with the
Estado da Índia in June 1615.61 A Portuguese document dated
February that year describes the difficult negotiations carried out
between the Mughal envoy and his counterpart, chancellor of the
Estado, Gonçalo Pinto da Fonseca, in Surat. In the main surviving
account of these negotiations, Muqarrab Khan is portrayed as a
skilled powerbroker without a trace of a merchant’s demeanour. He
is described as having fashioned himself almost as a ruler by
cultivating distance from his Portuguese petitioners and engaging in
rituals full of symbolic meaning. For instance, upon Pinto da
Fonseca’s arrival to Surat, Muqarrab Khan at first refused to allow
him into the city, subjecting the chancellor and those accompanying
him to an endless and humiliating wait in a tent. Subsequently, he
adopted challenging gestures in peak moments of a rather difficult
negotiation process, at one point sending two empty baskets to the
Portuguese and ordering the viceroy of Goa to fill them with ‘some
wine from Portugal, olives, and capers’.62
One of the issues with the interpretation of this series of tense
interactions, however, is that the account thus far used is drawn
from a manuscript pamphlet that was written against Viceroy Dom
Jerónimo de Azevedo (g. 1612–17); this took the form of a fictitious
letter sent from Surat by an anonymous author (‘an official of the
secretary’) to his brother. Given this context, one must ask whether
the meeting between Gonçalo Pinto da Fonseca and Muqarrab
Khan was indeed tense or not. The chronicler António Bocarro gives
a totally different version of the events. He writes that Muqarrab
Khan had excused his initial failure to speak with Pinto da Fonseca
as the result of serious heath problems suffered by his wife following
a difficult childbirth. Reminding the Portuguese of his established
reputation as doctor and surgeon, he asserted that had he not
intervened she would certainly have died. Bocarro then goes on to
note that Muqarrab Khan was eager to reconcile himself with the
chancellor of the Estado, and with the help of the Jesuits he sent
Pinto da Fonseca some gifts and even wrote him friendly letters
carrying the sign of the Cross and the name of Jesus. With regards
to the question of Muqarrab Khan’s religious identity, Bocarro
interestingly classified the Mughal noble not as a false convert but
rather as ‘an imperfect Christian’ since he lacked ‘that perfection of
faith that makes one despise all goods, honours and riches of the
world, and even one’s own life’.63
Muqarrab Khan may well have been an ‘imperfect Christian’, but
he certainly was the perfect dissimulator, who cleverly combined
diplomacy and war. During his negotiations with the Estado, he
made secret preparations to attack Portuguese Daman, for which he
tried to gain the support of both the EIC and the VOC.64 In fact, in
their own report on the outcome of these negotiations, the English
explicitly stated that Muqarrab Khan had received instructions from
Jahangir not to make peace with the Portuguese.65 Nevertheless,
the conflict in Gujarat between the Mughal Empire and the Estado
da Índia eventually came to a peaceful end in 1615, and in
subsequent years there was no sign of any lingering Portuguese
acrimony towards Muqarrab Khan. What is more, a positive memory
of his Christian identity seems to have survived in Goa longer than
might have been predicted. The Jesuit annual letter of 1621 states
that while serving as subadar of Bihar Muqarrab Khan had openly
favoured the missionaries in Patna. In their account of his activities,
the Jesuits portrayed the governor of the province as a sort of
‘hidden Christian’, unable to ‘declare himself Christian without
risking his life’,66 but still finding room to patronize a church and
encourage conversions. Furthermore, he held sufficient authority to
convene theological debates between Catholic priests and the
ulema in his provincial court, in some ways replicating the tolerant
religious policies and debating practices that had been pursued in
earlier decades by Emperor Akbar.
Two years later, in 1623, Muqarrab Khan was made subadar of
Delhi; here, his connection to Christianity grew even stronger in the
eyes of the missionaries. The Jesuit correspondence from that year
reported:
The nawab (nababo) Dom João de Távora intends to build a church in
his hometown and he is now a declared Christian. He very much
favours the padres and takes every possible occasion to mention them
to the Mogor. He wants to build a royal hospital in Agra, following the
same model of the Royal Hospital of Goa, which he saw.67

Being a doctor, the Royal Military Hospital in Goa had made a

strong impression on him back in 1611.68

Mir Musa and the Capture of the ‘Two Moorish

Ships’ (1630)
A second equally relevant political crisis between the Estado da
Índia and the Mughal Empire occurred during the reign of Emperor
Shahjahan, more specifically during the 1630s. This case revolves
around Mir Musa Mu‘izzul Mulk, who first appears in contemporary
Portuguese and other European sources in the aftermath of this
other major dispute.69 Much like his predecessor Muqarrab Khan,
Mir Musa became the Mughals’ privileged interlocutor with Goa
while serving as mutasaddi of Surat during a crisis caused in later
March 1630 by the Portuguese capture of two ships—the
Muhammadi and the Ja‘fari, one of which belonged to Shahjahan
himself—just off the main port that lay under his jurisdiction.70 As
with the ‘disaster of Surat’ of 1613, the seizure of the ‘two Moorish
ships’ (duas naus mouriscas) in 1630 was contentious among the
Portuguese as well. And again the motives of the Estado remained
essentially similar to those that had precipitated the crisis of almost
two decades earlier: Mughal ships continued to navigate without a
cartaz, while Dutch and English maritime trade in Gujarat was
granted imperial protection.71
In the early phase of the crisis, Mir Musa was instructed by the
emperor to retaliate by imprisoning all of the Portuguese living in
Surat, including three Jesuit missionaries, as well as seize all of
their property. There were important names among the captives,
including Father António de Andrade, Provincial of the Society of
Jesus, and Manuel Velho, a Portuguese expert on Mughal matters
that the viceroy count of Linhares (g. 1629–35) had sent to Surat as
his negotiator. To this act, Linhares responded in kind, arresting all
the Gujarati merchants residing in Goa and confiscating their
assets.72 With this escalation, Shahjahan pondered briefly an
outright attack on Daman and Diu. As the English Presidency of
Surat observed in April 1630: ‘How the King will resent these
affronts, one of the juncks being his owne wee daily expect. In all
appearance a great breach is like to insue.’73
This confrontation between the Mughals and the Portuguese was
short, yet intense. It was resolved in an agreement signed between
the parties on 13 September 1630, according to which Mir Musa
agreed to restrict Dutch and English activities in the ports under his
authority but obviously left the decision as to their ultimate expulsion
to Shahjahan.74 As with the treaty of 1615, only the Portuguese text
has survived, and it is quite possible that its content does not match
the Mughal version of the agreement, if it ever existed.75 To further
complicate matters, the viceroy of Goa demanded the accord to be
ratified by the emperor, but the only additional document received by
Linhares was a copy of a farman dated July 1631. This document,
the contents of which are known today from the Portuguese
translation found in the viceroy’s diary, establishes free circulation
and trade between the imperial ports and the maritime settlements
controlled by the Estado da Índia. However, there is not a single
word on the expected prohibitions to the commercial operations of
either the Dutch or the English. Furthermore, the farman itself posed
some difficulty from the Portuguese viewpoint since, as Linhares
rightly noted, it was directed towards the Mughal officials and not the
viceroy of Goa.76
As with seismic events, aftershocks to the events of March 1630
occurred in the months that followed. On 19 September, the
Portuguese took another nau de Meca off Surat, but this time the
viceroy of Goa was quick to prevent an escalation, and a new treaty
with the Mughals was signed in Bulsar two months later.77 Mir Musa
acted as the Mughal representative vis-à-vis the Estado da Índia
during this entire crisis (March–November 1630) and consequently
his name is frequently included in the Portuguese records of the
period. However, he was mentioned in other European sources well
before that. According to the EIC officials, Mir Musa was jagirdar of
Khambayat as early as 1623.78 And if Jacques de Coutre’s
testimony is to be accepted as true, Mir Musa had already visited
Goa as Jahangir’s envoy in the late 1610s, although we lack
information about this mission. At any rate, Mir Musa was said to
have acquired an impressive quantity of jewels and pearls during his
visit to Goa, which he bought (apparently without ever paying) from
the German entrepreneur Ferdinand Cron as well as from the
Flemish Coutre brothers. Jacques de Coutre, one of his ‘victims’, fills
four chapters of his book (Vida de Jacques de Coutre) narrating how
he followed Mir Musa from Goa to Bijapur and finally to Agra. The
Flemish merchant-adventurer states that Mir Musa was already at
this early date a protégé of Prince Khurram, the future Emperor
Shahjahan, and takes every opportunity to reiterate the close
connection between the two. Coutre would eventually return to Goa,
unsuccessful in his endeavour to recover his money; suffice it to say,
his portrait of Mir Mosa Moluco is anything but flattering.79
Mir Musa’s reputation among the English was equally negative. In
1630 they considered him to be ‘inclined more to the Portugall then
to us, as wee gather by some passages betweene them’. They go
on to note: ‘Certain we are hee is more their friend then ours, yet
firm to none, being a most falsehearted dissembling fellow as lives
in India.’80 Yet the Surat Presidency, impressed by the warm
reception given to Mir Musa by the population of Surat upon his
return as the newly appointed mutasaddi almost a decade later, was
pleased to foster a good relationship with its local interlocutor.81
Mir Musa is one of the many Iranians who managed to build a
career that spanned both business and politics and easily found a
niche in South Asia, a subject to which we will return in the next
chapter.82 Despite having joined the imperial service during the
latter part of Jahangir’s reign, it is clear that the main source for Mir
Musa’s influence and affluence was Shahjahan. Under this emperor,
his highest mansab reached 1,500 zat/300 suwar in 1628. In 1653,
in a report on an encounter between the emperor and his protégé in
Lahore, Dutchmen Joan Berckhout and Joan Tack underscored Mir
Musa’s optimism and confidence that Shahjahan would appoint him
as the governor of Surat once more.83 References to him in both
Mughal and English sources surface even later and coincide with
the beginning of Aurangzeb’s reign.84 Mir Musa thus enjoyed at
least three full decades of political visibility in which he almost
permanently served in Gujarat and artfully controlled key positions in
the maritime settlements of the province.85
In a way, Mir Musa was to Shahjahan what Muqarrab Khan had
been for Jahangir twenty years earlier, in the 1610s. This, despite
the declared enmity of the powerful Asaf Khan—Shahjahan’s father-
in-law—which may have damaged his career and limited his
influence at court.86 Both Mir Musa and Muqarrab Khan were men
with solid experience in maritime and European affairs, capable of
performing a vast array of tasks, from managing political crises and
serving as diplomatic envoys to gathering relevant information and
channelling valuable goods from the port cities to the imperial
capitals. In addition to rising to become a mansabdar of relatively
high stature (Muqarrab Khan held a far higher rank), Mir Musa also
had his own trading vessels, secured commercial monopolies,
counted on the collaboration of family members, and nurtured close
relations with prominent Gujarati merchants among which was Hari
Vaisya.87
The dealings between the viceroy count of Linhares and the
‘Captain of Surat’ provide us with telling details about Mir Musa’s
profile. Beginning in 1630, the Mughal noble wrote several letters to
Linhares, who included several (translated into Portuguese) in his
diary.88 A cursory analysis of these documents demonstrates that
they were penned by someone schooled in the conventions of
Mughal diplomacy and letter-writing. Mir Musa, or rather his munshi
(secretary), was indeed cautious where names and titles were
concerned and skilful at inserting rhetorical expressions of affection
(‘love’, ‘heart’, ‘friend’, ‘friendship’) even in the midst of hard
negotiations. In one of these letters, written in April or early May
1630, Mir Musa starts by underlining that ‘I have been friends with
the Portuguese for twenty years’. He goes on to praise Shahjahan
for having assigned to him the administration of the ports of
Khambayat, Surat, and Broach. He then chronicles the seizure of
‘two Moorish ships’ by the Portuguese and, while he acknowledges
that ‘the Portuguese custom is to capture the ships that do not hold
a cartaz’, he recalls that these two were actually sailing off the coast
of Surat and therefore in his territory when they were captured. In
his proposed solution to this quandary, Mir Musa suggests the
arrested people and goods be returned. He further mentions their
common friendship with the Hindu Bania, Keshava Doshi
(Quessuadossy), specifying that he had chatted with him in Surat
about the Portuguese viceroy’s qualities.
As one might expect, Mir Musa gave special importance to gift-
giving and sent rich presents to Linhares and to his agents in Surat
(Manuel Velho and the Jesuit António de Andrade had both been
released in the meantime), which ranged from horses and diamond
rings to silk carpets and tents.89 Once the conflict was over, the
mutasaddi of Surat wrote once more to the Portuguese viceroy, in
which he noted: ‘The King my lord will be very happy as soon as he
knows that you have released all the Moors, and he will realize that I
have some influence over Your Excellency’.90 In the end, the count
of Linhares may have understood that the Mughal mediator was far
too complex a character to put a single and linear label on him. Was
Mir Musa devoted to business or to the affairs of the state? Probably
eager to diminish his Mughal counterpart and to highlight his own
diplomatic achievements, Linhares considered that ‘Mirmuza captain
of Surat is more of a merchant than of a noble and thus desires to
make peace with the Estado’.91
 In other words, trade and politics went hand in hand, and Mir
Musa was just one among many mutasaddis of Surat and
Khambayat to bear the mixed profile of both merchant and official.92
One of his successors from 1646–7 is another case in point. We
refer here to a certain Mirza ‘Ali Akbar Isfahani; like Mir Musa (whom
he knew well) ‘Ali Akbar was of Iranian stock and like Muqarrab
Khan he was an expert in precious stones and was highly
knowledgeable of horses and the horse trade.93 Portuguese
sources confirm that he had served as governor of Surat at least as
early as 1634, before taking office again in 1640. On the latter
occasion, he arranged to send one of his ships from Surat to China
and eventually succeeded in becoming a business partner of the
Estado for that specific trade voyage. According to the agreement
with the Portuguese, ‘Ali Akbar was to pay all the duties in the
Portuguese customs houses during the voyage as well as to hire a
Portuguese captain capable of sailing to the South China Sea. The
Iranian magnate also agreed to present himself as a vassal of the
king of Portugal and suggested that a Bania merchant travel to
China aboard his vessel as procurador of the Portuguese crown. In
Goa, it did not take long for both the State Council and the Revenue
Council to approve the proposal put forward by the ‘Moor Ali
Acabar’, who was then described as a true ‘friend of the Estado’.94

The Mutasaddi
What do the careers of Muqarrab Khan and Mir Musa and their
dealings with the Europeans tell us? What elements can be drawn
from these two cases to build a consistent profile of the mutasaddi
of the Gujarati ports in the first half of the seventeenth century? And
what do these stories tell us about Gujarat as a borderland?
First, while both may certainly be portrayed as merchant
magnates, their role as political entrepreneurs cannot be
overlooked. The two mutasaddis’ multiple activities and their myriad
‘faces’ allow us to describe them as ‘portfolio capitalists’, capable of
acting simultaneously as merchants and princes, businessmen and
political actors.95 In spite of their proximity to the world of maritime
merchants, both Muqarrab Khan and Mir Musa were quite capable
of maintaining a strong public image as powerbrokers. Indeed this
type of individual was neither unheard of nor particularly unusual at
the time. As stated previously, it was rather common to find in
different ports of early modern India other Iranians like Mir Musa,
people who easily combined government (imarat) and trade (tijarat)
in their careers.96 Is seems that Das Gupta’s assertion that ‘the amir
would seldom stoop to act like a bania’ does not always hold true.97
Indeed while Muqarrab Khan and Mir Musa profited from their
close association with a number of affluent Gujarati merchants, they
do not seem to have been overshadowed by them. The Mughal
nobles who had been governors since the late seventeenth century
were far less fortunate, for they had to deal with men such as Mulla
Abdul Ghafur and other leading merchants, whose agency seems to
have strongly limited the political authority and economic power of
successive port officers.98 The deposition of the mutasaddi of Surat
in 1732 by Muhammad Ali, Ahmad Chellaby, and Seth Laldas
Vitaldas is a telling example.99 One may argue that the first half of
the seventeenth century constituted the ‘golden age’ of the
mutasaddi of Surat: simultaneously successful in the worlds of
business and politics, the mutasaddi is no longer the ‘unskilled’
Turani noble while the ‘menacing’ Gujarati merchant is still at bay.
In fact, Muqarrab Khan and Mir Musa substantially differ from
those who served in the role in Gujarat during the early years of the
Pax Mughalica, as the documents explored in the previous chapter
show. This is not to say that the first Mughal governors of the major
Gujarati ports did not engage in private maritime trade. Nor were
they lacking in valuable and ‘exotic’ objects; among the ‘treasures’
owned by Qutbuddin Muhammad Khan—the jagirdar of Broach, who
was killed in 1583 during Muzaffar Khan’s revolt—there was a ‘very
rich and very curious’ quilt (colcha) that was appraised by a
Portuguese man—Francisco Rodrigues, a merchant schooled in the
Gujarati market (muito continuo mercador de Cambaya)—at more
than 400,000 cruzados.100 However, individuals such as Qutbuddin
Muhammad Khan seem to have lacked the appropriate skills to deal
with the Europeans, as the perpetual conflicts with the Portuguese—
apparently shaped by questions of religious orthodoxy more than by
those of commercial competition—suggest.
As mentioned earlier, the majority of the Mughal governors of
these earlier years were Afghan (Turani) nobles, men who, unlike
our seventeenth-century mutasaddis, were incapable of adopting a
pragmatic attitude vis-à-vis the Firangis. While Qutbuddin
Muhammad Khan waged war on the Portuguese in 1580–1 because
they had obstructed the hajj, Muqarrab Khan was at ease with
entering a church in Goa thirty years later and acting Catholic. While
the former was certainly offended that the Portuguese cartazes
displayed images of Jesus and Mary, the latter did not hesitate to
begin his letters to the Portuguese with the sign of the Cross and the
name of Jesus.
A second point relates back to Farhat Hasan’s arguments,
already discussed briefly at the beginning of the present chapter,
regarding the undisputed supremacy of locality over the state in
Mughal India—expressed in the belief of different mutasaddis in
their ability to master their relationship with the emperor and
successfully resist becoming simple tools of imperial authority. While
it is certainly beyond dispute that the Mughal state was never as
centralized as historians once believed—the different provinces and
regions had not only always been active participants in driving policy
but had implemented their own agendas—it is also true, as our
sources seem to indicate, that there was a much more balanced
relationship between local and central, as well as between the
agency of the mutasaddi and the authority of the emperor, than
Hasan suggested. Furthermore, by emphasizing the autonomy of
the governors of Surat vis-à-vis the Mughal court so emphatically,
Hasan, to all effects, characterizes them primarily as merchants to
the detriment of their role as imperial officers—very much how
viceroy count of Linhares saw Mir Musa—when they actually
embody a far more complex a reality.
 The third and final reflection regards the intellectual and cultural
profile of these individuals. Most notably, both Muqarrab Khan and
Mir Musa managed in their dealings with the Portuguese to artfully
cope with tense religious issues. Muqarrab Khan seems to have
deliberately cultivated ambiguity in this particular area and in so
doing walked the tightrope of his double religious identity
competently enough to enhance his reputation with the Portuguese
without damaging his standing among his Mughal patrons. Mir Musa
was never as close to Christianity, but it is known that nevertheless
he too developed a relationship with the Jesuit missionaries and
encouraged them, even if for material reasons, to establish missions
and open churches in Gujarat.101
Similarly, both men were responsible for purchasing rarities for
their respective emperors, and each seems to have been a collector
of exotica in their own right. In this respect, however, Mir Musa was
certainly less of a cultured person than Muqarrab Khan, whose
many intellectual interests do not entirely match the profile of a
typical ‘merchant-prince’ of Surat. The Portuguese also seem to
have noted these sociopolitical differences between the two:
although nothing was written about their respective ranks within the
Mughal nobility, it was understood that Muqarrab Khan held a solid
position as Jahangir’s favourite. Those in Goa knew little about
Muqarrab Khan’s role as a member of the Mughal Empire’s cultural
elite, but they did speak of the ‘aristocratic surgeon’ (to borrow
Rezavi’s image) and knew he wrote medical treatises, had a keen
interest in horticulture, and was fascinated with Western technology.
His project to create a hospital in Agra modelled on the one in Goa
is a manifestation of this interest. Moreover, Muqarrab Khan also
became known for building and renovating a number of architectural
structures both in Gujarat and in his hometown of Kairana.102 And
while Mir Musa’s achievements (if there are any at all) are unknown
in this particular field, his successor as governor of Surat, ‘Ali Akbar,
is recognized as the founder and patron of a Friday mosque in
Khambayat.103 Muqarrab Khan’s and Mir Musa’s patronage of
Catholic temples in Bihar and Gujarat is not considerably different
from the customary support given to mosques by these and other
mansabdars.

CROSSINGS
The conflicts of 1613–15 and 1630 were liquid border wars,
triggered by the Portuguese assumption that the sea was theirs—it
‘belongs to the King my Lord’, remarked the viceroy count of
Linhares in a letter sent to the Mughal ambassador to Bijapur in
1630.104 The Estado da Índia managed to impose the cartaz on the
Mughals as the recognized instrument by which the Portuguese
could regulate the circulation of people and goods in the Arabian
Sea, as well as east of Ceylon. A more commercially minded
Mughal elite eventually came to realize that it was possible to
conduct business and politics with Firangis other than the
Portuguese. In fact, the liquid border of Gujarat became highly
unstable from the 1610s, with strong repercussions in the província
do Norte. To the Portuguese seizure of imperial vessels off Surat,
the Mughals responded by menacing Diu and Daman, arresting
Portuguese individuals, and confiscating their properties in Gujarat.
The Estado’s game plan was to make the suba recognize the rights
of the província by way of treaties. However, these assentos and
pazes—today preserved in Portuguese documentary collections—
were largely ‘paper fictions’ that no Mughal ruler cared to accept or
even read.
One of the main threads of this chapter has been to underline the
ways in which, somewhat ironically, conflicts such as the ‘disaster of
Surat’ and the capture of the ‘two Moorish ships’ sparked a number
of ‘border’ crossings. The incidents of 1613–15 and 1630 indeed
show that there was constant movement of people and an intense
exchange of letters between Mughal India and the Estado. These
flows are exemplified by the imperial envoys travelling from Gujarat
to Goa with large retinues as well as by the Hindu Banias who would
come to the capital of the Estado on behalf of eminent Mughal
patrons in order to obtain cartazes in the aftermath of the two crises.
Consider also the letters that Muqarrab Khan and Mir Musa penned,
apparently tailored to their Portuguese interlocutors’ cultural codes.
The letters show that the two sides had to some extent developed a
mutual understanding of each other’s cultures. What is more, these
documents allow us to unearth the existence of anonymous
individuals who somehow mediated the Mughal–Portuguese
conflicts and contributed their share towards the multiplication of
crossings. It is particularly telling that in one of his letters to the
count of Linhares, Mir Musa dropped the name of a common
acquaintance—Keshava Doshi, a Hindu Bania from Surat—in order
to get the Portuguese viceroy to open up towards him. Another
relevant example is that of Luís de Sequeira, a Portuguese resident
of Daman; while the Jesuit Jerónimo Xavier and the mutasaddi
Muqarrab Khan negotiated a solution in Surat for the 1613 crisis,
Sequeira directly addressed the Portuguese viceroy, informing him
that he had received letters from a ‘Moor’ who was placed on the
Mughal–Portuguese ‘border’ (na fronteira daquelas terras) as
military commander (cabeça da gente de guerra): ‘The Moor had
asked him [Sequeira] to act as mediator of that conflict because they
wished to have peace with us.’105 We thus have several strata of
negotiation, involving high representatives as well as local
(indigenous or not) low-level actors.
Religious crossings were particularly apparent. The Indian Muslim
Muqarrab Khan, with his presumed conversion to Catholicism and
letters that used the Cross of Christ as a header, is a significant
case. Another intriguing case is that of ‘Putecão, great captain of the
Mogor’ who apparently wrote a letter to the Portuguese viceroy in
late 1630 disclosing himself as a ‘great devout of the Mother of God
of the Rosary’ and offering his collaboration (a letter that was not left
unanswered).106 But the most significant fragment to consider is the
story of a Mughal mansabdar who dared to visit Bassein not long
after the incident with the ‘two Moorish ships’. The historical canvas
is provided by the great Indian famine of 1630–1, which will be
discussed further in the next chapter. In line with the multiethnic
composition of the Mughal nobility, this unidentified mansabdar was
a Christian Habshi who decided to travel with his family on
pilgrimage to the Portuguese city in order to worship the image of
the Virgin known as Our Lady of Remedies (Nossa Senhora dos
Remédios). After he had prayed, the Mughal ‘captain’
…asked for an interpreter who could explain to him the vows which
were hung on the walls, as well as the paintings offered and left there by
the people who received mercies thanks to the intervention of the Lady.
He then turned to the interpreter and told him that a miracle, bigger than
those which were painted there, was missing…. He started recounting
how the Great Mughal … was determined to conquer everything that
the Portuguese had in the Norte. To this effect he [Emperor Shahjahan]
organised two extremely powerful armies, with infinite men, both on
horse and foot, and many war elephants. He [Shahjahan] decided to
come in person and his ultimate purpose was to attack simultaneously
the cities of Daman and Bassein. But the Lady intervened and so the
plague came, and a great famine and thirst affected these armies and
destroyed them…. It spread out across the kingdom and has already
caused the death of three million people, more than one thousand
elephants, and countless horses. Being one his captains and having
witnessed such killing, he heard that in Bassein there was one Lady of
Remedies that made many miracles, not only to Christians but also to
Moors and Gentiles. He promised to go on pilgrimage (romaria) to Her
Holy House in case She spared him and his family. Since he escaped
death due to Her intercession, he came now with his family to pay his
vow and he left a good offer.107

One obviously has to be cautious when dealing with an account that

inevitably mirrors a religious, Jesuit agenda. But what we have here
is the combination of several crossings: a mansabdar, albeit
Christian, reading and admiring ex-votos with the help of an
unnamed interpreter (which language did they employ?), a capitam
do Gram Mogor honouring a Catholic image for having saved his life
and defeated his own emperor, and a multireligious site where
Christians, Muslims, and Hindus alike could fulfil their wishes by
worshipping an image of the Virgin.108 What the Jesuit author(s) of
this document forgot to mention is that the Church of Our Lady of
the Remedies—under the Dominicans’ protection, according to
Diogo do Couto—was face to face with a rather popular temple tank
that Hindus used for ritual cleansing, despite the Catholic priests’
control.109
Proof of the point to which circulation had become rooted in both
sides lies not only in the existence of culturally ‘amphibious’
individuals of multiple socio-economic and political strata, but also in
the goods that constantly moved around. Things (bought, offered, or
stolen), and their flows in the frontier zone, played a large part in
these crossings. Amidst thorny negotiations in Surat, Muqarrab
Khan ironically asked for Portuguese wine and olives from the
chancellor of the Estado. Looking at gift-giving commodities proper
—and the economic and social transactions behind them—one has
to recall the story of Fernão. It was he who, in Goa, refused to sell
Muqarrab an escritório for less than 30,000 cruzados in 1611. The
escritório was a precious object which in other circumstances would
have ended up in Jahangir’s hands at the Mughal court. Well before
that, in 1583, another Fernão (Fernão Rodrigues) evaluated a rich
colcha belonging to the late jagirdar of Broach, a declared enemy of
the Portuguese. Even though she was imperilled by the rebellion of
the deposed sultan of Gujarat, the jagirdar’s widow remained faithful
to her late husband’s orthodox views and refused the Estado’s
protection. This, however, did not prevent an experienced
Portuguese merchant from being given the opportunity to carefully
examine the ‘treasures’ of the deceased.
Some of these themes will resurface and be expanded upon in
Chapter 6, which is devoted to Bengal and to the neighbouring
relations between the Mughals and the Portuguese in the maritime
fringes of that suba. However, the next chapter takes us to the
Deccan plateau to explore the enduring fear expressed by the
Portuguese that the Mughals would force the ‘gates’ of Goa and
invade.

1 Jahangir (1999), pp. 240–1.

2 Viceroy Dom João Coutinho to Philip III, Goa, 3 February 1618, in DRI,
tom. IV, p. 130. A later report penned by the same viceroy notes that Jahangir
travelled in the company of more than 50,000 cavalrymen (Coutinho to Philip
III, Goa, 20 February 1619, in DRI, tom. V, p. 191).
3 Francesco Corsi to the Jesuit Provincial of India, Agra, 28 October 1619,
in DUP, vol. III, p. 158.
4 Cortesão and Mota (1987), vol. IV, pl. 416 E.

5 Foster (1921); Roe (1990); Hasan (1990); Jha (2005); Hasan (1993a);
Hasan (1990); Hasan (1986).
6 See Pelsaert (1979); Pelsaert (2001); Van Santen (1982); Jha (2005);
Akhtar (1995); Akhtar (1988).
7 Lombard–Jourdain (1998).
8 Nagashima (2009); Nagashima (2006).

9 João Teixeira Albernaz, Taboas Geraes de toda a Navegação, 1630, map

11, Washington, DC, The Library of Congress, G1015. T4 1630.
10 Chandra (2003), ch. 10, pp. 227–34.

11 Diary of Joan Breakout and Joan Tack’s overland trip between Agra and
Delhi (December 1652 to March 1653), The Hague, Algemeen Rikjksarchief,
Overgekomen Briefen en Papieren, VOC 1201, f. 768v.
12 ‘Cartaz a nau Jahanguiry del Rey Jahanguir’, Goa, 21 August 1618,
HAG, Consultas de serviços de partes, bk. 3, ff. 107v–9r; cartaz for Khurram’s
ship, Goa, 26 January 1619, HAG, Consultas de serviços de partes, bk. 3, ff.
119v–20v; ‘Sobre o cartaz de Surrate’, in ACE, vol. I, pp. 22–4; cartaz for a
ship owned by Jahangir’s mother, Goa, 23 October 1619, HAG, Consultas de
serviços de partes, bk. 3, ff. 129r–9v; Governor Fernão de Albuquerque to
Mirza ‘Isa, ‘captain and financial superintendent’ of Surat, Goa, 17 December
1619, HAG, Reis Vizinhos, bk. 1, ff. 58v–9r; Goa, 18 November 1620, HAG,
Consultas de serviços de partes, bk. 3, ff. 50r–v; Goa, 21 October 1621, HAG,
Consultas de serviços de partes, bk. 3, ff. 71v–2r; ‘cartaz del Rey Selemoxá
[Salim Shah, that is, Jahangir]’, Goa. October–November 1622, HAG,
Consultas de serviços de partes, bk. 3, ff. 82r–3r. Pearson (1981), pp. 145–7,
has studied some of these documents, albeit from a different perspective.
13 It is improbable that this Bhimji Parekh is the person who later worked as
a broker for the EIC, but the two certainly belonged to the same family. See
Gokhale (1979), pp. 119, 121–2.
14 The English reference to the Shahi is in EFI, 1622–1623, p. 271.
 15 See Moosvi (1990), who makes use of the Blochet Ms., Bibliothèque
nationale de France, Supplément Persan 482. Also see Qaisar (1968).
16 Hasan (2004); Hasan (1989–90); Hasan (1986); Akhtar (1988).
17 On the shahbandar (port official) of Surat, see Nagashima (1996).

18 Hasan (2004), pp. 35, 39. Also see Rezavi (1984); Hasan (1989–90);
Hasan (1993b).
19 The defence of the former argument is to be found in Pearson (1976);
Pearson (1991). For its critique, see, inter alia, Subrahmanyam (1995).
20 Jahangir (1999), pp. 206, 94, 106, 108, 133, 141. Jahangir Quli Khan—
Mirza ‘Aziz Koka’s son and subadar of Gujarat in 1608–9—used to present
Jahangir with exquisite objects, such as a silver throne (Jahangir [1999], pp.
106, 108, 121). Prince Kuhrram did the same during his time as subadar of
Gujarat after 1617; among the several objects bought under his name in Goa,
was a ruby worth 200,000 rupees that the emperor would later praise as the
heaviest and most valuable of his entire collection (Jahangir [1999], p. 231).
21 BA, JA, cod. 49–V–18, f. 336r.

22 Foltz (1998), p. 26.

23 António de Andrade to the Jesuit Provincial of India, Agra, 14 August
1623, in DUP, vol. III, p. 168.
24 Viceroy Rui Lourenço de Távora to Dom Francisco da Gama (then
serving as president of the Council of India in Lisbon), Goa, 29 February 1611,
BNP, Reservados, cod. 1975, f. 210r.
25 Lefèvre (2014); Alvi and Rahman (1968).

26 ‘His albums were microcosms, controlled universes in which the

artisanship of the Seven Climes was juxtaposed to demonstrate the might,
knowledge and connoisseurship of their patron’ (Bailey [1996], vol. I, p. 160).
27 Duindam (2016).

28 Flores (2016), pp. 89–90.

29 These incidents and their respective impact are somewhat comparable to
the taking of the Ganj-i Sawai by the English pirate Henry Avery in 1695 and
Aurangzeb’s reaction to it. On this episode, see Benton (2010), pp. 142–4.
30 On Muqarrab Khan, see especially Powell (1994); Rezavi (1999).
31 On this episode, see Abu’l Fazl (1993), vol. III, pp. 1061–2; Jerónimo
Xavier to Francisco Cabral, Lahore, 8 September 1596, in DI, vol. XVIII, pp.
579–81.
32 Ali (1985), J 43, 114, 317, 382, 391, 401, 417, 450, 530, 578, 605, 666,
814, 871, 944, 989, 1153, 1193, 1373, 1394, 1436; Shah Nawaz Khan (1999),
vol. I, pp. 616–17.
33 William Edwards notes that he ‘hath many great enimyes neere the King’
(W. Edwards to the Company, Ahmedabad, 20 December 1614, in Downton
[1997], p. 171). On the incidents that contributed to occasionally diminish his
political fortune in the Mughal court (and consequently his mansab), see
Rezavi (1999), p. 157; Powell (1994), pp. 77–8.
34 A cursory reading of the Jahangirnama reveals how close the two men
were. Throughout his memoirs, the emperor praises Muqarrab Khan’s medical
and hunting skills (Jahangir [1999] pp. 34, 137–8, 380–1), calling him either
‘an old servant that I knew well’ (Jahangir [1999], p. 277) or ‘an old retainer of
this dynasty’ (Jahangir [1999], p. 411).
35 Husain (1999), pp. 64–5, quoting Shaikh Farid Bhakari’s Zakhirat-ul
Kwanin.
36 Powell (1994), p. 75; Das (1978), pp. 142–3, 150–1; Beach and Koch
(1997), pp. 28–9, 92–3, 161–2, 198–9.
37 Father Jerónimo Xavier to the Jesuit Provincial of India, Agra, 24
September 1608, in DUP, vol. III, p. 128; Guerreiro (1930–42), vol. III, pp. 20–
1.
38 Thomas Aldworth to the Company, Ahmedabad, 9 November 1613, in
Foster (1968), p. 307.
39 Thomas Elkington to the Company, Swally Road, 25 February 1615, in
Downton (1997), p. 198. Similar assessments were made by Nicholas
Downton (letter to the Company, [Surat], 7 March 1615, in Sainsbury [1862], p.
392); and T. Keridge (letter to T. Aldworthe and W. Biddulph, Ajmer, 15
November 1614, Sainsbury [1862], p. 337).
40 Based on evidence from the EIC (which broadly matches that which is
provided by the Portuguese sources), Hasan (2004), p. 35, writes that he was
governor of Surat in 1608–10. We have closely followed Ali (1985) to briefly
reconstruct Muqarrab Khan’s career in Gujarat after 1610: governor of Surat in
1613–14 (J 450); governor of Cambay in 1615–6 (J 530); overseer of the
customs house of Surat and Cambay in 1615 (J 605); subadar of Gujarat in
1617 (J 814); subadar of Gujarat in 1618–19 (J 989) (this is improbable, as
Prince Khurram became subadar of the province in 1617); governor of Surat in
1623 (J 1394) (this too is doubtful, for Muqarrab Khan was subadar of Agra in
1623–4 [J 1436]).
41 Shah Nawaz Khan (1999), vol. I, p. 616. Thomas Kerridge’s remarks
from Ajmer in 1614 complements Shah Nawaz Khan’s observation. The
Company servant notes that, like any other Mughal official in charge of the
imperial ports, ‘Mocrob Chan’ had orders to buy the best goods for the
emperor, especially jewels and ‘strange’ objects. He would, therefore, choose
whatever objects he wanted first and only then could all the others start their
business. Kerridge to Downton, Ajmer, 22 November 1614, in Foster (1968),
vol. II, p. 179.
42 Jahangir (1999), pp. 94, 106, 108, 133–4, 141, 143, 192, 219, 249;
Qaisar (1998).
43 Shah Nawaz Khan (1999), vol. I, p. 616.
44 Rezavi (1999), p. 161, notes that people such as ‘Aziz Koka and the
chronicler Lahori considered Muqarrab Khan’s appointment a mistake.
However, the subadar of Gujarat would later be chosen by Jahangir to rule
over two other provinces, namely Bihar and Delhi.
45 4 October 1618, in ACE, vol. I, pp. 24–6.
46 Numerous and strong criticisms of Muqarrab Khan are to be found in the
correspondence of the EIC. Often accused of favouring the Portuguese, he is
commonly portrayed as having been dishonest and childish. Suffice it to recall
the violent clash between William Hawkins and the ‘dogge Mochreb-chan’
(Foster [1985], p. 75) or Thomas Roe’s tough letter to the governor of Surat in
19 October 1615, in which Roe openly considers him his enemy (Sainsbury
[1862], p. 436). The ‘Viceroy of Suratt’ was considered to be ‘very vain and
toyish in all his proceedings’ by William Edwards (letter to the Company, n.pl.,
n.d. [1614], in Foster [1968], p. 149).
47 On one occasion in Khambayat, Muqarrab Khan took the Jesuit visitor
Nicolau Pimenta on his elephant to watch one of his ships being launched into
water (BA, JA, cod. 49–V–18, f. 350r). Also see Rezavi (1999), pp. 164–5.
48 Jourdain (1992), pp. 154, 173, 175; Downton (1997), p. 33.

49 Alam and Subrahmanyam (2012) ch. 2, pp. 88ff. On Akbar’s embassies

to Goa and the profile of the imperial emissaries as viewed by the Portuguese,
see Flores (2015), pp. 150–3. Reference to a certain Hakim Kushhal as
Jahangir’s ambassador to Goa in 1619 (Viceroy Dom João Coutinho to Hakim
Kushhal, Goa, 19 December 1619, HAG, Reis Vizinhos, bk. 1, ff. 59r–v).
50 ‘Da Missão do Mogor’ [1616], BA, JA, cod. 49–V–18, ff. 330v–63v.
 51 We ignore what gifts the Mughal ambassador and the Portuguese
viceroy might have exchanged, but it is known that Muqarrab Khan offered two
large carpets to the Jesuit Professed House of Goa, while Manuel Pinheiro
reciprocated by offering him a wall hanging (pano de armar) representing
Christ tied to the column.
52 Jahangir (1999), pp. 133–4. Painted c. 1612 and today housed in the
Victoria and Albert Museum, IM 135–1921.
53 Raza Library (Rampur, India), album 1, f. 7a. See Beach and Koch
(1997), pp. 120–1.
54 Davis (2006), pp. 62–6. Also see Matar (1998), ch. 4.
55 Leo Africanus most probably resorted to taqiyya while in Rome, thus
placing himself in a political and religious landscape that impelled Muslims on
the Christian side of the Mediterranean to dissimulate their beliefs in the early
sixteenth century. On this, see Davis (2006) pp. 188–9; O’Banion (2016).
Powell (1994) has compared Muqarrab Khan’s gesture to other, later cases of
individual conversion to Christianity among the elites of north-western India.
Building on the work of Eaton (1985), pp. 106–23, she draws a distinction
between ‘conversion’ and ‘adherence’; the former corresponds to a full spiritual
reconfiguration while the latter is determined by special circumstances and
imply nothing other than the ‘superficial’ performance of rites and gestures
pertaining to another religion. In sum, one could receive baptism without
necessarily converting to Christianity.
56 See Krstić (2009); Mills and Grafton (2003), esp. introduction and chs 4–
7.
57 For a standard account of Muqarrab Khan’s relationship with the
Christian faith, see Maclagan (1932), pp. 77–9. Muqarrab Khan’s adopted son
(Masih-i Kairanawi, or Sa’ad Allah) would also apostatize and later became a
poet.
58 Viceroy Rui Lourenço de Távora to Dom Francisco da Gama, Goa, 20
December 1611, BNP, Reservados, cod. 1975, ff. 208r–9r (208v); Viceroy Dom
Jerónimo de Azevedo to Philip III (Goa, 1613), HAG, MR, bk. 12, f. 23r.
59 Bocarro (1876), vol. I, ch. 45, pp. 189–92; ‘Repostas que dá Dom
Jeronimo de Azevedo Visorey que foy das Indias Orientais aos 23 cargos a
que lhe mandarão responder’, BA, MM, cod. 51–VII–27, ff. 146r–86r (148v–
53r).
60 Findly (1988).
 61 Jahangir (1999), p. 154; ‘Capitulos das pazes que se fizeram entre os
vassallos de El-Rey Jahanguir e os Portuguezes, por Nauabo Mucarreb-Xhan
e Gonçalo Pinto da Fonseca’, 7 June 1615, in Biker (1995), tom. I, pp. 189–92
(English translation of this document published in Heras [1990], ch. 11, pp.
140–51).
62 ‘Copia de hũa carta que hum official do secretario escrevo a hũ irmão
seu da Barra de Surrate em Fevereiro de 615’, BNP, Reservados, cod. 11410,
ff. 71r–v.
63 See Bocarro (1876), vol. I, ch. 81, pp. 355–7, who provides the
Portuguese translation of one of these letters.
64 John Crouther to the Company, Ahmedabad, 26 December 1614, in
Sainsbury (1862), p. 359; Edward Dodsworth to the Company, Ahmedabad, 30
December 1614, in Sainsbury (1862), p. 363. Nicholas Downton writes that the
governor of Surat contacted the Dutch in Masulipatnam offering them Daman
in exchange for their naval support against the Portuguese (N. Downton to the
Company, Swally, 20 November 1614, in Foster [1968], vol. II, pp. 168–71).
65 N. Downton to the Company, Surat, 7 March 1615, in Sainsbury (1862),
p. 392. In all likelihood, the treaty of 1615 (of which only the Portuguese
version has survived) was never recognized by Jahangir.
66 ARSI, Goa, vol. 33 II, f. 667v.
67 Annual letter, 1623, ARSI, Goa, vol. 33 II, f. 725r. Also see the letter from
António de Andrade to the Provincial of the Society of Jesus in India, Agra, 14
August 1623, in DUP, vol. III, p. 163. Muqarrab Khan is also said to have
helped the Franciscan mission of 1623–4 that was led by Fray Manuel Tobias
to the court of Jahangir. In his letter to Fray Gaspar da Conceição, Tobias calls
Muqarrab ‘the hidden Christian, friend of the Portuguese’; Agra, 18 April 1624,
Madrid, Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 600/6-4, ff. 217r–33r.
68 On this hospital, see Walker (2015). On hospitals in India in this period,
see Speziale (2012).
69 For a brief profile of Mir Musa, see Gokhale (1966), pp. 55–60; Gokhale
(1979), pp. 59–61. On his dealings with the Dutch, see Tracy (1999), pp. 269–
71.
70 Detailed information on this incident––especially regarding the cargo of
the two ships that was sold in an auction held in Goa between late April and
late June 1630––is included in Portuguese records, namely the ‘Treslado do
inventario que se fez da fazenda das duas naos mouriscas que tomou em
Surrate Dom Francisquo Coutinho Deosem’, Goa, 31 January 1631; HAG,
MR, bk. 14, ff. 249r–323r; ‘Conselho sobre as naos, cavallos e artilheria que
se tomarão aos mouros’, Goa, 2 May 1630, in ACE, vol. I, pp. 275–6. Also see
Matos and Matos (1999), pp. 3–39. I thank Artur Teodoro de Matos for
granting me access to his own transcription of the Treslado.
71 Akhtar (1988), p. 257; Tirmizi (1989–95), vol. II, pp. 41, 60.
72 Linhares 2, ff. 102r–3r.

73 Surat Presidency to the Company, 13 April 1630, EFI, 1630–1633, p. 37.

74 ‘Copia do assento que Padre Antonio d’Andrade Provincial da
Companhia fez cõ Mirmuza capitão de Surrate, Cambaya e Baroche’, Daman,
13 September 1630, in ACE, vol. I, pp. 285–7.
75 On the complex question of ‘inter-cultural treaties’ in this period, see
Belmessous (2015).
76 ‘Copia do formão do Mogor e confirmação das pazes’, 17 July 1631, in
Linhares 2, ff. 91v–2r.
77 ‘Assento feito com o capitam de Surrate’, Bulsar, 28 November 1630, in
ACE, vol. I, pp. 292–4; ‘Conselho que o Senhor Conde VisoRey fez em quatro
de Outubro sobre as novas que teve por cartas do Pe. Provincial Antonio de
Andrade e Dom Francisco Coutinho de haver tomado hũa nao de Mequa’, in
ACE, vol. I, pp. 291–2.
78 John Leachland to President Rastell (in Surat), Ahmedabad, 29
November 1623, EFI, 1622–1623, p. 329.
79 Coutre (1990), pp. 293–317.
80 Surat Presidency to the Company, 13 April 1630, EFI, 1630–1633, pp.
33, 36. Like Coutre, the English complained about Mir Musa’s lack of business
ethics, as he apparently owed the EIC 31,000 mahmudis in 1634. In that same
year, Mir Musa acquired from the English a tapestry ‘with the story of Vulcan
and Venus’ for 1,600 mahmudis, but did not hesitate to return it right after for
its lack of fancy colours, such as green, red, or yellow (EFI, 1634–1636, pp.
83, 64).
81 Foster (1926), pp. 307–16.
82 Subrahmanyam (1992); Subrahmanyam (1999); Haneda (1997); Thomaz
(2014).
83 Diary of J. Berckhout and J. Tack of the voyage between Agra and Delhi,
26 December 1652 to 31 March 1653; The Hague, Algemeen Rikjkarchief,
Overgekomen Briefen en papieren, VOC 1201, ff. 759r–75r (764r). From
Mandu in 1636, John Drake reported on Mir Musa’s anxiety regarding the
possibility of not recovering his position as mutasaddi of Surat (J. Drake to
Surat Presidency, 7 September 1636, EFI, 1634–1636, p. 288).
84 At some point, Mir Musa might have been close to Aurangzeb, since
William Fremlen notes that in 1639 the Portuguese asked him to persuade the
future emperor (then subadar of the Deccan) not to attack Daman (Foster
[1926], pp. 310–11).
85 Ali (1985), S 274, 287, 359, 582, 847, 886, 1064, 1106, 1134, 1487,
1701, 2242, 2310, 2664, 2777, 2586, 3502, 3708, 3812, 4023, 4316, 4344,
4347, 4362, 4521, 5202, 5473, 6925, 7713.
86 ‘…the two are deadly enemies, and Asaph Ckaune … would then
contrary whatsoever Meer Moza should prosecute’; John Drake to the Surat
Presidency, Kirki, 4 June 1636, EFI, 1634–1636, pp. 262–3. Muqarrab Khan
also had a conflict with Asaf Khan, as noted by Roe (1990), p. 230. On Asaf
Khan, see Kumar (1986).
87 The diary of President Methold registered a ship owned by Mir Musa
leaving from Surat to Bengal in 1636 (EFI, 1634–1636, p. 255). Mir Musa’s
brother, a certain Mir Jafar, was also placed in Gujarat; Surat Presidency to
Ahmedabad, 11 October 1630, in Malony (1992), pp. 156–7; Gokhale (1979),
pp. 59–61.
88 Linhares 1, ff. 41r–2v, 61v–4r. Throughout his term, the viceroy of Goa
exchanged correspondence with Mir Musa (Linhares 2, f. 53v), in addition to
having access to letters sent by the mutasaddi of Surat to Jesuit missionaries.
See two letters from Mir Musa to Father Paulo Reimão, dated 10 and 12
December 1634 respectively, in Linhares 3, pp. 254–6.
89 AHU, CU, cod. 218, ff. 121v, 122r; Linhares 3, pp. 254–6.

90 The Portuguese original of the excerpt in italics (emphasis added) reads

as follows: ‘e entendera que posso algũa cousa cõ V. Exa.’
91 Goa, 3 August 1630, in ACE, vol. I, pp. 283–6.

92 Rezavi (1984).
93 See Lambourn (2003), pp. 238, 240; Ahmedabad Factory to Surat
Presidency, 2 February 1647, EFI, 1646–1650, p. 100.
94 ‘…sobre a liçença que Miranja Aly Acabar morador em Cambaya pede
para mandar a China hũa nao sua’, Goa, 21 February 1640, in ACE, vol. II, pp.
279–80; ‘Assento tomado sobre hũa nao de Aly Acabar hir a China e partir de
Surrate’, Goa, 22 February 1640; HAG, Conselho da Fazenda, bk. 5, ff. 85v–9r
(includes the Portuguese translation of the letter from Mir ‘Ali Akbar to the
Portuguese, Cambay, 15 January 1640). More about later (1647) dealings
between Mir ‘Ali Akbar and the Estado may be found in Lambourn (2003), bk.
6, ff. 243v–4r.
95 Subrahmanyam and Bayly (1988).
96 Subrahmanyam (1995).

97 Das Gupta (2001) p. 97.

98 Hasan (2004), p. 42. The author tends to portray the mutasaddis as
‘hostages’ of the Gujarati merchants as well as other local economic and
social forces, and he provides evidence dating back to 1636 of this. Also
Hasan (1993b).
99 Das Gupta (1979), pp. 315–41.
100 Couto (1974), dec. X, pt. I, bk. iv, ch. 7, pp. 439–40.

101 Manuel da Silva, ‘Das cousas que soube del Rey Mogor’, Surat, 27
October 1629, in ACE, vol. I, p. 284.
102 Asher (1992), pp. 228–9; Jahangir (1999), pp. 244, 317.

103 Lambourn (2003).

104 Linhares 1, ff. 49v–50r.

105 Viceroy Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo to Philip III, Ilhéus Queimados, 31

December 1614, HAG, MR, bk. 12, ff. 164v, 166r–v.
106 Goa, 1 December 1630, Linhares 1, f. 121r; AHU, CU, f. 228r (payment
to the runner that carried the viceroy’s reply to ‘Putecão’). The Mughal noble
surely had in mind the chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary (initially of the Mother
of God), in Daman.
107 ‘Relaçam da India tirada de hũas cartas dos Pes da Compª anno de
1631’, ARSI, Goa, 34 I, ff. 39r–42v (citation on f. 40r).
108 On early modern ex-votos, see Holmes (2009).

109 Couto (1974), dec. VII, bk. iii, ch. 10, p. 244. Our Lady of Remedies is
one among many shared and contested sacred spaces of the early modern
world, as studied by Nelson and Wright (2017).
 5
The Deccan Wall

THE WESTERN DECCAN: SATELLITE STATES OR

BUFFER ZONE?
The Mughal conquest of the Deccan was a slow process. A century
passed between the initial military inroads made under Akbar in the
1580s and the decisive campaigns that were led by Aurangzeb in
the 1680s, which eventually resulted in the imperial absorption of
the sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda. Indeed Aurangzeb pushed
the southern limits of the Mughal Empire as far as Jinji in 1697, but
he ultimately failed to control the Maratha power in the Deccan.1
The emperor’s links to the region were as old as they were
intense. While he was the prince, he served as provincial governor
twice (1636–44, 1652–7). Once he became ruler, Aurangzeb
directed his efforts towards creating a Mughal Deccan that was
anchored in an imperial capital named after him (Aurangabad, 1681)
and, incidentally, where he would spend the last twenty-five years of
his life. To make the Deccan Mughal implied the need for both rough
war and artful policies; it was not only a military and political
enterprise, but also a social and cultural one based on the
colonizing role of the imperial army and the patronage of Sufi
shrines and institutions, as well as on the implementation of urban
and architectural projects.2 Yet the full incorporation of the Deccan
into the empire did not conform to the traditional Mughal approach to
the region. The dominant strategy followed by rulers from Akbar
onwards was one of indirect rule, one that somehow reminds us of
the Safavid approach to the Deccan in that it favoured suzerainty
over sovereignty and the preservation of more or less loose ties of
vassality with the sultanates over the creation of full imperial
provinces. This contrast in approach became particularly apparent
after 1636, wherein Emperor Shahjahan defended the status quo
ante while Aurangzeb as subadar pushed for direct control of the
Deccan; with the conquest of Bijapur (1686) and Golconda (1687),
Aurangzeb’s stance prevailed.3
Despite Aurangzeb’s strategies of assimilation, Mughal
sovereignty brought substantial transformations to the Deccan
society. It is now recognized that there is no ‘Maginot line’ between
the north and south, and in fact the social influence of the Mughals
in the Deccan—especially cultivated through art and architecture—
clearly predates the conquest. The lines of demarcation were
blurred and circulation of people, ideas, and practices between Indo-
Persian, Deccani, and Hindu spheres was intense, as evidenced by
Richard Eaton, Phillip Wagoner, and Andre Wink, among other
scholars.4 The greatest disrupture seems to have revolved around
the idea of empire itself; Eaton remarks that ‘rulers of fourteenth and
fifteenth century Vijayanagar chose to participate in a territorially
decentred Islamicate world-system that was compelling precisely
because it was not identified with political domination from any
hegemonic centre’.5 This formula might well apply to Ahmadnagar,
Bijapur, and Golconda vis-à-vis the Mughal Empire. Historian Roy
Fischel has put forth an ontological notion of the Deccan as a non-
imperial space, underlining that its political and cultural landscape
was polycentric and anti-imperial in essence.6
While this assertion may prove hard to fully demonstrate, we
know that direct Mughal rule brought about fundamental changes in
the Deccan, starting with the elimination of the king, the court, and
all that this implied. Aurangabad was, instead, ‘a colonial town’. It
was bursting with newcomers from Lahore and Kabul, immigrants
from Central Asia who never speak of Hindus in their writings while
‘only one recognizable native Deccani Muslim’ is mentioned in a
notable collection of their narratives penned in the early eighteenth
century.7 There were ethno-linguistic tensions (foreigners vs natives,
Persian vs vernaculars), and resentment, even resistance, did not
take long to surface in the former sultanates. In Golconda, people
accepted neither the deposition of their sultan, Abu’l Hasan, nor his
subsequent exile and incarceration; in fact, the dream of his
restoration persisted until 1700.8 In addition, movements of social
banditry such as that led by Sarvayi Papadu—who was eventually
executed in 1710—fuelled popular resistance to the Mughals in the
former Qutb Shahi kingdom.9 A similar situation surfaced in Bijapur;
the integration of the local nobility into Mughal imperial service was
not entirely successful, and Aurangzeb might have ‘contributed to
widening the gap between landed Sufis and non-Muslims’. In one
particular text, the emperor is portrayed as a bad ruler, someone
who promoted bribery, injustice, and the destruction of the social
fabric. Its anonymous author concludes with a rather strong desire:
‘May God damn the tyrant!’10
The objective of this chapter is neither to chronicle the full period
of Mughal conquest of the Deccan nor to systematically investigate
the Portuguese ‘response’ to it. With no aspirations whatsoever to
provide a comprehensive picture, the focus lies on two key moments
of the Mughal–Portuguese construction of the western Deccan
frontier in the period prior to Aurangzeb’s arrival in 1636 and before
the Marathas rose as players in the region that could not be ignored.
The first moment relates to a set of Mughal conquests in the
northern and central Deccan, encompassing the annexation of Berar
in 1596, the conquest of the city of Ahmadnagar in 1600, and the
seizure of Khandesh in 1601.11 During this time, the imperial capital
was moved from Lahore to Agra in 1598 with an eye to Akbar’s
objective of conquering the Deccan and, as someone had predicted
a decade earlier in Goa, to ‘setting foot in India’ (meter pé na
Índia).12 Our analysis of this short yet significant period is partly
structured around the figure of a woman, Chand Bibi (d. 1599), the
regent of Ahmadnagar who maintained extensive dealings with the
Portuguese.
The second moment corresponds to an equally important stage of
Mughal control over the Deccan and hones in on the crucial year of
1636. That year, following the elimination of Ahmadnagar as an
independent kingdom, the two remaining sultanates of Bijapur and
Golconda were forced to formally acknowledge imperial authority by
signing the ‘Deed of Submission’ (‘Ahdnama).13 The turbulent
situation of Bijapur in that moment—a privileged Mughal target in
the Deccan that was simultaneously the closest ‘neighbouring
kingdom’ of the capital of the Estado da Índia—will be considered
through the examination of the figure of a prominent Iranian who at
the time played a key role in the ‘Adil Shahi court, the artful political
landscaper Mustafa Khan (d. 1648).
What the Mughals considered to be sought-after vassal
sultanates, and eventually imperial provinces, were considered by
the Portuguese to be autonomous kingdoms that ought to be
independent so that they could function as a buffer zone. Seen
through the Iberian and Catholic lenses, these Muslim states
seemed unstable and weak, with their rulers calling for constant
personal guidance and political direction. Notwithstanding, they
were perceived in Goa as an indispensable wall. Indeed the motif of
a wall and specifically the Deccan as a wall repeatedly surfaced in
Portuguese texts from those years. It is quite clear that for their
authors, the Deccan constituted the border between the Mughal
Empire and the Estado da Índia.
Unlike in the província do Norte, the Portuguese did not have
villages, rents, or rights to secure in the Deccan; carving out territory
and claiming jurisdiction was not in their designs since their main
contention with the Mughal Empire in the south was not a question
of controlling the land (its resources and related benefits) or
securing rights of passage. Their committment to preventing the
Mughals from taking the region, especially the two sultanates of the
western Deccan, had instead to do with preventing the elimination of
Goa and to ultimately ensure the survival of the Estado. The
Portuguese truly feared what they perceived to be an excessive
proximity—a very real, physical proximity—with the Mughals, and
this perhaps explains their frequent use of a language that borrowed
heavily from that of ordinary relations between neighbours, or rather
of a typical un-neighbourly relationship. When discussing the
Mughal pressure that was being exerted on the Deccan, it was
common for them to speak in terms of ‘gates’, ‘locks’, and ‘walls’,
and to use such terminology as ‘to set foot in’, ‘face to face’,
‘vicinity’, ‘bad’ neighbours, and ‘harmful’ ones.
Realpolitik prevailed in the capital of the Estado. One clear
manifestation of ‘cold’ political realism was the Portuguese
temptation to expand territorially at the expense of the two crumbling
states. Goa initially sought to strengthen the sultanates of the
western Deccan and enhance the unity of the two so that they could
successfully resist the Mughals. But when faced with the collapse or
submission of the sultanates, the Portuguese shifted approach and
moved to take advantage of the disaster. Jahangir’s military inroads
in the Deccan sparked in the Portuguese the first ideas of conquest.
In fact, the possible capture of the fortress of Danda was discussed
several times between Goa and Lisbon from the early 1610s to the
early 1620s. Combined with Chaul, Danda would have extended the
Portuguese area of influence in Konkan; suffice it to say, the fort was
never taken.14 Roughly a decade later, following the fall of
Daulatabad to the Mughals (1633), the ‘looting’ of Ahmadnagar
began as soon as people realized that it was just a matter of time
before the sultanate would be conquered. The Portuguese simply
joined the group so as to ensure they got their share of the booty:
before the Mogor conquers his kingdoms—the Viceroy of Goa wrote
in March 1634, referring to the Nizam Shahi kingdom and Murtaza
III (r. 1633–6)—it would be good to extinguish the rents and rights
that the Deccani King has in our limits and transfer them to Your
Majesty, so that the Mogor does not gain any right over the said
rents.15
The dreamed target was invariably the Konkan region. Very much
along the lines of the conception underlying the utopian Portuguese
project to conquer Mughal Bengal—which will be discussed in the
next chapter—the chronicler Diogo do Couto considered the
presumed weakness of the sultan of Bijapur to be an opportunity to
make the king of Portugal ‘Lord of the entire Konkan’ (Senhor de
todo o Concão). As he saw it in 1608, taking possession of Dabhol
was the springboard for a political endeavour of this calibre, and this
approach was clearly modelled on a relevant precedent: Bahadur
Shah’s concession of Diu to the Portuguese in 1535. Couto was
willing to travel to the court of Ibrahim II disguised as a horse
merchant in order to negotiate the deal, but apparently no viceroy
supported his plan.16
Though no territorial lines between Portuguese India and Mughal
India in the Deccan had been defined, Goa somehow saw the
region in its entirety to be both the political and natural border. The
Estado considered the two aspects to be concurrent and ‘objective’
markers of separation between the Hindustan and the Deccan. In
fact, the Portuguese interpreted the imposing geographical features
of the area that divided the two political worlds as an ecological ‘cut’
between different territories, one that intrinsically contained obvious
political lessons: to force its passage could well translate into defeat.
For them, the ‘natural border’ that distinguished the north from the
south was located in Berar. We will see later in this chapter that the
viceroys of Goa used to describe this kingdom as the ‘key’ to the
Deccan, and likely referred to the separation between the Indo-
Gangetic Plain and the Northern Plateau created by the Vindhya
Range and the Satpura Range in particular.17 Missionaries and
cartographers had complementary views on the strategic
importance of Berar. The Treatise of the Court and Household of
Jahangir Padshah King of the Mughals, penned in 1610–11 either by
the Jesuit Jerónimo Xavier or by his companion Manuel Pinheiro, is
a case in point; while a Portuguese version of this text calls the
‘kingdom of Berar’ the ‘key to the Deccanis’, a Spanish version of
the same treatise specifically terms it the ‘border to the Deccanis’
(frontera de los Dequinies).18 A second significant example of this
shared view is provided by a map drawn by Manuel Godinho de
Erédia and dated c. 1615–22. It represents one single passage
through the region of Khandesh and includes the following caption:
‘Gates of the Deccan’ (portas do dacan).19
 Despite the existence of relevant studies of the roads, circulation,
and warfare in Mughal India, specialists of the empire have yet to
engage with a research agenda that lies at the crossroads of
environmental and frontier studies, similar to that which Gábor
Ágoston has been pursuing with regard to the Ottomans and the
Ottoman–Habsburg frontier in Hungary. This specifically concerns
the obvious geographical constraints of moving sizeable armies
across uncharted terrain. Such constraints could naturally be
mitigated by knowledge of topography—from vegetation and climate
to river crossings and water resources—and recruitment of skilled
road guides.20 We will see later that the Portuguese emphasized
the impact such factors had when Akbar increased pressure on
Ahmadnagar at the end of the sixteenth century. A Jesuit priest
writing on the eve of the Mughal conquest of Khandesh was
impressed with Akbar’s achievements but did not fail to remark on
the difficulties he had encountered: ‘He [Akbar] has already crossed
the Ghats (Gatte), picking his way through mountains so rough and
woody that not seldom the whole day was spent covering the
distance of a gunshot.’21
Thirty years later, the Mughal advance southward under
Shahjahan likewise did not go unobserved in Goa. People in the city
were attentive to the overwhelming impact orography and climate
had on the imperial conquest of the Deccan, all the more so given
the Mughal campaigns that eventually resulted in the elimination of
Ahmadnagar coincided with the great drought and famine that tore
through western India in 1630–2.22 A telling picture emerges from
what the viceroy, count of Linhares, recorded in his diary in the short
period between March and July 1630. The first Mughal successes in
the Deccan would have to wait until early 1631, the moment in
which the forts of Dharur and Qandahar were conquered. These
were significant military accomplishments that merited visual
depiction by prominent imperial court painters such as Balchand and
his brother, Payag.23 Before these victories, the Mughal inroads
southward had faced several drawbacks, inflicted both by
geography and Burhan III (r. 1610–31). The Portuguese began by
carefully following Shahjahan’s advance towards Burhanpur, which
became the imperial capital in March 1630. They monitored the
emperor’s advance and recorded such detailed information as ‘he
progresses three leagues a day’ (on 24 March), concluding on 1
April that Shahjahan ‘fortifies himself in Burhanpur’.24
Abundant but often contradictory news about the Mughal
movements reached Goa in the following weeks. On 13 April the
Viceroy wrote: ‘The imperial army seeks to cross the mountains’,
qualifying that it was unlikely it would pass ‘the gates of Berar
(Verara)’, where the Ahmadnagar forces were awaiting the Mogor.25
Drawing on information provided by a missionary, Linhares noted on
30 April that it would be hard for Shahjahan to sustain ‘such a large
army’ (tão grande exerssito de gente), pointing to the distances and
difficulty of obtaining supplies as the negative factor at play: the
emperor ‘will not be able to support it due to the lack of foodfstuffs;
since he is in the limits of his kingdom, supplies will unlikely
arrive’.26 On 6 May, the Viceroy wrote: ‘The Mogor was very much
affected by hunger and thirst, and he was loosing a lot of people,
and the Melique had killed two thousand men, as well as captured
two hundred elephants and five hundred horses.’27 The Portuguese
discussed then the inflated prices of foodstuffs and water, to remark
some days later that ‘the Mogor is retreating because many people
are dying of starvation in his army’.28
According to Portuguese accounts, the Ahmadnagar forces were
prepared to stay on during the monsoon—people ‘remain on top of
the Ghats (na cabeça do gate), building houses to spend the
winter’.29 Shahjahan, however, had planned the upcoming rainy
season differently; the emperor was said to have made a deal with
Muhammad ‘Adil Shah (r. 1627–56) so that Bijapur would wage war
against Ahmadnagar during the winter months. He intended to
retreat and ‘disperse’ his armies because of the rain that would soon
fall, but eventually ‘not a single drop of water fell from the sky’ (nao
deitou o ceo nehuma agoa). The war could thus continue, even if
the drought was severe and many people and animals perished;
those who had water and provisions available had the upper hand in
the conflict.30 Given this context, it is no wonder people in
Daulatabad observed that an obsessed Shahjahan considered the
Deccan to be ‘like a bone in his throat’ (osso que se lhe atravessara
na garganta). Further news that reached Goa from the capital city of
Ahmadnagar concerned the emperor’s reputed plans to come to the
Nizam Shahi kingdom ‘in person’. Rather than incite fear in the
hearts of the Decanins, this prospect apparently aroused in them
excitement—they were eager to see Shahjahan ‘behind the flanks of
his army, starved and thirsty’.31
As powerful as it was unexpected, this Deccani conception of the
Mughal emperor says much about the rules of the game; hunger
and thirst would kill Shahjahan, not combat wounds. What this and
the other pieces of information that had been meticulously inscribed
in the diary of a viceroy of Goa reveal is that the natural defensive
features of the region, exacerbated by an abnormal climatic
phenomenon, had attained the status of political protagonist with
regard to the Mughal conquest of the Deccan in the 1630s. In fact,
the telegraphic descriptions highlighted above do not privilege battle
scenes or military strategies. Rather, they place mountains, rain,
food, and water at the centre of the narrative, as though imperial
success or failure depended on these factors. Not even the
formidable imperial court based in Burhanpur and the impressive
Mughal military camps on the ground were impervious to nature.
Despite the Mughal victories of early 1631, news that reached Goa
in June that year somehow replicated, in tone and content, the
reports gathered the year before: exorbitant prices on maize flour in
Bijapur (3 June); ‘all armies are being consumed by disease and
starvation’ (8 June); ‘starvation gradually consumes the Mogor
camp, as five hundred people die everyday, and there are days in
which one thousand people die of sheer hunger’ (12 June).32
Mughal sources likewise acknowledged the compounded effects
war, geography, and economy had in the Deccan. An example of
such is ‘Inayat Khan’s description of the imperial siege of Bijapur in
1632. The author introduces his readers to the ‘preventive economic
war’ carried out by both parties and provides a general picture of the
conflict in the Deccan, which for the most part corresponds to the
Portuguese reports discussed above:
In short, no supplies of grain had come in from anywhere during the 20
days they [the Mughals, or the ‘Royalist Forces’] had been besieging
Bijapur, since the enemy previous to their arrival had devastated all the
flourishing villages around the city and carried the grain. Consequently,
the provisions they had brought with them being speedily consumed,
the soldiers were reduced to the verge of starvation. The price of grain
rose to one rupee a seer and the horses and cattle got famished and
emaciated. The chiefs under these circumstances deemed it advisable
to march away into some fertile part of the enemy’s country, both to
recruit their own troops and to devastate the flourishing settlements of
the rebels. With this intent, they turned toward Raibagh and Miraj, both
opulent towns of that kingdom; and wherever they found water, forage,
and grain, they stopped and sent the army to ravage in all directions
until not a sign of cultivation was left. In this way, they desolated the
country on both sides of every road they trasversed.33

If one fast-forwards roughly four decades to the eve of the conquest

of Bijapur to look again at Mughal sources in order to study the
Deccan at the height of Aurangzeb’s conflict with the Marathas, the
documented news tends to be familiar: descriptions of the
destruction of the countryside, the shortage of supplies, scared
villagers, and robbed bankers fill many contemporary documents
related to Aurangzeb’s Deccan.34
The Portuguese believed the natural boundary between the
Hindustan and the Deccan to coincide with the political one. If ‘good
fences make good neighbours’, the fences dividing the Mughals
from the Portuguese were obviously the sultanates of Ahmadnagar
and Bijapur. Prior to 1636, these states were seen in Goa as a two-
panelled folding screen that was placed there to ‘hide’ Mughal India.
Moreover, the screen needed both leaves to be standing—a
complete victory of Bijapur over Ahmadnagar, and vice versa, was
equally dangerous to the Estado da Índia. Resorting once more to
realpolitik, Goa did everything it could to avoid such disruptions in
the balance of power.
The Portuguese developed a somewhat monolithic vision of the
power relationship between Mughal India and the Deccan kingdoms.
They perceived the former to be a homogenous imperial territory, a
unified political and military force (the Mogor), that was dangerously
on the move southward to absorb a region that represented
precisely the opposite. While modern scholars classify the Deccan
as a space rich in ethnic diversity, linguistic plurality, and cultural
heterogeneity, the Estado’s officers at the turn of the sixteenth
century viewed it as a fragmented world, a fertile ground for anarchy,
a doomeed society in permanent political upheaval. In the eyes of
Goa, the Deccani sultanates were home to fragile rulers. Internally
fragile because the Nizam Shahi and the ‘Adil Shahi sultans
frequently found themselves involved in, if not held hostage to, the
conflicting agendas of myriad ethnic groups and political factions
that crowded their courts and shaped the life of their states.
Externally weak, for those same rulers were deemed incapable of
preventing an inevitable Mughal conquest. Instead of fostering an
anti-Mughal alliance, they favoured permanent regional disputes
and fought endlessly among themselves either over contested
fortresses, lands, and rents or to secure the fluid allegiance of
certain ‘captains’.35 The Portuguese discourse on the states of the
western Deccan ingeniously establishes a link between the dramatic
developments at court—invariably comprised of coups and
assassinations, puppet sultans, and shallow favourites—and the
wider picture of a region on the verge of hostile takeover by the
Mughals.
Viewing the Deccan from their palace in the capital of the Estado,
successive viceroys adopted a paternalistic stance toward both the
Nizam Shahi and the ‘Adil Shahi rulers. Often formulated in
suggestive language, recurrent warnings were sent from Goa about
the need to ‘weave’ Ahmadnagar and Bijapur together against
imperial conquest. The acceptance of markers of Mughal suzerainty
by the local sultans was equally criticized; one viceroy, in his
concern regarding Burhan II’s (r. 1591–5) allegiance to Akbar, urged
the sultan of Ahmadnagar to reflect upon ‘what was more
honourable and profitable: to be an absolute king or a vassal
king’.36
Considered within its close-knit relationship with the southward
expansion of Mughal India, this biased vision of the Deccan states
generated in Goa was further reinforced by an intriguing Portuguese
attempt at gendering and moralizing politics and war in the region. In
fact, reflections on gender and masculinity heavily shaped
Portuguese views on the safety of Goa vis-à-vis the Mughal threat in
the Deccan. According to these views, to have a robust kingdom
there must be a proper king, one that thinks and acts in accordance
with what the dominant political theory in Madrid and Lisbon dictates
an ideal king to be. In other words, a king who knows the difference
between good and bad government, who seeks advice (especially if
young and unexperienced) and connects to his people, who is brave
and behaves like a warrior, and who possesses wisdom and does
not cultivate vices. In other words, the sultans of Ahmadnagar and
Bijapur should be ‘real’ men. Alternatively, the Portuguese were
ready to accept women behaving like men, but certainly not men
behaving like women.
The intriguiging case of Sultan Ibrahim II (r. 1580–1627) of Bijapur
together with the perception the Portuguese had of him at the turn of
the sixteenth century provide an excellent entry point into this
discussion. Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah was an eclectic Sunni sultan,
interested in Hinduism, and invested in transforming Bijapur into a
centre of Indo-Muslim culture. He was a learned ruler and a
committed patron of the arts, including poetry, music, and
calligraphy. Himself an artist, Ibrahim is pictured in contemporary
miniatures wearing luxurious clothes, playing the tambur, and
holding castagnets (kartals), while the work he authored, Kitab-i
Nauras, devotes particular attention to Indian ragas.37 The
Portuguese, however, were far from impressed by his liberal
character and cultured profile. They instead viewed these traits to be
unfit for a ruler, rather innapropriate for someone who was supposed
to firmly stand against Akbar and later Jahangir.
The first consistent Portuguese descriptions of Ibrahim date from
the late 1590s and relate to the Mughal campaign in the Deccan.
Dom Aleixo de Meneses, the Archbishop of Goa, wrote in 1597 of
Ibrahim: ‘[He] is a young king, weak, and given to pleasures
(delicioso); he does not take advice, and consequently is not very
well regarded by his vassals.’38 The archbishop’s judgement is
probably coloured by his own, direct knowledge of princely
education. It happens that Meneses had been raised in the royal
palace in Lisbon alongside a young king—Sebastian (r. 1557–78),
likewise frequently portrayed as ‘weak’—as privileged company.
This was because his father, Aleixo de Meneses (d. 1569), was tutor
(aio) to King Sebastian for several years.39 Thus, this experience
qualified him to judge (with Portuguese eyes) the kind of king
Ibrahim II was.
Incidentally, Dom Francisco da Gama’s views on Ibrahim II
parallel those of Aleixo de Meneses. Similarly, the viceroy—the
fourth count of Vidigueira and the great grandson of Dom Vasco da
Gama—also belonged to a family that was intimately familiar with
royal service.40 Gama’s initial observation notes that Ibrahim was
‘very much inclined to vices (vícios) and treats (regalos), while being
rather careless regarding his duties’.41 He goes on to recount that
he had tried to ‘persuade the ‘Adil Khan (Ydalcão) of the need to
abandon the treats and pastimes of which he was so fond, and
alternatively to engage with the government of his Kingdom’.42
Throughout his term, the count of Vidigueira repeatedly remarked
that the sultan was ‘more inclined to pastimes than to matters of
war’, and eventually admitted his failure in ‘diverting him from his
vices’ (apartallo de seus viçios).43
Meneses’s and Gama’s assessment of Ibrahim does not greatly
differ from previous Portuguese observations of other Deccan
sultans: they were young, lacked experience, rejected advice, and
were ‘much given to wine and other vices’.44 This particular choice
of words, however, is quite revealing. Vices, treats, pastimes,
pleasures—all words and concepts that related to a cultural world
that may in part be accessed today by leafing through Sebastián de
Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua Castellana o Española (1611)
and searching for the established meanings some of these words
had on the Iberian Peninsula at the time. According to Covarrubias,
delicioso is ‘one who treats himself to an extreme’ (el regalado con
estremo). He further associates regalo to the kingly figure, but not
necessarily in the negative sense used by Dom Francisco da Gama:
regalo is ‘royal treat’ (el trato real), while regalarse (‘to treat oneself’)
means to ‘enjoy the pleasures that Kings are entitled to’ (‘tener las
delicias que los Reyes pueden tener’).45 Fray Juan de Santa María,
the author of Tratado de República y Policia Christiana para Reys y
Principes (1619), takes a more austere approach, paralleling
Gama’s stance on Ibrahim: Kings, he argues, ‘were not created and
put on the world just for their own comfort and pleasure (regalo); all
the good food does not have to end up on their plates’.46 With
regard to kingly ‘vices’, Jerónimo Osório’s criticism in De Regis
Institutione et Disciplina (1572) is comparable to both Meneses’s
and Gama’s thoughts—vices are the opposite of virtue; if kings
cultivate ‘lavish vices’ (desregrados vícios), their subjects will surely
emulate them.47
Ibrahim’s pastimes and pleasures were of course his many
cultural endeavours and religious experiments, which Portuguese
onlookers in Goa considered to be in contrast with what the perfect
king should be and how he ought to behave. Faced with the threat
created by the vicinity of the Mughals, the independence of ‘Adil
Shahi kingdom and the existence of the capital of the Estado da
Índia depended on the competent execution of war and politics (and
realpolitik) and not on the intellectual effervescence of the sultan.
This discourse in itself contains a potential gender dimension that
Diogo do Couto did not take long to substantiate. Writing from Goa
in 1608 on Jahangir and the inevitable Mughal conquest of Bijapur,
he argued that Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah was not the man for the occasion.
According to Couto, the sultanate would soon be lost because the
sultan ‘is a Sunni, a dancer, and a musician, and as effeminate as a
woman; thus, he is helpless’.48 Interestingly, the first trait the
Portuguese chronicler noted was that Ibrahim was a Sunni, not a
Shi‘a like his predecessors. Was he implying that the sultan could
easily side with Jahangir (the Mughal rulers being Sunnis) rather
than with Shah ‘Abbas? The second point of reflection reinforces
previous Portuguese considerations about the sultan’s
predisposition towards indulging in his vices and pleasures; that the
sultan was a dancer and a musician rendered it impossible, in
Couto’s mind, that he could be a ruler and also a warrior. This
assertion seems to allign Couto with the branch of Portuguese
political thinking that tended to view poorly and dismiss the cultural
dimension of the king.49 This stance is well represented by the
figure of Rui Lourenço de Távora, who, in Jerónimo Osório’s De
Regis Institutione et Disciplina, argues that lettered kings tended to
be cowards and ‘a life excessively devoted to the letters’ could
destroy empires.50 But not even the usual conversation and tension
around the importance attributed to arms over letters did fully apply
to Ibrahim since, as the sultan, more than dedicate himself to
reading and writing, he turned his attention to dancing and playing
the tambur.
The third and most important observation obviously refers to the
image of a ‘helpless’ Ibrahim, as ‘effeminate as a woman’, and,
therefore, helpless and incapable of fighting the Mughals. Drawing
from Machiavelli, the figure of the effeminate prince and its inherent
dangers is discussed in Giovanni Botero’s Della ragion di Stato
(1589), which became accessible in Spanish as early as 1592.51 On
the Iberian Peninsula, this discussion overlapped with a broader
moral debate about the growing visibility of effeminate men in
society. Among other relevant examples, Santa María lamented:
‘Customs are so corrupted that men treat themselves (se regalan)
and adorn themselves like women.’52 Armed with these ideas and
the associated lexicon, Couto harshly judges Ibrahim and goes on to
link the stability of the Mughal–Portuguese border in the Deccan to
the sultan’s masculinity, or lack thereof: an effeminate Ibrahim
translates into a permeable Bijapur, and consequently into a
vulnerable Goa.
Curiously enough, the Mughal discourse on the Deccan sultans
and their ability to rule also revolves around questions of vice and
masculinity. Notwithstanding, fragments of this discourse have been
transmitted by unconventional sources, namely through Portuguese
summaries that provide glimpses of Mughal letters or conversations.
It is fair to ask whether the summaries are loyal to the originals or if
the translation process twisted their original language and intention.
In 1579, a Jesuit priest in Goa referred to an ambassador sent by
Akbar to Sultan ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah I (r. 1558–80). The mission
intended to make clear that, if he [‘Ali] did not give up drinking and did
not renounce the heinous vice (se não emendasse de ser bebado e do
vicio nefando), [Akbar] would come down on him with all his might.
Should he correct his behaviour [Akbar] would be his father and would
take him as his son, and would protect him from his enemies.53

A second instance, also related to Bijapur, takes us to the early

years of Muhammad’s reign and regards a letter from Shahjahan to
Taj Sultana, the sultan’s mother. In an equally paternalistic tone, the
Mughal emperor remarks that Muhammad is just ‘a boy lacking
wisdom’ (hũ menino sem ciso) and further admonishes that, being a
woman, Taj Sultana could not possibly ‘manage the affairs of the
government’ (entender o negocio do governo).54
While Akbar was invested in bringing a sultan’s excessive
drinking and ‘deviant’ sexual conduct to a stop, Shahjahan sought to
prevent a queen mother from actually ruling the sultanate. For this
reason both emperors would be sympathetic to Gama’s and Couto’s
views on Sultan Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah. Yet the Portuguese saw in
Ibrahim’s aunt, Chand Bibi, an antidote to the sultan’s wickness and
the solution to the dilemma of the western Deccan; in fact, they
initially portrayed her as a strong, manly woman, capable of playing
the tough game of politics in Ahmadnagar and defying Akbar in the
1590s. At least for a time, before those in Goa began to regard her
as ‘inconstant’, Bibi was considered to be the ‘man’ that Ibrahim was
not.

AN ‘INCONSTANT WOMAN’ IN LATE SIXTEENTH-

CENTURY AHMADNAGAR
Ahmadnagar definitely came onto the Mughal radar in the mid-
1580s, when Akbar simultaneously granted refuge in his court to the
sultan-to-be Burhan and appointed Mirza ‘Aziz Koka (then subadar
of Malwa) to head the first military campaign against the sultanate.55
Fearing further stronger imperial inroads and also aware that
Burhan Shah (Buranexa), then at Akbar’s court, was relying on
Koka’s support to ‘take possession of the kingdom of the Deccan’,
the Portuguese sought to form an anti-Mughal coalition with ‘the
Kingdoms of Balaghat (Balaguate), our neighbours’.56 Needless to
say, their ultimate goal was not the survival of the Deccani
sultanates per se, but rather to keep the Mogor—the ‘bad
neighbour’—at a distance.57 For the next half-century this would be
the Estado’s major strategy in preventing the Mughal Empire from
‘swallowing’ Goa, that is, keeping the territorial status quo.
An on-site report sent from Nauraspur in 1616 by a German
called Georg Krieger to Michel Angelo Corai, a Syrian Christian then
living in Goa, helps to shed light on the Portuguese obsession with
trying to maintain the distance between their capital city and the
imperial armies. At the time, Krieger was in the then capital of
Bijapur when word arrived that a Mughal military campaign against
Ahmadnagar had just been launched. Krieger’s testimony provides a
vivid picture of how people in the ‘Adil Shahi sultanate—everyone,
from Ibrahim II to his courtiers to the common folk—reacted to the
announcement of an imperial incursion:
This unexpected news has clouded this entire land, and everything
seems to have suddenly changed. Once he was informed about this,
the King [Ibrahim II] sent all his treasures to Bijapur, namely to a fortress
that he holds there for his own safety. From the day he received this
news until today we have witnessed a constant movement of loaded
 carts and elephants. He further ordered the fortification of that city and
fortress as briefly as possible. Last night he has sent many of his wives
there. His plans are unknown, but some say that he likewise intends to
retreat to that fortress, while others think that he is preparing himself to
go on campaign. In sum, there is unspeakable fear and a lot of
confusion among the people as if the enemy was already at the gate,
even if he is distant more than twenty days’ march…58

Several years later (and several times in-between), once more

anxiety struck and daily life was paralysed: upon receiving news
about the movement of a Mughal army towards Bijapur, ‘people
neither move around nor sow, and everyone is terrified’.59
Considering the geographical distance and the Portuguese
tendency to view Ahmadnagar and Bijapur as a buffer zone, these
occasions likely caused less panic in Goa. From other sources,
however, it is clear that following the news that the Mughals were on
the march, the collective fear that rippled through the western
Deccan equally affected the capital of the Estado and the main cities
of the província do Norte.
Let us now return to Burhan, who became Burhan Nizam Shah II
in May 1591 and then inaugurated his four-year reign in
Ahmadnagar. While Abu’l Fazl bitterly noted that Burhan had tried to
distance himself from the Mughal Emperor, turning to the rulers of
Bijapur and Khandesh for support, the Portuguese expressed a
different understanding of the situation. They unequivocally spoke of
Burhan’s loyalty to Akbar and the bonds fostered between the two
men in the Mughal court.60 Building on information received from
Goa, it was commented in Lisbon in 1602 that Akbar
tried to conquer the Deccan seven years ago, thus collecting on the
promise made to him by Burhan Shah during the period he had
wandered around disguised as a penitent. He then told the Emperor
that he was lord of the kingdom of the Melique, and further incited the
Emperor to come over for he was ready to give it to him.61

It seems Akbar was ready to come over, but as suzerain; he would

support Burhan with an army of 6,000 men, on the condition that the
new sultan would thereafter have the khutba read in the Mughal
Emperor’s name.62 It was precisely in this context that the
diplomatic mission to the Deccan by Abu’l Faiz ‘Faizi’, Abu’l Fazl’s
brother and Akbar’s envoy, took place in 1591–3. Faizi was
expected to report on the Deccan’s political life, while putting
pressure on both Khandesh and Ahmadnagar to acknowledge
Mughal suzerainty.63 This purpose was stated in the letters
delivered by Faizi from Akbar to these two rulers. Indeed the
remaining Deccani sultans were also to receive similar messages
from other Mughal envoys.64
The years following Faizi’s mission represent a key moment with
regard to the geopolitical triangle formed by the Mughals, the Nizam
Shahs, and the Portuguese. The latter sensed that the old kingdom
of Berar, which had been under Ahmadnagar’s control for the last
two decades, was about to pass into Akbar’s hands and tried to
persuade Burhan II not to recede.65 The news that reached Goa
was that the local governor opposed the imperial integration of his
territory having remarked that it ‘was royal heritage (patrimonio real),
which could not be dismembered in that way’. Notwithstanding, he
was keen to fight the Portuguese when asked to and was equally
ready to recognize imperial suzerainty in Berar, and therefore had
accepted ‘the weights, measures, mandates (chapas), and other
things of the Kingdom to be like in the Mogor’.66 Even if conveyed in
Portuguese words, this official’s reaction is of the utmost
significance: in his mind, indirect Mughal rule over Berar was
acceptable, but full imperial incorporation would damage the legacy
left by the Imad Shahi dynasty. Such patrimonio real had been well
preserved since 1574 by the sultanate of Ahmadnagar, which, as
one of the Bahmani successor states, presumably embodied the
cultural integrity of the former Bahmani territory itself.67
While ceding to Mughal pressure in the north, Burhan II entered
into open conflict with the Portuguese to the south. In violation of the
1571 settlement between the sultanate and the Estado, Burhan had
a fortress built on a tiny hilly island across from the city of Chaul. His
aim was to blockade the port of Revdanda, or Upper Chaul. The
Portuguese referred to Burhan’s fortress of Korla as the fortaleza do
Morro de Chaul, or simply the ‘Morro’ (hilltop). The Morro is depicted
in António Bocarro’s Livro das plantas de todas as fortalezas (1635),
where it is suggestively referred to as Chaul’s ‘stepfather’.68 The
prevailing sentiment in Goa was that this unexpected belligerent
move was a direct consequence of the alliance between Akbar and
Burhan II and reflected the solid relationship they had formed in
Lahore: ‘He [Burhan] had arranged this with the Mogor, in whose
court he had lived many years.’ Interestingly, this event crystallized
in Portuguese memory as one of Akbar’s Machiavellian moments
and was contrasted with Burhan’s naïvety: Philip III was fully
convinced as late as 1615 that by encouraging the sultan of
Ahmadnagar to wage war against the Estado da Índia back in 1594,
the Mughal Emperor had primarily intended to weaken the sultanate,
ease its demise, and in so doing accelerate its incorporation into the
Mughal Empire.69
The Portuguese crushed the Ahmadnagar forces and conquered
the fortress of Korla in September 1594, thus recovering full control
over Chaul and strengthening their role in the political affairs of the
Deccan. Apparently, the Estado’s victory had a significant impact on
the Mughal court. From Lahore, the Jesuit missionary Jerónimo
Xavier reported that Akbar, Prince Salim, and several nobles
‘showed great admiration for the seizure of the Morro’.70 As
fortresses—their conquest or loss—were considered to be privileged
instruments among the Mughals (but not exclusively) to gauge a
state’s military might and a ruler’s political weight, it is possible that
Xavier’s words really convey the Mughal court’s sentiment once the
news had reached it.
Burhan died in April 1595, soon after the siege of the Morro, and
his grandson Bahadur ascended the throne in August of that same
year. The months in between were characterized by political
uncertainty and it was in this same condition that a Portuguese
ambassador from Goa found the court of Ahmadnagar. During his
return, only once he had reached Chaul, the ambassador reported
on the extreme instability of the ‘kingdom of the Melique’ to the
viceroy. He further noted that ‘the Mogor could well try to conquer
that Kingdom as he had others, and there is word that he is already
seeking to do it’.71
Once in power, the young Bahadur depended completely on
Chand Bibi’s patronage to rule. Bibi was a master of courtly
communities and was an experienced political actor of the western
Deccan. Daughter of Sultan Husain Nizam Shah I (d. 1565) and
widow of ‘Ali I ‘Adil Shah (d. 1580), Chand Bibi lived and
manoeuvred between Ahmadnagar and Bijapur. She had played a
central role in the tumultuous life of the ‘Adil Shahi kingdom during
the early years of the reign of Ibrahim II, her young nephew,
effectively serving as queen regent. A decorative painting on a small
ivory box dated to this period represents the sultan and his aunt and
visually transmits this privileged relationship.72
Chand Bibi moved back to Ahmadnagar in 1584, but would have
to wait more than a decade to gain political visibility in the Nizam
Shahi sultanate. Following the death of Burhan II, Chand Bibi, as the
deceased sultan’s sister, sought to apply her political skills and
salient position in the harem in order to favour Bahadur in the
struggle for succession. But it would take her time to acquire
influence in Ahmadnagar, a condition that would not materialize
before 1596; somewhat inadvertently, however, the Mughals offered
her her chance. As the Portuguese had hinted, the city of
Ahmadnagar eventually came under siege in December 1595. Yet
the improbability of a Mughal victory led to the negotiation of a
settlement a mere three months later. As a result, the Mughals
agreed to withdraw and recognized Bahadur as ruler. In exchange,
they acquired direct control over Berar and expected the new sultan
of Ahmadnagar to declare himself vassal of the Mughal emperor. On
all counts, Chand Bibi emerged as a winning figure.
The imperial siege of Ahmadnagar and its reverberations were
narrated in minute detail by the officials of the municipal council of
Goa in a letter to Philip II in early 1597.
Last year, in early January, one of Akbar’s sons [Murad] entered the
lands of the Melique with 50,000 Mughal horsemen and many foot
soldiers. Facing no resistance whatsoever, he reached the city of
Ahmadnagar, head of that kingdom, and he laid siege to it with
impressive war devices (grandes arteficios de guerra). However, Chand
Bibi—the sister of the deceased king who has been governing the
kingdom since the death of her brother—defended herself vigorously
(se defendeo animosamente). If she could have counted on the support
from the’Adil Shah (Idalxá) and the Qutb ul-Mulk (Cotta Maluquo), which
she repeatedly sought, there is no doubt that she would have defeated
the Mughals. In fact, the latter were short of supplies while the people
loyal to Chand Bibi seized the provisions that they were expecting to
receive. Furthermore, there was an outbreak of plague in their military
camp (deu peste no arraial) and consequently a considerable number of
people died. Under such circumstances, they were forced to negotiate a
truce. They got something in exchange, the most important being the
concession of the lands of Berar, which they very much desired not only
because the winter was fast approaching but also due to their
pretensions to subjugate the kingdom. Once in Berar, the Mughals
sought to attract farmers (corombis), and thus gave them good
incentives to cultivate the lands. The region became considerably
populated, with many native and foreign people. They have built three
fortresses, to make sure that their back will now be safe, but also to to
steadily receive both people and supplies without having to go through
past difficulties. Presently we have news that the Mogores are
determined to enter the lands of the Idalxá this coming summer. With
that purpose in mind, Akbar has sent a lot of people and instruments of
war (petrechos de guerra) to his son [Murad]. The Emperor promised to
send more; in fact he promised to send all deemed necessary for them
to conquer the Deccan, but he has also threatened them rather explicitly
in case they fail to do so. True, the Mughals are very powerful and these
neigbouring kings are not strong enough to defend themselves, more so
because they do not work together (não se unindo) to such an end.
They seldom do. Notwithstanding, this conquest entails very hard work
for the Mughals; there was shortage of rain in Balaghat, as well as of
food supplies and water; this is a major obstacle if one takes into
account that the way is long and the military camp large. However, it is
only a matter of one year more unless, by His mercy, Our Lord cuts
short their terrible intents. We will certainly experience great difficulties,
 since these are bad neighbours (ruins vezinhos) and they hold
considerable power.73

This long passage raises a number of interesting points regarding

the early stages of Akbar’s offensive in the western Deccan. First,
the citizens of Goa proved attentive to the specific conditions of a
Mughal siege in the Deccan region. In addition to the mention of the
employment of ‘impressive war devices’ by the imperial forces, they
rightly noted that epidemics and the scarcity of food and water,
combined with adverse climatic conditions and the obvious
difficulties of supplying armies in remote regions, were enough to
stall the imperial offensive or ultimately justify Akbar’s retreat.
Second, the city officials from Goa emphasize Murad’s interest in
Berar and go on to recount the early stages of the Mughal
colonization of the former sultanate. The prince’s primary concern
was to expand agriculture and foster population growth by
incentivizing ‘many native and foreign people’ to cultivate the land.
Additionally, the Mughals sought to erect three fortresses in Berar as
a means to secure their strategic position there and ease the flow of
men and supplies to the Deccan.74 As discussed earlier in this
chapter, the Portuguese attributed central importance to the former
Imad Shahi sultanate and often mentioned its gifted geopolitical
situation in their writings. Faced with the same critical context
addressed by Goa’s municipal council, Dom Francisco da Gama
considered in 1597 that Berar ‘is the beginning of the kingdom of
Melique and guarantees its full defence’.75 Berar was likewise
termed ‘the gate to the kingdoms of the Deccan’ in another
Portuguese chronicle of the time, in which its anonymous author
goes on to explain—referring to the period immediately prior to the
Mughal conquest—the benign effect its topography had in delaying
Akbar’s progression towards the south:
It is a very strong place because it is totally surrounded by the Gaths,
which are rough mountains, and one cannot cross them except through
certain passages. The Mogor made several attempts to cross them, but
he was always confronted with great resistance and defences. Like a
 ditch (valo), this Kingdom had so far stalled his [Akbar’s] glorious path.
Without this kingdom, he would have already expanded his forces and
conquered the mainland until he found himself face to face (abarbar)
with the Portuguese to break their power and domain.76

Lastly, it is clear that in the eyes of the people of Goa, Chand Bibi
stands as the heroine of this siege: Bibi ‘defended herself
vigorously’, the city officials noted, and she only failed to defeat the
Mughals because military support from Bijapur and Golconda did
not arrive in time. This predominant sentiment in the capital city of
the Estado is similar to that which prevailed in Ahmadnagar as well
as the other states of the Deccan in the aftermath of this Mughal
incursion. Chand Bibi, hereafter recognized with the title of Chand
Sultana, saw her political fortune change as she acquired (even if
momentarily) internal authority and regional fame. In his Burhan-i
ma’athir, ‘Ali Tabata presented Bibi, ‘who carries the banner of
Alexander the Great’, as the true sovereign of the sultanate.77 The
Mughals likewise acknowledged her as a powerful woman, a woman
who was capable of acting like men—like the men under her
command—should. This recognition of Bibi’s position surfaced
during the negotiations that had been called to put an end to the
siege, when one of the Mughal generals tried to shame Afzal Khan,
Ahmadnagar’s representative in the meeting, by calling into question
his manliness: ‘You, like a eunuch, are keeping a woman [Bibi] in the
fort in the hope that she will come to your aid.’78
Yet Chand Bibi was not the sole influential elite female figure of
the Deccan.79 Like Bibi, the women whose lives are briefly
chronicled later all had their ups and downs, periods of undisputed
authority, and evident popularity interspersed with moments of
political oblivion and social ostracization, if not actual incarceration.
With a marriage economy intended to forge alliances between
neighbouring states (similar to what happened in Europe at the
time), it was not uncommon for royal women to have moved
between kingdoms and courts of the Deccan. They were often
schooled in the household practices, harem strategies, and courtly
factions of more than one sultanate. Furthermore, these women
were able to build their own networks and foster relevant group
solidarities. In addition to mastering the internal politics of their
sultanates, they dealt extensively with the Europeans.
One such woman was Khadija Sultana (d. after 1665), who went
by the title of Bari Sahiba. The daughter of Sultan Muhammad Qutb
Shah (d. 1626) and wife to Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah (d. 1656),
Khadija played a significant role in the politics of Bijapur from the
mid-1630s to the early 1660s. She also cultivated her connections
with the Dutch; we know much less about her links with the
Portuguese. Following her husband’s death, Khajida was regent for
‘Ali II during the early years of his reign. Later on she would even
perform the hajj, go on pilgrimage to the Shi‘ite holy places in Iran,
and visit the court of ‘Abbas II (r. 1642–66).80
Tarabai (1675–1761) is equally exemplary since she held sizeable
power in the Maratha kingdom for extended periods over the course
of her long life.81 A further example of a powerful woman in the
Deccan is a contemporary of Chand Bibi, an intriguing yet lesser-
known woman warrior from Bijapur. Her story was briefly narrated
several decades later by seventeenth-century Portuguese chronicler
Manuel de Faria e Sousa (d. 1649). Sousa recorded her visit to Goa
during the viceroyalty of Dom Francisco de Mascarenhas (g. 1581–
4), noting she was probably fleeing from the turmoil that marked the
political life of Bijapur when Ibrahim II became sultan:
Then came to Goa a woman of great fame, formerly banished by
Hidalcan. She was about 65 years of age, little of stature, of complexion
fair, still thewing the ruins of beauty, esteemed a virgin, and much
valued for her prudence, wit, and courage, for in a man’s habit (except
her head which was dressed in white) on horseback with a bow and
arrow she followed the army like an Amazon, and gained reputation.
Her name Abehi. She pretended to treat with the Viceroy about
important affairs, which were never known. She was taken by the
Inquisition, banished to Ormuz, and thence fled to the Mogol.82
Regardless of the reliability or not of Sousa’s account, this is a
rather telling episode. On the one hand, it ties in well with what is
written in Chapter 2 about the mobility of people in the Indo-Persian
world, including relevant cities of the Estado da Índia: Abehi—that
is, sahebi, ‘Lady’—travels (even if forced or impelled to travel) from
Bijapur to Goa, then later to Hormuz and from there to Mughal
lands, thus crossing several political, religious, and cultural
landscapes.83 On the other, it is possible to hone in on Sousa’s
attentive description of this woman and the ways in which her many
virtues are presented to the reader: white and virgin, if Muslim;
beautiful, if old; ingenious, prudent, brave, and esteemed fighter, if a
woman. Similar to Chand Bibi—who was depicted mounted on a
horse and hawking (an activity associated to men and princes)
—‘Abehi’ also rode a horse and wore men’s clothes. This is a
manifestation of the trope of the woman warrior who dresses and
fights like a man, a figure that is to be found in other latitudes of the
early modern world, from the famed Basque Catalina de Erauso
(1592–1650), in Peru and Chile, to the anonymous black slave in
Macau praised by the Portuguese for bravely facing the Dutch in
1622.84
Monitored by the Portuguese, Murad remained in Berar until early
1597, when a second Mughal offensive against Ahmadnagar was
planned. Even if the pressure applied by Akbar did not lead to the
sultanate’s immediate fall, the fact is the internal situation of
Ahmadnagar deteriorated rapidly. The main rupture lay between
Chand Bibi and Abhang Khan, a Habshi who gained visibility during
the war with the Mughals and was consequently promoted to
peshwa (prime minister) by the regent. Gone were the days when
the alliance between the two enabled them to ‘block the strength of
the Mughal incursions’.85 Within this new framework, the
Portuguese stance towards Chand Bibi began to shift, rapidly
evolving into a stereotyped view of the regent of Ahmadnagar as a
woman, and as such unfit to wage war and govern the kingdom.
Indeed it did not take long for Viceroy Dom Francisco da Gama to
believe the sultanate of Ahmadnagar to now be ‘very weak’, not only
due to the recent wars but also because of ‘Chand Bibi’s usual
inconstancies’. And he went on to predict: ‘She will not be able to
resist the Mogor for too long.’86
Gama was acquainted with Bibi mainly through letters and the
letter bearers. Two short letters from Chand Bibi to him, written in
August and October 1598 respectively, have survived in Portuguese
translation.87 On these two occasions, a Brahmin envoy carried the
documents between the city of Ahmadnagar and the city of Goa
(presumably he was also the bearer of Gama’s responses back to
Bibi), and he was authorized to further elucidate the contents thereof
to the viceroy by speaking (de palavra) on the regent’s behalf. The
Soltan Chandebibi—as she referred to herself in one of the letters—
sought to strengthen Ahmadnagar’s relations with the Estado and in
so doing requested Portuguese support against Abancão (Abhang
Khan), which meant standing alongside the havaldar (district
governor) of Konkan. In Bibi’s words, Abhang Khan was heading a
rebellion and planned to seize Konkan.88
These two letters, written ‘man to man’, represent a fragment of
the dealings between the regent and the viceroy and their possible
mutual perceptions. The key document to understanding the events
of 1597–8 and their interpretation in Goa is a letter from Dom
Francisco da Gama to Philip III, penned in mid-December 1599.89
The viceroy begins by recounting the developments in the region
since the Portuguese capture of the Morro, expressing his
conviction that Burhan died of sorrow (moreo de paixão) as a result
of the siege’s outcome. Gama goes on to explain Chand Bibi’s
success in placing Bahadur—‘the child King’ (o Rey menino)—on
the throne: ‘She closed herself with him inside a fortress since she
feared that some of his vassals would seize and tyrannize him, as it
is common among this people.’ The letter notes that the political
turmoil that ensued opened the sultanate’s doors to Akbar. Gama
then mentions the correspondence he had been having with Chand
Bibi in which he assured her of the Estado’s support. Yet, therein,
the viceroy also expressed strong doubts concerning her ability to
maintain control of the situation:
 Because she is a woman, she is very volatile and inconstant…. One
day she seems about to be persuaded, only to change her mind the
next, for she fuels considerable hatred toward some of her captains, her
vassals; I was told that she even wishes and seeks to give both herself
and the King [Bahadur] up to the Mughals just to punish the said
captains.

In another letter, also dated 1599, the viceroy speculates that Chand
Bibi rules ‘with little truth’ and further notes ‘the lack of firmness of
the Persian captains, who are the principals of her government’.90
This is yet another expression of gendered politics: a woman—
inconsistent, volatile, and inconstant by nature—could not possibly
maintain the unity of a kingdom nor face the Mughal threat.
At this point, Dom Francisco da Gama had greater sympathies
towards the Habhsi faction led by Abhang Khan, whom he
considered to be the only viable opposition to the Mughals in
Ahmadnagar. Carefully, so that Chand Bibi ‘does not suspect and
make a mistake that cannot be undone’, Dom Francisco da Gama
maintained regular contact with Abhang Khan and encouraged him
to reach a settlement with the regent. However, the situation in
Ahmadnagar worsened even as the Portuguese viceroy wrote.
Abhang Khan had fled the sultanate and Chand Bibi had apparently
been assassinated by a crowd that was led to believe, by a eunuch
called Hamid Khan, that she had begun to favour the Mughals
(Gama had heard the same rumour). In August 1600 the imperial
army marched into the city of Ahmadnagar.91 Bahadur was arrested
and succeeded by Murtaza Nizam Shah II (r. 1600–10), who ruled
the sultanate from the city of Daulatabad. Murtaza was the
‘invention’ of a man that would play a key role in the western
Deccan’s political life for the next quarter century, a man that would
shape the region’s relations with the Mughals and the Portuguese
alike. This man was a Habshi former slave called Malik ‘Ambar
(1548–1626) and effectively Chand Bibi’s successor as a kingmaker
in Ahmadnagar.92
To a certain extent, as the effective ruler in Ahmadnagar, Chand
Bibi represented the survival of the autonomous states in
northwestern Deccan. Therefore, although her death marked the
begining of the end, the demise of her legacy only truly came in
1601. It was the fall of the sultanate of Khandesh that metaphorically
marked the fall of the regent of Ahmadnagar. Strategically located in
the northern periphery of the Deccan, between the rivers Tapti and
Narmada, the Faruqi kingdom became a Mughal province in that
year.93 Akbar led the conquest of the sultanate himself, leaving Agra
at the head of a large army in September 1599. When faced with the
inevitable Mughal attack, Sultan Bahadur Shah (r. 1597–1601) gave
up the control of the capital city of Burhanpur and retreated to the
nearby fortress of Asirgah.94
Oddly enough, the Portuguese officials in Goa did not chronicle
these events in detail; a worried Dom Francisco da Gama wrote in
April 1600 only that Akbar himself was now dangerously close, in
Burhanpur, ‘the main city of the kingdom of the Mirão’.95 The
conquest of Khandesh, particularly the prolonged siege of Asir
(March 1600 to January 1601), was, however, described in detail by
the Jesuit missionaries who accompanied Akbar on his expedition to
the Deccan. Jerónimo Xavier left a first-hand account of the siege,
while Nicolau Pimenta based his impressions on a report penned by
Bento de Góis. The situation, size, and strength of the fortress of
Asirgah—‘which nature and art have made impregnable’ and was
protected by numerous and huge cannons, which, ‘when fired,
sound as loud as thunder’—caught the eye of both priests; the
impenetrable fortress explained why the Mughal siege dragged on
for eleven months before the sultan capitulated.96 Writing from
Bassein a year and a half later, an anonymous official of the Estado
announced to Gama’s successor, Viceroy Dom Aires de Saldanha
(g. 1600–5), what seemed to be the inevitable outcome of the siege:
Akbar would soon become ‘King of Balaghat’.97

AN ‘IRANIAN OLIVARES’ BEHIND BIJAPUR’S

DEED OF SUBMISSION
We now fast-forward thirty years to focus on another moment of
heavy imperial pressure over the western Deccan. The fall of Sultan
Bahadur Shah did not mark the rise of the Mughal rulers as kings of
Balaghat, but the conquest of the city of Daulatabad in 1633
concluded the dismantlement of Ahmadnagar. Shortly thereafter, the
city would acquire the status of imperial capital, and eventually, in
1636, the strategic lands of the sultanate—which Goa then
compared to a ‘Moorish lock’ (cadeado mourisco) protecting the
Estado—were shared out to Shahjahan and Muhammad ‘Adil
Shah.98 With one of the two leaves of the folding screen gone, the
other would inevitably fall: indeed, Bijapur’s submission to imperial
authority, as expressed in the signing of the Deed of Submission,
followed that same year.99 It is in this context of the 1630s that the
figure of Mirza Muhammad Amin, best known as Mustafa Khan, will
be discussed. Between at least 1620 and his death in 1648, this
Iranian was a key individual in the political life of Bijapur as well as
in the Mughal–Portuguese equation of the western Deccan.
The available sources on Mustafa Khan are varied, ranging from
Indo-Persian and Dakani texts to Portuguese and Dutch records.
His three-decade-long career in Bijapur has attracted the attention
of scholars since the 1940s and has recently become the object of
renewed interest.100 As with Amin Khan—an influential Iranian in
the Qutb Shahi court, intimate of Sultan Ibrahim (r. 1550–80),
studied by Phillip Wagoner—it is possible to bypass the dominant
vision of Mustafa Khan and others like him that has thus far been
conveyed by Persian texts and to move on to explore a range of
sources produced in several languages that reflect diverse cultural
backgrounds. These sources, including Portuguese texts that have
not yet been fully considered, ultimately contribute to a more
nuanced picture of the ‘divide’ between Persianate and Indic
political, social, and cultural spheres in the early modern Deccan.101
In December 1642, six years before Mustafa Khan’s passing, a
Portuguese man from Goa that knew him well—a certain Manuel
Dinis, to whom we will return in this chapter—remarked that
Mostafacão was ‘very old and could die any day now’.102 However,
Mustafa Khan’s alleged iminent death seemed in no way to have
diminished his authority; Dinis failed to mention Mustafa Khan’s
active participation in the Bijapuri campaigns against the Karnataka
principalities, which followed the signing of the treaty with the
Mughals in 1636 and the pacification along the northern frontier of
the sultanate.103 Notwithstanding, Dinis knew enough to affirm then
that ‘be it war, peace, or treasury, this King ‘Adil Shah is entirely in
the hands of Mustafa Khan, who does what he wants; despite being
rather old, he is very much feared’. The obvious conclusion for this
sharp observer of Bijapur politics was that ‘Mustafa Khan is more
[powerful] than what the Count-Duke used to be in Castile’. This is
an obvious reference to the celebrated count-duke of Olivares,
Gaspar de Guzmán (d. 1645), who had by that point suffered
political disgrace.104
This intriguing reflection is included in a letter to the Portuguese
king, who certainly knew nothing about Bijapur or Persian influence
in the sultanate, let alone Mustafa Khan. Being aware of this,
Manuel Dinis sought to convey the degree of Mustafa Khan’s
importance by ‘translating’ it into something that those in Lisbon
could relate to. By comparing Mustafa Khan to the count-duke, and
presenting this ‘Iranian Olivares’ as greater then the ‘original’, Dinis
could be sure that King John IV (r. 1640–56) and his advisors would
immediately understand what was at stake. This reinforced what
had been written in letters from Goa about Mustafa Khan since the
late 1620s wherein Mustafa Khan was identified as the sultan’s
favourite. The recurrent use of the terms ‘valido’ and ‘privado’ from
various sources rendered the parallel between Mirza Muhammad
Amin (or Mustafa Khan) and Gaspar de Guzmán even more striking.
Although Mustafa Khan’s family was originally from Lar, it is
unclear when he left Iran or, though less likely, whether he had
actually been born in India. It is possible he travelled to the Deccan
soon after 1613, in the period when, as we have seen in Chapter 2,
Shah ‘Abbas I and Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II strengthened their ties by
regularly exchanging letters, gifts, and envoys. Like many Iranian
immigrants in India in the early modern period, there is a fair
possibility that Mustafa Khan lived in Bijapur so as to keep his eye
on Safavid Iran. In addition to nurturing family bonds, it was also
important to negotiate distances and maintain powerful connections
in court circles, if not with the ruler himself.105 When in 1632–3, at
the height of Mustafa Khan’s influence in Bijapur, his daughter, Taj
Jahan Begam, married Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah, the agents of
the Safavid ruler in the sultanate noted their presence in the
wedding procession.106 Shortly thereafter, another relevant, if
different, sign regarding the mental and political geographies at play
was made manifest. Given their protector’s somewhat volatile
political fortune, members of Mustafa Khan’s family and clique
(namely one Muhammad Raza) felt uneasy about remaining in
Bijapur in at least two instances (1635 and 1643); their immediate
thought was to return to Iran.107
Mustafa Khan would have probably recognized himself in the
suggestive words of Muhammad Baqir Kahn Najm-i Thani (d. 1637),
another fellow Iranian, a contemporary of his. A soldier and poet,
Baqir joined the Mughal service at the beginning of the seventeenth
century. Some of his letters and two of his works survived, among
which is his greatest intellectual endeavour, a political treatise
entitled Maw‘izah-i Jahangiri. Interestingly, within the text the author
openly expresses his sentiments on living abroad and finding
oneself far from one’s country, family, and friends: ‘Travel is a tree
that bears only the fruit of separation. Leaving one’s homeland is a
cloud that drops the rain of grief.’108 Did Mustafa Khan on any
occasion feel the same way during his long years in the Deccan?
Did he too suffer nostalgia for Iran while living in Bijapur? Like Baqir
Muhammad, Mustafa Khan was a soldier, though he was no poet.
His patronage of poets and other intellectuals is documented, but he
did not seem to have penned any works: no political treatises, no
reflections put to paper, and no sign of his putative correspondence
with Iran.109 In his seat in Goa, the viceroy count of Linhares may
have imagined that Mustafa Khan was inclined to chat about Iran,
even if with Catholic priests. This may have explained why when he
had to send a new ambassador to Bijapur in 1630, the Portuguese
viceroy selected two Augustinian priests, both knowledgeable of
Safavid Iran. Fray João da Rocha headed the embassy and was
accompanied by Fray Sebastião de Jesus, who spoke Persian
(sabe falar a lingoa parçia).110 The instructions handed over to the
missionary-ambassador were clear. Upon his arrival, he was to pay
a visit to Mustafa Khan at his home. Once in Mustafa Khan’s
presence, he was to mention his own experience of India as well as
his familiarity with the ‘affairs of Persia’. The courtesy call was to be
brought to an end, leaving Mustafa ‘thirsty for his [the ambassador’s]
good conversation’.
Mustafa Khan first appears in Portuguese documents in 1620 as
Mir Mamede Amy (Mirza Muhammad Amin). He was then the new
qiladar (fort or town governor) of Ponda and havaldar of Konkan
(Capitão de Pondá e Governador do Concão); a man with whom the
Estado da Índia would deal and clash regularly in the years to
come.111 The events of this early phase show that although Mirza
Muhammad Amin rose to prominence in Bijapur mostly under
Muhammad ‘Adil Shah, he managed to also amass considerable
influence over Ibrahim II in the last years of his reign. Dom
Francisco da Gama confronted then the sultan of Bijapur about
Muhammad Amin’s ‘bad behaviour’ (mao procedimento) on a
number of issues; the Portuguese viceroy was convinced as early
as 1623 that the ‘Captain of Ponda promotes disorder only because
his father-in-law Mula Mamede is very close to the King [that is,
Ibrahim II], and for this reason no one dares to bring these matters
to the King’s attention’.112 This Mula Mamede was in fact Mulla
Muhammad Lari, an Iranian general in the service of Bijapur who
fought Malik ‘Ambar in the early 1620s. Mulla Muhammad Lari was
killed on the battlefield in 1624 when, under an entente between
Ibrahim II and Jahangir, he had travelled to Burhanpur to try to
capture the rebellious Prince Khurram, the future Emperor
Shahjahan.113
Several threads in the web of connections that the havaldar had
begun to weave in Konkan became apparent in Goa. In addition to
backing from his father-in-law, Mustafa Khan also relied on the
complicity of the resident ambassador with the sultanate in the
capital of the Estado. Furthermore, it seems the havaldar of Konkan
employed a cousin who is said to have travelled frequently to Goa.
Mustafa Khan’s contacts also extended at this point to include
Christians; he is known to have formed a connection with a certain
Jorge de Sousa (or da Costa, according to other sources), whose
(Portuguese?) mother was very close to Ibrahim II.114 At the peak of
his influence in the 1630s–40s, this network of family, friends, and
acquaintances was extensive. As shown in Figure 5.1, which
partially reconstructs the thread as seen from Goa, Mustafa Khan
sat at the centre of a heterogeneous web of power that included
Iranians like himself, but also Hindu Brahmins and Portuguese
Catholics. Most of the Iranians involved were his family members,
with particular reference to two brothers-in-law—Shah Abu’l Hasan
and Shah Saib—and Muhammad Raza, who was Shah Saib’s son-
in-law and a close relative (muy parente) of Mustafa Khan.
Unfortunately, the women who wove these family bonds are absent
from the available sources.
Mirza Muhammad Amin’s influence in Bijapur expanded in the
aftermath of the succession crisis of 1627, during which he
decisively acted as kingmaker. The ascension of Sultan Muhammad
‘Adil Shah was the outcome of the artful manoeuvring of two men,
Daulat Khan and Muhammad Amin, who had by then acquired
enough weight in the court of Bijapur to shape the political
developments of the sultanate in the years to come. It was then that
the new sultan granted Daulat Khan the title of Khawas Khan and
Muhammad Amin that of Mustafa Khan.115 They were now the two
main power brokers of Bijapur and, for better or worse, their careers
became closely interlaced, as the presentation of their portraits one
after the other in the Witsen Album seems to suggest.116
The Portuguese vigilantly kept tabs on the actions of these two
privados, as well as the alternating clashes and alliances between
them; they feared their growing influence and frequently lamented
what they considered to be the ruler’s extreme political fragility.
Onlookers from Goa repeatedly affirmed throughout the 1630s that
Sultan Muhammad was nothing but a puppet in the hands of
Khawas Khan and Mustafa Khan.117 A Habshi born in India,
probably in Bijapur (natural daquele reino), Khawas Khan was
employed as ‘a musician at the time of this King’s father [Ibrahim
II]’.118 He likely controlled the inner circuits of the palace, for the
viceroy count of Linhares wrote: ‘[He] is behind doors (portas
adentro) with the King and has him in his hands.’ Mughal and
Portuguese texts alike underscore the existence of close ties
between Khawas Khan and the most prominent Brahmins of Bijapur,
especially Murari Pandit.119
F 5.1 Mustafa Khan’s Web of Connections in Bijapur as Seen from
Goa, 1620s–40s
Source: Author.
List of Persons: 1. Mustafa Khan [MK]
Iranian, d. 1648; his name was Mirza Muhammad Amin; honoured with the
title of Mustafa Khan, 1627; the Portuguese called him Mostafacão.
2. Mulla Muhammad Lari
Iranian, d. 1624; MK’s father-in-law; the Portuguese called him Mula Mamede
and noted his influence in the early steps of MK’s career in Bijapur, 1623–4
(ACE, vol. I, pp. 179–81, 195–6).
3. Shah Abu’l Hasan
Iranian; MK’s brother-in-law, 1638 (ACE, vol. III, p. 649); ambassador of
Bijapur to Goa, 1636 (ACE, vol. II, p. 92).
4. Shah Saib
Iranian; MK’s brother-in-law, 1654 (ACE, vol. III, p. 570); Muhammad Raza’s
father-in-law, 1635–6 (ACE, vol. II, pp. 26, 92; Linhares 3, p. 251); one of the
two ‘captains’ who rebelled in Karwar against the sultan of Bijapur, 1631
(ACE, vol. I, p. 530); qiladar of Ponda, 1654–5 (ACE, vol. II, pp. 346, 348,
369–70).
5. Muhammad Raza
Iranian; ambassador of Bijapur to Goa, 1629, 1633 (ACE, vol. I, pp. 243–4,
470); havaldar of Konkan, 1636, 1643 (ACE, vol. II, pp. 93, 458–9; ACE, vol.
III, p. 648); ‘close relative’ of MK and ‘great friend’ of Manuel Dinis, 1630
(ACE, vol. I, pp. 238, 243–4).
6. Taj Jahan Begam
MK’s daughter; married Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah in 1632–3; the
Portuguese considered this wedding to have strengthened MK’s political
authority in Bijapur (ACE, vol. II, p. 554).
7. Asad Khan
MK’s son, 1642 (ACE, vol. II, p. 340); involved in the military campaigns
against the Siddis of Danda in the 1640s as ‘captain of the Idalcão’ (ACE, vol.
II, p. 340); merchant-shipowner with interests in the Persian Gulf, 1642 (ACE,
vol. II, pp. 374–5, 387–8); friends with viceroy count of Aveiras, 1642 (ACE,
vol. II, p. 387).
8. Unnamed cousin
Went often to Goa in MK’s service when this last was havaldar of Konkan,
1620 (ACE, vol. I, p. 118).
9. Santu Shenvi
Hindu Brahmin; MK’s agent in the port of Karwar, 1638 (ACE, vol. II, p. 554).
10. Iroji Shenvi
Hindu Brahmin; MK’s agent in Goa, late 1640s (M. Dinis’s letter, 1649).
11. Jorge de Sousa (or da Costa)
Portuguese adventurer living in Bijapur; MK’s friend, 1620, 1623 (ACE, vol. I,
pp. 118–19, 164).
12. Vicente Ribeiro
Portuguese merchant of Goa; held privileged contacts in the ‘Adil Shahi court;
MK’s ‘old friend’, 1630, 1633 (ACE, vol. I, pp. 245, 474); had likewise been
close to MK’s father-in-law (Bocarro [1876], I, p. 306); knew Shah Saib and
Muhammad Raza very well, 1633–4 (Linhares 3, p. 215; ACE, vol. I, p. 472).
13. Manuel Dinis
Portuguese casado of Goa; knew well MK, with whom he corresponded; was
close to Shah Saib (M. Dinis’s letter, 1649) and Muhammad Raza.

Although Khawas Khan clearly had influence over the Sultan, it is

the personage and influence of Mustafa Khan that is most relevant
to this chapter. Mustafa Khan’s rise impacted the political landscape
of the sultanate and impacted the balance of the interested factions.
Being of ‘Persian nation’ (de nasção pársio), Mustafa Khan
obviously sought to fill the key political positions of the sultanate with
other Iranians.120 In this new context, the Habshis—an ethnic group
that exerted considerable influence during Ibrahim II’s long reign—
were gradually excluded (or excluded themselves) from the sultan’s
inner circle. One such example was Ikhlas Khan (Ecalascão), who
refused to continue as financial superintendent of Bijapur: ‘As the
Persians are in power, he does not want to mix with them because
they are traitors.’121 Like the Persian texts, Portuguese sources
tend to emphasize the existence of binary tensions across ethnic
groups in the Deccan sultanates. This perspective moulded most of
twentieth-century scholarship, but it is clear today that these divides
were far less rigid than previously believed. One relevant example
concerns the place of Brahmins within these ethnic tensions:
‘Deccanis’ such as Khawas Khan are usually pictured as being
closely associated with Brahmins, while ‘Westerners’ such as
Mustafa Khan seem to have been biased against them. Mustafa
Khan was in fact vocal about his suspicions concerning Brahmins
working for the Portuguese, but at the same time he employed
Shenvi Brahmins in his service: men such as Santu Shenvi, his
agent in the port of Karwar, and Iroji Shenvi, who was his mediator
when he dealt with some of the most relevant figures of the imperial
elite of Goa.122
The ‘Relação dos Reis Vizinhos’ states that Mustafa Khan was
the ‘Kar-i-Mulk (Caramaluco), which corresponds to the secretary of
the state of the king’. But he was also the vedor da fazenda
(financial superintendent) of the kingdom.123 The viceroy count of
Linhares attributes Mustafa Khan with a broad spectrum of political
responsibilities: ‘As secretary, privado, valido, and governor, he
controls every matter related to the government.’124 Another
Portuguese testimony of the time stated: ‘No mandate (chapa) or
farman (formão) leaves the hands of the ‘Adil Shah without being
seen by the said Mustafa Khan, who apparently serves as secretary
or chancellor of this Kingdom.’125 It is certain that Mustafa Khan
became Bijapur’s wazir, an office comprising rather flexible
competencies that made the holder’s power more effective in times
of political weakness of the ruler, as was the case of Sultan
Muhammad’s early years.126
It is also clear that Mustafa Khan had a firm say in the foreign
affairs of the ‘Adil Shahi kingdom, for he systematically dealt with the
neighbouring states and mastered the sultanate’s policy of alliances.
Such responsibilities included maintaining relations with the
Europeans. In fact, the Iranian wazir kept regular contact with Goa
until his death through the exchange of letters with different viceroys
and several other officials of the Estado as well as meetings. He
additionally had dealings with many other Portuguese individuals,
among which were diplomat-priests (Fray João da Rocha),
merchants (Vicente Ribeiro), and adventurers (Jorge de Sousa). He
further controlled Bijapuri officials with significant functions vis-à-vis
the capital of the Estado, the port cities of Konkan, and maritime
trade in the Arabian Sea and beyond, including the ambassador to
Goa, the qiladar of Ponda, or the governor of Dabhol. Dutch sources
speak of Mustafa Khan as ‘the main shipowner on the Konkani
coast in that period’, recording that he operated as many as seven
ships.127 In the final decade of his political career, right before he
turned his attention to Karnataka, Mustafa Khan sought to diversify
his contacts with the Europeans and became the VOC’s main
interlocutor in Bijapur. In fact, it was with the Iranian wazir that
Johan Van Twist—the company’s emissary to the court of Bijapur in
1637—negotiated the establishment of a Dutch factory in
Vingurla.128 Van Twist’s report provides a detailed picture of ‘Duke
Mustafachan’, with whom he had close contact for roughly five
weeks (13 February to 19 March 1637). The Dutch envoy’s insights
regarding the influence Mustafa Khan had over different political and
administrative levels of the sultanate largely match those noted by
the Portuguese writers. Van Twist, however, included further details
of Mustafa Khan’s affluence, authority, and personality; he
maintained a sumptuous house and employed several Europeans in
his service, including an Englishman called Thomas Trebecq, a
Dutch surgeon, and two Portuguese (mestizo) musicians to
entertain guests.129
Mustafa Khan proved quite able in dealing with the Europeans
and their maritime-commercial aspirations. In addition to being able
to engage with merchants and speak their ‘language’, he also knew
how to preserve a strong public image as a power broker. Both the
Estado and the VOC acknowledged his mastery of protocol and
political ritual. On all counts, the comparison with Mir Musa—his
fellow countryman and contemporary discussed in the previous
chapter within the context of Mughal Gujarat—proves appropriate.
Like Mir Musa, Mustafa Khan learned how to manoeuvre between
the Portuguese and the Dutch. In the years following Van Twist’s
mission to Bijapur, the Dutch expressed both excitement and
bitterness over their relationship with the ‘Duke’; they went from
euphoria to disappointment, eventually reaching the conclusion that
an unstable man addicted to opium was playing them. Somewhat
differently, the Portuguese kept the same negative perceptions for
three decades, perceptions that were shaped by a singularly political
understanding of the figure of Mustafa Khan. In fact, decision-
makers in Goa were in no way attentive to other facets of his
personality. They never spoke of the fact that he was a cultural
patron, never described his palace-complex, or cared to mention the
caravanserai he founded.130 Nearly six years after his death, Goa
still perceived him as an enemy.131 The Portuguese observations of
Mustafa Khan are twofold. On the one hand, they relate to the tense
‘neighbourship’ between the Estado and Bijapur and the myriad
conflicts it fuelled, from border disputes to petty misunderstandings
to clashes about the sultanate’s trading ventures (illegitimate, to
Portuguese eyes) in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.132 On the
other hand, and far more important in the context of the present
chapter, people in Goa strongly judged Mustafa Khan for his
allegiance to the Mughals and his willingness to betray Muhammad
‘Adil Shah by handing in the sultanate of Bijapur to Shahjahan.
Like most favourites during the early modern period, Mustafa
Khan did not exactly conform to the ideal figure described by
Anthony Sherley (d. 1635) in 1622: ‘Your Excellency, in sum, to be
the favourite is to be the king’s clothing; and accouterments with no
seam, tight-fitting to the body of the king.’ Sherley was addressing
here the count-duke of Olivares, to whom he dedicated the Peso de
todo el mundo, but he could just as well have been speaking to the
‘Iranian Olivares’.133 Mustafa Khan, however, never was his sultan’s
‘clothing’. His relationship with Muhammad ‘Adil Shah was
characterized by frequent ups and downs as the valido fell and rose
several times. Indeed the sultan of Bijapur imprisoned his privado
twice. In 1635, when Khawas Khan was decapitated by royal order,
‘Mustafa Khan, who holds even more power, was subjected to a
tight prison’.134 Most probably consequent to Mustafa Khan’s arrest,
two close members of his circle tried to leave the sultanate by
escaping to Goa. These were Muhammad Raza (who eventually
fled to Kanara) and his father-in-law, Shah Sahib.135 Mustafa Khan
meanwhile eventually recovered his previous level of authority, but,
when a new crisis arose in 1643 (likely due to his independent
agenda in the Karnataka), he was once again incarcerated. Be that
as it may, the sultan held then a rather low opinion of his former
favourite, as the bitterness of these words demonstrate:
Mustafa Khan does not deserve my royal grants and favours. I made
him so many, and, having it all, he failed to take advantage of them. He
forgot what I did for him, was ungrateful, dishonest, and committed
numerous mistakes. When I learned about his misbehaviour and
wrongdoings, I became very upset and thus ordered the ungrateful man
together with his sons to be imprisoned, as well as all the people
belonging to his coterie (gente de sua obrigação e parcelidade). 136

Mustafa Khan’s arrests of 1635 and 1643, however, were not

isolated and entirely unforeseeable incidents. Prior to them,
according to Portuguese records, there had already been tense
moments between Mustafa Khan and Muhammad Shah, specifically
in relation to the valido’s dealings with the Mughals. Those in Goa
were convinced in the 1630s that the ‘Iranian Olivares’ was
completely aligned with Shahjahan: ‘He has an agreement with the
Mogor in order to become lord of the kingdom of ‘Adil Khan
(Idalcão).’137 Was it possible that Mustafa Khan, in exchange for his
aid in facilitating the Mughal conquest of the sultanate, aimed to be
appointed subadar?
More than blind allegiance to the Mughals, it is obvious that
Mustafa Khan had his own agenda, which made him juggle and
manage relations with not only Shahjahan and Muhammad, but also
with courtiers of the royal palace and minor officials in the
sultanate’s limits (be it Konkan or Karnataka), as well as the
Portuguese and the Dutch. Considering the number of parties
involved, he was, unsurprisingly, often caught between a rock and a
hard place. Playing the dangerous game of multiple loyalties caused
him problems in both the ‘Adil Shahi and the Mughal courts, but
Mustafa Khan could not have expected otherwise. One entry in
Linhares’s diary from late June 1631 speaks of a letter written to Taj
Sultana (the queen mother of Bijapur) by Shahjahan containing
plenty of accusations about Mustafa Khan, and that she decided to
confront the accused. The entry goes on to say that Mustafa Khan
‘answered in a frightened tone, saying that he would give her
300,000 pagodes, 50,000 at once and the remaining amount in one
month’s time, and that this sum should be sufficient to silence the
Queen’.138 His ability to compromise is well reflected in this
incident, but the emperor’s letter—known to us through a third
person Portuguese summary—informs us far more about Mustafa
Khan and Shahjahan’s views on him. The emperor began the letter
with a brief mention of Khawas Khan, ‘a singer, who earned his life
playing and singing’. Shahjahan’s prejudice towards Khawas Khan
is somewhat comparable to Diogo do Couto’s in 1608 concerning
Khawas Khan’s own patron, Sultan Ibrahim II. As to Mustafa Khan:
Mustafa Khan was a traitor who will harm any one who puts a hand on
his plate, and one could really tell that he was the son-in-law of Mula
Mamede [Mulla Muhammad Lari], who caused many losses including
men of war, as she knows well from the time of her husband, the old
King [Ibrahim II]. Mustafa Khan had written to him, the Mogor King,
inviting him to besiege Bijapur, and if he, the Mogor, did not come fast to
wage war, like Mustafa Khan was advising him to do, this was because
he sought to keep the great friendship and communication that he used
to have with the old King, her husband, who had always obeyed him …,
and if she wanted to know the whole truth, she should imprison Mustafa
Khan and send a trustworthy person to his court with the tribute, and
then he would tell her everything about the government of her son…139

First, Shahjahan places himself in this letter on a superior level, not

only because he was talking to a woman on government affairs but
also because he assumed to know more than her about her own
son, the sultan, and the ways in which the sultanate was being
governed. Second, Shahjahan’s highly critical remarks about the
‘Iranian Olivares’—the emperor went so far as to suggest that her
interlocutor order the assassination of both Mustafa Khan and
Khawas Khan—demonstrate that the former was not fully aligned
with the Mughals. In addition, the specific reference to Mustafa
Khan’s father-in-law is significant. As we noted earlier, Mulla
Muhammad Lari died in 1624 while hunting down Shahjahan, then
Prince Khurram. The Mughal Emperor had not forgotten the affront
and took the opportunity to draw a parallel between two failed
characters: Mulla Muhammad and his son-in-law, Mustafa Khan.
Finally, Shahjahan deliberately evokes the figure of Ibrahim II and a
past situation of perfect suzerainty between the Mughal Empire and
the sultanate of Bijapur, one that he invites the queen mother to
quickly restore by sending tribute to the imperial court.
Three years later, in 1634, a new incident would once more
expose Mustafa Khan: a letter from him to Shahjahan was
intercepted and brought to Muhammad ‘Adil Shah himself. In the
letter Mustafa Khan suggested the Mughal Emperor to suspend a
planned attack on Bijapur ‘because the ‘Adil Khan was then very
strong’. When the Sultan read it he fell silent (a leo, e calou). He
immediately decided to confiscate some of his privado’s lands and
toyed with the idea of seizing all his property for redistribution
among other Bijapuri nobles, as was common practice to secure
loyalties in the Deccan sultanates. Mustafa Khan obviously
understood the danger he was in and opted to err on the side of
caution. Thus, he took refuge in his ‘fortress’, ‘without daring to
leave it for fear of being arrested’. More than a month later, he
apparently had still not left his house.140
The ‘Iranian Olivares’ died on 9 November 1648, but this news
took more than two months to reach Goa. On 15 January 1649,
Manuel Dinis—the man whose views on Mustafa Khan opened this
section of the chapter—did not yet know of his passing. This is
evident from the letter Dinis penned and addressed that day to
‘Mirza Muhammad Amin (Mir Mahamede Momina), from the Council
of the King ‘Adil Shah’.141 Interestingly, Dinis gives his interlocutor’s
full name with no mention to his title, further identifying him as one
of the members of the sultan of Bijapur’s council but not as the most
powerful favourite of the ‘Adil Shahi court. The letter is a formal
document concerning the relations between Bijapur and the Estado,
or between Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah and King John IV. It also
constitutes a ‘monument of dissimulation’, a much-debated phrase
in the author’s own time and world.142 Dinis’s harsh views on
Mustafa Khan stated back in 1642 contrast with the soft language
employed in this letter of 1649, in which Mustafa Khan is presented
as a ‘friend’ and man of ‘good qualities’ (boas partes). With this
letter Dinis sought to maintain his ties with an old prominent Muslim
figure of a Muslim court for obvious political motives, and yet he was
a ‘Familiar of the Holy Office’. The other two Portuguese individuals
Dinis mentioned in the letter—the Archbishop of Goa (the
Franciscan Francisco dos Mártires) and the Inquisitor of Goa
(Domingos Rebelo Lobo)—were likewise sheer dissimulators. The
greetings that were passed on through the letter were made using a
mixed Islamo-Christian formula: ‘warm greetings with goodwill and
love’ (muitas salamas com boa vontade e amor).143 To be sure,
Mártires and Lobo were two distinguished figures of the Catholic
hierarchy of Goa and simultaneously sat on the State Council,
advising the viceroy on government affairs; their true opinion about
Mustafa Khan could not be more distant from that conveyed in the
letter of 1649.
In fact, the Portuguese dissimulated with Mustafa Khan
throughout. Once it had been decided a diplomatic mission was to
be sent from Goa to Bijapur in 1638, the State Council took the time
to ‘prescribe’ the right approach the chosen ambassador was to take
with the privado—to dissimulate: ‘Mustafa Khan is our enemy, but he
[the ambassador] should treat him as a friend, showing him with
words that we consider him as such.’144 Several years later, when
preparing another embassy to the sultanate and discussing how to
deal with Shah Sahib, Mustafa Khan’s son-in-law, the Portuguese
agreed that there was no need to dissimulate with him as much as
they had with his late father-in-law (menos forsado dissimular).145
One dissimulates with those who dissimulate, and Manuel Dinis
does not fail to accuse the privado of ‘concealing his evil-doings’
(emcubrir suas maldades), an expression that exactly matches
Covarrubias’s definition of dissimulation in 1611—to dissimulate
(dissimular) is what the ‘dissimulated rogue, the one who conceals
his malice’ (vellaco dissimulado, el que encubre su malicia)
does.146 With or without malice, Mustafa Khan proved in fact to be
the perfect dissimulator each time he sent his Brahmin agent Iroji
Shenvi to visit the archbishop and the inquisitor on his behalf.147

AFTER THE WALL

In the eyes of the Portuguese, Shahjahan had become ‘Absolute
Lord of all the Provinces between the Indus and the Ganges’ after
the fall of Ahmadnagar and the submission of Bijapur in 1636.148
That said, the ‘Adil Shahi kingdom was to enjoy a sort of second life
in the two decades following the signing of the Deed of Submission:
free from the imperial pressure that had long endured from the
north, the sultanate expanded to Karnataka and Vijayanagara, a
territorial venture in which Mustafa Khan still had a role to play. But
the prevailing opinion in Goa in the 1650s was that the sultanate
was gradually abandoning its existence as an independent polity.
The Jesuit António Botelho, who then lived in the court of
Muhammad ‘Adil Shah, would later recount his own impressions: ‘I
have seen and experienced how much this King gave to the King
Mogol … and people who were well-versed on the court of the King
‘Adil Shah used to say that all that was valuable in his court was
sent to the Mogol.’149 Governor Manuel Mascarenhas Homem (g.
1656) was of the same mind: Muhammad ‘Adil Shah was used ‘to
buying his freedom’ (se remir por dinheiro), but this would soon end
‘since all his treasures had been sent in this way to the Mogor’.150
The Mughals annexed Bijapur in 1686 and would take control of
Ponda three years later.151 It can be argued that the Deccan Wall
collapsed along with the sultanate. ‘Once he conquered the entire
Hindustan—Viceroy Vasco Fernandes César de Meneses (g. 1712–
17) noted in 1714—the might of the Mogor came so close to the
lands of the Estado that the borders (rayas) of one and another
became common’.152 There were no buffer states between them
now; the capital of the Estado could be conquered at any time. And
yet, it never was. A farman issued by Emperor Farrukhsiyar (r.
1713–19) even ceded Ponda—the fortress and lands under its
control—to the Portuguese provided that Mughal ships were not
prevented from doing ‘our most pious pilgrimage to Mecca’ (nossa
piissima romaria de mecca).153 What ultimately prevailed was a
negotiated solution, one based on jurisdictional concessions in
Konkan and transit passage rights in Gujarat; ironically, once the
Deccan Wall crumbled, the southern Mughal–Portuguese border
settled right at the gates of Goa, and the Mughals did not knock
down the door.

1 For a general view, see Richards (1995), pp. 205–52; Gommans (2002),
pp. 187–99. For a recent view of Aurangzeb and his reign, see Truschke
(2017).
2 Green (2012), pp. 170–85; Digby (2001).

3 Chandra (2003), ch. 21, pp. 461–84. The tension between Shahjahan and
his son concerning the Deccan is evident in a number of letters that the latter
wrote to the emperor during his time as subadar. See Flynn (1974), pp. 187ff.
4 Eaton (2000), pp. 159–75; Wagoner (1996); Wink (1993).

5 Eaton (2000), p. 175.

6 Fischel (2012).

7 Digby (2001), pp. 6–8.

8 Richards (1975), pp. 71–4.

9 Eaton (2005), pp. 155–76.

10 Eaton (1996), pp. 239, 270–3.

11 On this particular moment, see Alam and Subrahmanyam (2012), pp.

165–203.
12 Duarte Delgado Varejão (secretary of the Estado) to Philip II, Goa, 1
December 1588, AGS, SP, bk. 1551, f. 516v.
13 Nayeem (1974), pp. 161–6; Khan (1971), pp. 234–41; Sherwani (1974),
pp. 436–8.
 14 Philip III to Viceroy Rui Lourenço de Távora, Lisbon, 17 February 1610,
in DRI, tom. I, p. 333; Philip III to Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo, Lisbon, 14
February 1615, in DRI, tom. III, p. 235; Philip III to Governor Dom João
Coutinho, Madrid, 21 March 1617, in DRI, tom. IV, pp. 131–2; Philip IV to Dom
Francisco da Gama, Lisbon, 11 February 1622, in DRI, tom. VIII, pp. 383–4.
15 Goa, 3 March 1634, Linhares 3, p. 15.
16 Diogo do Couto to Dom Francisco da Gama (in Lisbon), Goa, Christmas
1608, in Couto (1947), vol. I, pp. lxxviii–lxxx. On Portuguese plans for taking
the Konkan, see Pissurlencar (1955).
17 Deloche (1980), vol. I, pp. 10, 54, 105; Gommans (2002), p. 28.
18 Flores (2016), p. 103.

19 Anonymous–Manuel Godinho de Erédia, Atlas–Miscellany, c. 1615–22,

in Cortesão and Mota (1960), vol. IV, pl. 415 B.
20 Ágoston (2009).

21 Nicolau Pimenta to Claudio Acquaviva, Goa, 1 December 1600, in

Hosten (1927), p. 71.
22 On this, see Disney (2009), ch. v.

23 Beach and Koch (1997), no. 15, pp. 48–9, 173–4; no. 18, pp. 54–5, 177–
9.
24 Goa, 24 March 1630, Linhares 1, f. 17r; Goa, 1 April 1630, Linhares 1, f.
19r.
25 Goa, 13 April 1630, Linhares 1, f. 22r.
26 Goa, 30 April 1630, Linhares 1, f. 29r.

27 Goa, 6 May 1630, Linhares 1, fl. 35r. The Portuguese usually referred to
the Nizam Shahi rulers as Melique (that is, malik, ‘king’).
28 Proceedings of the State Council meeting, Goa, 6 May 1630, in ACE, vol.
I, p. 278; Goa, 19 May 1630, Linhares 1, ff. 40v–1r.
29 Goa, 4 July 1630, Linhares 1 (1997), ff. 61r–v.
30 Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 12 December 1630, HAG, MR, bk. 14, f. 202r.

31 ‘…metido dos alares para dentro, a fome e a sede’; Goa, 1 December

1630, Linhares 1, f. 118v.
32 Linhares 2, ff. 33v, 35r, 36r.

33 ‘Inayat Khan (1990), p. 80.

 34 Mughal sources, yet of a different nature—dastak (trade permits),
yaddasht (memoranda), and the like. See Khan (1953); Khan (1958).
35 The Portuguese texts give plenty of space to these phenomena, which
were a ‘trade mark’ of the region. For a picture of the unstable frontier zones in
the early modern Deccan, see Eaton and Wagoner (2015), pp. 274–5, figs
7.21 and 7.3.
36 Vignatti (1998–9), pp. 118–19.

37 On Ibrahim’s rich intellectual profile, see Eaton (1996), pp. 70ff., 89ff.;
Michell and Zebrowski (1999), pp. 162–77; Parodi (2015).
38 Meneses to the Superior of the Augustinians, Goa, 9 December 1597, in
Beylerian (1974), p. 584.
39 On the archbishop’s father as King Sebastian’s aio, see Cruz (2006), pp.
70–2, 81–2. When it came time to choose his religious name, the Augustinian
friar adopted that of his father.
40 Subrahmanyam (1997).

41 BNP, Reservados, cod. 1976, f. 9r.

42 Philip III to Viceroy Dom Francisco da Gama, Lisbon, 21 November
1598, in APO, fasc. 3, p. 929.
43 Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, Goa, 23 December 1599, BNP,
Reservados, cod. 1976, f. 142r. Later Portuguese views of Ibrahim were
consistent with Meneses’s and Gama’s stance: in 1619 the then viceroy of
Goa (Dom João Coutinho, r. 1617–19) described the sultan of Bijapur as
‘essentially shy and little inclined toward war’. His main occupation was music,
to the point of being politically and financially manipulated by ‘players and
singers’ (tangedores e cantores); Coutinho to Philip III, Goa, 20 February
1619, in DRI, tom. V, pp. 194–5.
44 The citation refers to Duarte Delgado Varejão’s description of Husain
Nizam Shah II (1588–9) in a letter to Philip II, Goa, 1 December 1588, AGS,
SP, bk. 1551, f. 516r.
45 Covarrubias (1611), pp. 303, 5.
46 ‘No fueron criados, ni introduzidos en el mũdo para sola su comodidad y
regalo, y que los buenos bocados todos siruan a su plato’; Santa María
(1619), p. 18.
47 Osório (1944), p. 185.
 48 ‘… he hũ soni, balhador, tangedor, e tão afiminado como hũa mulher, por
onde não ha que fazer com elle’; Diogo do Couto to Dom Francisco da Gama,
Goa, Christmas 1608, in Couto (1947), p. lxxix.
49 Tocco (2003).
50 Osório (1944), p. 55.

51 Howard (2014), pp. 72–3. This is not an exclusively Iberian phenomenon.

Thomas Roe noted in November 1616 that Prince Khurram marched against
the Deccan with an ‘effeminate army, fitter to bee a spoyle than a terror to
enemyes’; Thomas Roe to Sir Ralph Winwood, 30 November 1616, in Roe
(1990), p. 318.
52 Soyer (2012), pp. 18–19.

53 Fernando de Meneses to Everardo Mercuriano, (Goa), 15 November

1578, in DI, vol. XI, p. 741.
54 Goa, 29 June 1631, Linhares 2, f. 42r–v.

55 Abu’l Fazl (1993), vol. III, pp. 603–5, 739–42; ‘Abdul Qadir Badayuni
(1986), vol. II, pp. 334, 354, 372–3; Couto (1973), dec. X, bk. vi, ch. 15, p. 113.
On Ahmadnagar and the Mughals in this period, see Shyam (1966); Khan
(1971), ch. 4.
56 Luís de Mendonça to Philip II, Diu, 26 November 1589, AGS, SP, bk.
1551, f. 664r.
57 Duarte Delgado Varejão to Philip II, Goa, 1 December 1588, AGS, SP,
bk. 1551, f. 516v. Also municipal council of Goa to Philip II, Goa, 16 November
1588, AGS, SP, bk. 1551, f. 526r.
58 Goa, 29 January 1616, AGS, Estado–Portugal, 145 (also AGS, Estado–
Legajos, 437, ff. 149r–51r). On the fascinating figure of Corai, see Federici
(2014).
59 Goa, 14 June 1631, Linhares 2, f. 36v.
60 Abu’l Fazl (1993), vol. III, p. 909; ‘Abdul Qadir Badayuni (1986), vol. II, p.
334.
61 Philip III to Viceroy Aires de Saldanha, Lisbon, 7 February 1602, AHU,
CU, cod. 282, f. 82r.
62 Vignatti (1998–9), p. 116.

63 Alam and Subrahmanyam (2012), pp. 180–92; Siddiqui (1999), pp. 198–
208.
 64 English translation of Akbar’s letters to Khandesh and Ahmadnagar, both
dated 5 September 1591, in Haidar (1998), pp. 56–67. Also see ‘Abdul Qadir
Badayuni (1986), vol. II, pp. 389–90.
65 Philip II to Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque, 1594, AHU, CU, cod. 281, ff.
263r–4r.
66 Vignatti (1998–9), pp. 116–17.

67 On the importance of memory and the role of dynastic legacies in the

Deccan plateau, see Eaton and Wagoner (2015).
68 Bocarro (1992), vol. II, p. 120, and vol. III, pl. xxv.

69 Philip III to Viceroy Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo, Lisbon, 14 February

1615, in DRI, tom. III, pp. 234–5.
70 Philip II to Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque, Lisbon, 5 February 1597, in
APO, fasc. 3, p. 674.
71 Philip II to Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque, Lisbon, 5 February 1597, in
APO, fasc. 3, p. 691.
72 Goetz (1945).

73 ‘Carta que a cidade de Goa escreveo a Sua Magestade, o ano de 96

[sic]’, in APO, fasc. 1, pt. II, pp. 37–9.
74 APO, fasc. 1, pt. II, pp. 136–41.

75 ‘Cartas escrittas a S. Magestade por terra em Outubro de 97’, BNP,

Reservados, cod. 1976, f. 89r.
76 Vignatti (1989–9), p. 116.

77 On Chand Bibi, see Shyam (1966) and most recently Fischel (2012), pp.
89–117, esp. 100–13 (on her Ahmadnagar years), 104 (Tabata’s citation).
78 Eaton (2008), p. 113, citing Tabata.

79 For women politicians in the Islamic World during this period, see Hambly
(1999). Relevant Southeast Asian cases discussed in Andaya (2006), pp.
166–8.
80 Kruijtzer (2009), pp. 49–50, 66, 69, 76, 82–3, 94, 101, 164–5, 169.

81 Eaton (2005), pp. 177–202.

82 Sousa (1694), tom. III, pt. 1, ch. 2, p. 17.

83 Were women such as ‘Abehi’ more mobile than women from other
societies of the early modern world? On gendered spaces in this period, see
Wiesner-Hanks (2015).
84 Erauso (1996); Penalva (2011), pp. 29–30. On Amazon women, see
Davis (1975), ch. 5, pp. 124–51; Perry (1987). Regarding the Castilian Queen
Isabel la Católica (d. 1504) portrayed as Amazon queen, see Rowe (2011), p.
117.
85 Viceroy Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, [Goa], December 1598,
BNP, Reservados, cod. 1976, ff. 94v–5r.
86 Philip III to Dom Francisco da Gama, Lisbon, 21 November 1598, in
APO, fasc. 3, pp. 915–16. Gama kept underlining Bibi’s ‘inconsistencies’ in his
correspondence with Philip III during the remainder of his term (Philip III to
Dom Francisco da Gama, Goa, 23 December 1599, BNP, Reservados, cod.
1976, f. 142r).
87 ANTT, MMCG, box 2, tom. III, p. 295, published in Subrahmanyam
(1998), pp. 194–5.
88 Subrahmanyam (1998), p. 195.
89 Goa, 18 December 1599, BL, Add. Ms. 28432, ff. 13r–16v, published in
Subrahmanyam (1998), pp. 192–4.
90 ‘Resposta às cartas que vieram [do Reino] em 1599’, BNP, Reservados,
cod. 1976, f. 56r.
91 Abu’l Fazl (1993), vol. III, pp. 1157–9.

92 Eaton (2005), pp. 105–28; Shyam (1968); Ali (2016).

93 On Khandesh and its incorporation into the Mughal Empire, see Shyam
(1981); Mahajan (1991); Quddusi (2002); Joshi (1973).
94 The Mughal perspective on the conquest of Khandesh can be followed in
Abu’l Fazl (1993), vol. III, pp. 1168–71; Elliot and Dowson (1996), vol. VI, pp.
134ff. (Shaikh Illahdad’s Akbar Nama).
95 Viceroy Dom Francisco da Gama to Philip III, Goa, April 1600, BNP,
Reservados, cod. 1976, f. 100v. The Portuguese often refer to Bahadur Shah
as Mirão because Miran was the sultan’s given name.
96 Xavier’s report is discussed in Heras (1990), ch. 10, pp. 125–39, while
Pimenta’s letter (to Claudio Acquaviva, Goa, 1 December 1600) was published
in Hosten (1927), from which the brief quotations given above are taken.
These two descriptions match what we know about siege technology and the
challenges at stake regarding long Mughal sieges (Gommans [2002], pp. 141–
5). As for the gigantic Deccani cannons, see Eaton and Wagoner (2015), pp.
254ff. On the fall of Asirgah, also see Hassan (1977).
97 ‘Lembrança das cousas do Norte para o Señor Visorrey Aires de
Saldanha’, Bassein, 25 June 1602, BNP, Reservados, 11410, ff. 73r–81v
(citation on ff. 81r–v).
98 Linhares 1, ff. 118v–19r.

99 On Bijapur–Mughal relations in this period, see Nayeem (1974); Khan

(1971).
100 Sarkar (1978); Kruijtzer (2009); Dayal (2016).

101 Wagoner (2011).

102 Manuel Dinis to King John IV, Goa, 18 December 1642, AHU, Índia, box
24, doc. 131.
103 Nayeem (1974), pp. 140–1. For this later phase of Mustafa Khan’s
career and his plans to control the Karnataka independently as it were his fief,
see Dayal (2016), ch. 2.
104 ‘Mostafacão he mais do que era o conde Duque em Castella’; Manuel
Dinis to King John IV, Goa, 20 December 1642, AHU, Índia, box 24, doc. 135.
On Olivares, see the classical work by Elliott (1989). On the figure of the
favourite in early modern Spain and Europe, see Tomás y Valiente (1990);
Elliott and Brockliss (1998); Malcom (2017).
105 Relevant examples discussed by Islam (1982), pp. 117ff.
106 Kruijtzer (2009), pp. 80–1.

107 Particularly for the incident of 1643, see the proceedings of two State
Council meetings, Goa, 1 October 1643, in ACE, vol. II, pp. 457–9; Goa, 10
October 1643, in ACE, vol. II, p. 469, as well as the letter from Sultan
Muhammad ‘Adil Shah to Viceroy Count of Aveiras, Bijapur, 4 November,
1643, in ACE, vol. II, pp. 476–7.
108 Alvi (2012), p. 22. Also see Alvi (1989).

109 On Mustafa Khan as cultural patron, see Dayal (2016), ch. 2.

110 Viceroy Count of Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 18 November 1630, in ACE,
vol. I, pp. 519–20.
111 On the office of havaldar in Bijapur, see Fukazawa (1991), pp. 26–32.
112 Proceedings of State Council meetings, Goa, 27 July 1623, in ACE, vol.
I, pp. 179–81; Goa, 23 February 1624, ACE, vol. I, pp. 195–6.
 113 Sarkar (1978), pp. 20–3.

114 António Caldeira to Governor Fernão de Albuquerque, Bicholim, 14 July

1620, in ACE, vol. I, pp. 118–19; Proceedings of the State Council meeting,
Goa, 8 March 1623, in ACE, vol. I, p. 164.
115 This tumultuous political transition is chronicled in a Portuguese
document dated 1629 and titled ‘Relação dos Reis Vizinhos do que ora
passão e contão’ (‘Account of the Neighbouring Kings of what currently
happens and is recounted’), in Pissurlencar (1930), pp. 52–61.
116 The Witsen Album (anonymous, c. 1686), nos. 42, 43; Amsterdam,
Rijksmuseum, RP-T-003186.
117 From a wealth of possible examples, see the letter from Viceroy Count
of Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 18 February 1630, in ACE, vol. I, p. 243.
118 According to Sarkar (1978), p. 41, he was a Maratha, while Kruijtzer
(2009), pp. 77–8, questions his still unclear ethnic origins. Many musicians
were attracted to Bijapur’s court during Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah’s reign (Eaton
[1996], p. 71) and Khawas Khan may well have been one. ‘Inayat Khan
(1990), pp. 60–1, says he was a kalawant (minstrel).
119 ‘Inayat Khan (1990), pp. 60–1; Elliot and Dowson (1996), pp. 23, 28;
Linhares 3, p. 108.
120 ‘The Kingdom of this ‘Adil Shah is now full of Persians (parçios), who
are enemies of this State’; Pissurlencar (1930), p. 56.
121 Pissurlencar (1930).

122 Kruijtzer (2009), p. 85; Instructions given to António Moniz Barreto,

ambassador to Bijapur, Goa, 11 August 1638, in ACE, vol. II, p. 554. Also see
the letter of 15 January 1649 from Manuel Dinis to Mustafa Khan cited at the
end of this chapter.
123 Pissurlencar (1930), p. 56.

124 Linhares 1, f. 12v.

125 Instructions given to António Moniz Barreto, Goa, 11 August 1638, in
ACE, vol. III, pp. 553–4.
126 It is relevant to look at Portuguese views on the growing power of
Mustafa Khan alongside evidence on the limits of the wazir’s authority in
Bijapur, as discussed by Eaton (1983), pp. 209–22. Eaton argues that in
Bijapur the wazir did not have consistent links to the financial structure of the
sultanate.
 127 Barendse (1998), p. 115.

128 Prakash (1996); Dayal (2016).

129 Joshi (1956); Kruijtzer (2009), pp. 37, 102.

130 Kruijtzer (2009), pp. 79–80; Dayal (2016).

131 Instructions to Father Gonçalo Martins, ambassador to Bijapur, Goa, 16
April 1654, in ACE, vol. III, p. 570.
132 Mention to one of Muhammad’s vessels coming from Persia in 1632
with a fake cartaz and loaded with illegal commodities, including Iranians and
Habhsis (ACE, vol. I, pp. 425–6). Reference to several ships loaded with
pepper and other forbidden goods sent by the governor of Dabhol to the
Persian Gulf in 1632–3 (ACE, vol. I, pp. 473, 559).
133 The Spanish original reads as follows: ‘Vuestra Excelencia, en fin, con
ser privado es vestido del rey. Y vestido sin costura, ajustado al cuerpo del
rey’; Sherley (2010), p. 213.
134 Count of Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 30 October 1635, in ACE, vol. III, p.
643.
135 Proceedings of State Council meetings, Goa, 10 June 1636, in ACE,
vol. II, pp. 92–3; Goa, 18 July 1636, in ACE, vol. II, pp. 93–4.
136 Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah to Viceroy Count of Aveiras, Bijapur, 4
November, 1643, in ACE, vol. II, pp. 476–7.
137 Goa, 24 August 1634, Linhares 3, p. 163; also Linhares to Philip IV,
Goa, 12 December 1630, HAG, MR, bk. 14, f. 202r.
138 Linhares 2, f. 42v. Pagode was a gold coin of south India usually
bearing the figures of deities and their temples.
139 Goa, 29 June 1631, Linhares 2, ff. 42r–v. Shahjahan’s views on Mustafa
Khan as expressed in this letter are not far from what ‘Inayat Khan (1990), p.
79, writes in his chronicle.
140 Linhares 3, pp. 6–7, 28.
141 Bloomington (IN), Lilly Library, Boxer Collection, Green Box, no. 2.

142 The literature on dissimulation in early modern Europe is quite

extensive. See Snyder (2012); Villari (2003). For the Iberian context, see Flor
(2005).
143 Fray Francisco dos Mártires had been Archbishop of Goa since 1635
and would be a member of the interim government council of the Estado in
1651–2, while Domingos Rebelo Lobo served as Inquisitor of Goa between
March 1646 and April 1649. On the central role of affections in early modern
Portuguese political lexicon and discourse, see Cardim (2000).
144 Proceedings of the State Council meeting, Goa, 20 July 1638, in ACE,
vol. II, p. 238.
145 Instructions given to father Gonçalo Martins, ambassador to Bijapur,
Goa, 16 April 1654, in ACE, vol. III, p. 570.
146 Covarrubias (1611), p. 323.
147 ‘Iroji Sinai does not fail you in any way, and with great care he visits the
Archbishop and the Inquisitor…’; Manuel Dinis to Mustafa Khan, Goa, 15
January 1649, Lilly Library, Boxer Collection, Green Box, no. 2.
148 ‘…Senhor absoluto de todas as Provincias d’entre o Indo e Ganges’;
Viceroy Pedro da Silva to Philip IV, Lisbon, 18 February 1640, in ACE, vol. II,
p. 560.
149 António Botelho, ‘Relação das cousas mais notaveis, que observei no
Reino do Gram Mogor em perto de seis annos’ [1670], BL, Add. Ms. 9855, f.
27v.
150 Governor Manuel Mascarenhas Homem to John IV, Goa, 12 February
1656, in ACE, vol. III, pp. 608–9.
151 Fernandes (1987), pp. 92–4.

152 Viceroy Vasco Fernandes César de Meneses to King John V, Goa, 14

January 1714, in Gracias (1907), p. 124.
153 Sampaio (2008–9), pp. 259–65 (Portuguese version of the farman on p.
262).
 6
Bengal, an Eastern ‘Far West’

TREMORS BEFORE A TECTONIC CRISIS

Bengal proved to be a harsh land for both the Mughal Empire and
the Estado da Índia. Mughal rulers struggled far more in Bengal than
in most of their domains to maintain control over the territory and its
people, and eventually to create a suba inhabited by loyal vassals.1
Similarly, the viceroys of Goa fought hard to ‘tame’ their own vassals
in Bengal and met with little success in confining their extreme
mobility or disciplining their behaviour. There are striking
resemblances between a Mughal chronicler who, observing Bengal
from the imperial court in the late sixteenth century, coined the new
suba as ‘the house of turbulence’ (Bulgha Khana)—a place where
‘the dust of dissension is always rising’—and a Portuguese official in
the capital of the Estado some decades later who labelled the port
city of Hughli as ‘nothing more than a receptacle for thieves and
disobedient men’.2
Where Mughal expansion in India is concerned, Bengal arguably
had traits similar to the American frontier as conceived at the turn of
the twentieth century by Frederick Turner.3 The rise and
consolidation of imperial authority in the delta region took time and
was faced with several and rather diverse problems. As Richard
Eaton has pointed out, West Bengal (Bharigati) reacted differently
from East Bengal (Bhati) to the imposition of Mughal power, while
the northeastern region posed additional resistance to imperial
domination.4 Bengal was vast and the people living there
heterogeneous: provincial elites keen to appropriate the Persianized
political culture brought by the Mughals and the rustic inhabitants of
rough regions such as Kuch Bihar, Kamrup, Assam, and Sylhet, who
never came to be fully ‘polished’ through contact with the Mughal
order, are but examples of the diversity.5 It is possible to draw a
parallel in the latter case with the contemporary Chinese
classification applied to non-Han, ‘inferior’ ethnic groups of Qing
China, that is, that these were ‘raw’ people waiting (or resisting) to
be ‘cooked’.6
Bengal was thus considered a wild territory for both empires, a
sort of eastern ‘Far West’ as seen from Fatehpur Sikri and Goa
alike. Geography and the isolated remoteness of the region from the
respective hearts of the empires might well help to explain the
fragilities of the two states in Bengal and their unease when dealing
with the region. The transfer of the Bengali capital from Tanda to
Gaur immediately following the Mughal conquest in 1574–6
coincided with significant changes in the Ganges River delta that
rendered the new provincial political centre unhealthy. Stagnant
waters caused an epidemic that killed thousands. Eaton has
emphasized how ‘the plague’s devastation swiftly cut into the morale
of officers and troops’, thus contributing to the formation of a
predominantly negative image of Mughal Bengal; it was seen as ‘a
hostile and foreign land’, with a bad climate and in a state of
permanent sedition, and considered a sort of exile where neither
common soldiers nor high-ranking officials wished to stay long.7 In
addition, the eastern edge of the empire was fertile ground for the
emergence and spread of fantastical stories within Mughal India,
marvels that often reached the imperial court. The same holds true
for the Portuguese empire; Bengal is indeed home to many of the
Indian fables that circulated in Habsburg Iberia during this period.8
Think of Lope de Vega’s play La octava maravilla (‘The Eight
Wonder’), which was published in Madrid in 1618 but written in c.
1609. In this comedy, Vega depicts a Bengali king called Tomar
journeying to Spain to see Philip II’s monastery of El Escorial.9
It is interesting to note, the first Portuguese to set foot in Akbar’s
court came from ‘strange’ Bengal and not from ‘normal’ Goa.
Following the imperial conquest of the sultanate, the Mughal
emperor received Pero Tavares—captain of the port of Satgaon—in
Fatehpur Sikri as early as 1577. The meeting was recorded by Abu’l
Fazl, who portrays ‘Partab ‘Tar Feringi’ in the Akbarnama essentially
as a Bengali; the chronicler notes his marriage to a woman called
Nashurna and that Tavares was ‘one of the officials of the merchants
of the ports of Bengal’.10
The interactions between the Mughals and the Portuguese in
Bengal, as well as the nature of their ‘demarcation lines’ in the
region, substantially differ from the scenarios discussed in the three
preceding chapters. The geopolitical constraints of the Deccan
Plateau on the two actors and their conflicting strategies are quite
distinct from those that characterized their (un)neighbourly relations
in the deltaic lands of the Ganges. Differently from the Deccan but
similar to Gujarat, Bengal embodies the maritime sphere of the
Mughal Empire and represents a second borderland with the Estado
da Índia. But neither the Mughals nor the Portuguese had the
strength to replicate in this particular environment the kind of
‘sovereign gestures’ that they exhibited in Gujarat; instead of large
earthquakes that shook their relationship, like those discussed in
Chapter 4 that impacted Surat in 1613–15 and again 1630, the norm
in Bengal manifested in the form of multiple tremors, though a crisis
of seismic proportion would eventually strike the port city of Hughli in
1632.
This chapter seeks first to highlight the difficult path taken by the
Mughal Empire to erect a suba in Bengal, coupled with the recurrent
endeavours of the Estado da Índia to secure some sort of influence
in the region. For decades, the Mughals and Portuguese clashed in
Bengal over the control of ports, commodities, and, to a lesser
extent, also of lands and rents. Contemporaneously they struggled
with internal clashes and contradictions, as Bengal represented an
unstable ground for both empires, which necessitated internal
colonization: emperors and their subadars had to suppress myriad
local rebels, while viceroys and their captains sought to quash the
existence of myriad outlaws.11 As the seventeenth century
progressed, however, Mughal authority in Bengal grew and
strengthened leaving less room to the Portuguese for privateering.
The second, main section of the chapter studies this new moment
and focuses on a particularly relevant incident: the imperial capture
of the port of Hughli under Emperor Shahjahan in 1632. An
exploration of this seismic event, its immediate aftershocks, as well
as the surprisingly fast return to the status quo ante, will help to
generate better understanding of the nature of the Mughal–
Portuguese ‘border’ in Bengal.
The Estado’s involvement in Bengal started early on in their
expansion into India. In fact, several inaugural expeditions to
‘discover’ the Bay of Bengal preceded the first embassy from Goa to
Gaur in 1521, the capital of the sultanate under Nusrat Shah (r.
1519–32). The Portuguese were quick in adapting to the
geographical shifts and economic changes that occurred in the
region throughout the 1500s. They began to frequent the main ports
of Bengal—Satgaon and Chittagong—and it did not take long for
them to understand their hierarchy, as is clear to their references of
the former as porto pequeno (small port) and the latter as porto
grande (great port). By mid-century Chittagong had begun its
decline while the maritime settlements of western Bengal gained in
importance. Satgaon eventually replaced Chittagong and the ports
of neighbouring Orissa (especially Pipli, but also Balasore) gradually
grew. A Darwinesque rule seems to explain the rise and demise of
the Ganges delta ports, and can also explain Satgaon’s twighlight
before the end of the sixteenth century; due to the silting of the river
channel, Satgaon was destined to be outstripped by Hughli, a
settlement located farther south. Hughli soon became home to a
vibrant Portuguese and mestizo colony of merchants and
adventurers. But the time would come when another port would
eclipse Hughli: just as Hughli had replaced Satgaon, Calcutta rose
to overshadow Hughli by 1698.12
Initially, in the 1520s and 1530s, the influence of the Estado was
limited to Crown commercial voyages (carreira de Bengala) headed
for Satgaon and especially Chittagong. The captain of the carreira
exercised power and jurisdiction over those living and doing
business in the ports of the Bay of Bengal. However, the mounting
importance of Portuguese private trade in the region rendered
Crown shipping somewhat anachronistic. Consequently, from the
1560s onwards, voyages to the Bengal area—Chittagong, Satgaon,
and Pipli—were governed by a concession system in which the
concessionary travelled aboard his own vessel but was entrusted
the authority of a captain-major. With the exception of the
momentary presence of the captain of these annual fleets, the
Estado held no power in Bengal; this weakness of the official
structures in the area, however, lay in sharp contrast with the
strength of private initiatives.
Characterized by its immense and intricate river delta, the
geographically challenging Bengal became a comfortable home for
hundreds of Portuguese settlers. These were highly mobile and
malleable individuals, who were able to easily move between
business, war, and diplomacy in a predominantly multiethnic
landscape; these were unpredictable, ‘untamed’ men, who were
ready to desert family, trade political allegiances, and even turn on a
dime to adhere to a new religion if they deemed it necessary. The
Portuguese who watched them from afar, in the cities of Goa and
Lisbon, saw nothing but merchants without scruple (chatins), rebels
(alevantados), and, in some instances, renegades (arrenegados).
The Portuguese embassy to Gaur in 1521 exemplifies this early
friction between Crown affairs and private agendas; upon his arrival
in the capital of the sultanate, the ‘real’ ambassador of the Estado,
António de Brito, had to contend with the presence of a ‘fake’
emissary, a man called Rafael Perestrelo, who had installed himself
and whose coterie included several Portuguese adventurers. Martim
de Lucena was surely the most interesting character among this
group: ‘dressing as a moor’, and really looking the part, Lucena did
not hesitate to say aloud that he ‘was not at all indebted to the king
of Portugal’.13 It is not difficult to identify in this description George
Winius’s vision of the Bay of Bengal as a ‘shadow empire’—which
corresponded to the reverse side of the coin called Goa—or Sanjay
Subrahmanyam’s concept of a Portuguese ‘improvised empire’ in
the region.14
Individuals soon formed into groups or Luso–Asian communities
that established their own bandéis in the several ports that stretched
in a long arc from Balasore to Chittagong.15 Applying a broad
chronological framework to this context that spanned the early
sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, the Portuguese presence in
the region is to be viewed as a highly complex phenomenon, made
of an ever-evolving social fabric. From the initial binary contradiction
between a formal and informal Portuguese presence, which placed
Crown officials in contrast to unruly adventurers, the reality gradually
evolved into a far more composite and tense scenario: eventually
the Portuguese, ‘black Portuguese’ (portugueses negros), and
‘brown Christians’ (cristãos pardos) who formed trading (and
raiding), religious, and linguistic communities in turn came to form or
embody a firangi identity in Bengal. The Portuguese—or the
harmads (from armada, fleet), as they were called locally—fill many
of the ballads originating in eastern Bengal, for example, ‘Nasar
Malum’ and ‘Nuranneha and the Grave’, in which they are invariably
depicted as pirates and robbers.16 Only in 1665 were these people
put under Mughal control in the Chittagong area.17
Needless to say, the firangi ‘nation’ was not spatially static and,
therefore, not bound by precise geographical delimitations; it
comprised of mobile groups that moved around the region according
to the whims of nature, trade, politics, and war. The religion shared
by the myriad members of the firangi ‘nation’ is a relevant thread in
this tapestry. The presence of successive generations of Catholic
missionaries in the area was anything but homogeneous and
consisted of rival orders (Augustinians vs Jesuits) and competing
overarching structures (Padroado vs Propaganda Fide). These
groups often held conflicting views on conversion strategies and
language policies. A clear example of this divergence lies in the
clash of the 1720s between the Augustinian priests and the local
Christian communities (cristandades) over the language in which the
Christian doctrine was to be taught. When the missionaries insisted
that the many converts that had not fully mastered Portuguese
should study the doctrine in Bengali, the latter countered. Local
converts sought to impose the use of Portuguese, offended that they
were being called Bengalas as if they were ‘gentiles’; they were also
Portuguese, they argued, despite being ‘brown’ or ‘black’.18 The
push for a common tongue—no matter how ‘broken’ was the
Portuguez torto (broken Portuguese) used—constituted thus
another salient trait of this ‘nation’. It is not by chance that when the
Danish decided in 1644 to write and distribute a five-folio manifesto
to inform ‘all the Christian nations in these parts of Oriental India’ of
their travails in Bengal with the Mughals they penned it in
Portuguese.19
This initial and fundamental tension between the body and its
shadow, that is, the world of the capital city and that of the bandel,
would span several decades. It was felt during the main political
transformations that occurred from the twilight of the Husain Shahis
in the 1530s to the full incorporation of Bengal into the Mughal
sphere less than a century later, including the Sur Regime (1538–
64) and the Afghan dynasty of the Karranis (1564–75). News of the
abrasive behaviour and activities of Portuguese alevantados in the
region repeatedly reached Goa during the 1540s.20 The captains
dispatched by the viceroys to control the situation in Bengal—Vasco
da Cunha and later Manuel da Gama—speak of the negative impact
Afghan rule had on maritime trade, the Estado’s commercial
interests included: the Patanes were considered a ‘very belligerent
people’ (gemte muy belicosa) and Bengal was seen as ‘a rather
dangerous land’ (terra de tanto perigo).21 Based on information
gathered on the ground, Gama suggested in 1547 that the
Portuguese official trade in the region should shy away from
traditional centres and instead direct its energies towards the ‘land
of Çundar’, or the Sundarbans.22 This labyrinthine region of forest
and marshy lands was located in the southern Ganges delta; its
rulers—the rajas of Jessore—had been able to repel the authority of
both the Husain Shahis and the Surs, much as they would with the
Mughals until 1609.23 A document from 1547 speaks of a group of
150 Portuguese alevantados led by Jerónimo de Sousa that rushed
to aid the ‘lord of Sundar’ against the Patanes.24 Similar to how they
coped with the fluid geographical and commercial reality of Bengal,
the Portuguese—lawful citizens and rebels alike—also managed to
navigate its permanently volatile political landscape. But their
continued antagonistic stance against the Afghans would eventually
bring them problems; the Afghan attack on Satgaon in 1560
constituted a major blow to the Europeans of the bandel: 100 people
were killed and 300 taken captive, 30 ships were lost and 300,000
golden pardaus seized.25
As mentioned earlier, the Mughal conquest of Bengal did not
immediately translate into a solid imperial authority in the region,
and the years to come would be peppered with moments of serious
turmoil. The Jesuit missionaries who had newly arrived at the court
of Akbar in 1580 did not fail to note how intimidated the emperor
was by the people who contested him ‘through rebellions, like the
ones in Bengal’.26 News of ‘the victorious alevantados in Bengal
who killed his [Akbar’s] viceroy’ had circulated around the court.27
Two years later, Antonio Monserrate observed that the situation had
worsened in Bengal since ‘10,000 Mogores and 20,000 Patanes
have revolted’.28 Bengali Muslim ‘Isa Khan was one of the main
faces of the anti-Mughal resistance in the Bhati region since 1584.
Denigrated in the Mughal chronicles (namely in Abu’l Fazl’s
Akbarnama) but celebrated in numerous local ballads, ‘Isa Khan
was the leader of the ‘twelve chieftains’ (bara bhuyan). In fact, the
bara bhuyan controlled vast portions of Bhati—stretching from
Jessore, Bagerthat, and Bakla to Sripur, western Mymensingh, and
southwestern Sylhet—and operated under the command of the
Masnad-i ‘Ali (that is, the ‘Exalted Throne’, the title used by ‘Isa
Khan and his successors). When journeying the region in 1586, the
Englishman Ralph Fitch would attest to the limited strength of the
Mughals, who he portrayed in his account as powerless conquerors
struggling against the local ‘kings’ who mastered the difficult
geography of the delta and were aligned with Isa Khan.29
The Portuguese rode the wave. The residents of Satgaon
challenged Akbar’s authority right after his conquest of Bengal,
despite the warnings by the Jesuit priests who, from the Mughal
court, advised them to return ‘the rights that they were stealing from
the King of the land’ (os direitos que furtavão ao rey da terra).30
Farther east, many other Portuguese were probably close to ‘Isa
Khan, whom Fitch describes as ‘a great friend to all Cristians’.31 In a
letter sent to ‘Abdullah Khan in 1586, Akbar unsurprisingly
announced his intention to ‘exterminate’ the firangis who had been
causing him problems in Bengal.32 However, not all Portuguese
were antagonistic towards Mughal authority; the proximity of some
Portuguese and mestizos to Tanda, the provincial capital, led
naturally to their acceptance of imperial rule. During his incursion
into the delta in the 1580s, António de Sousa Godinho encountered
Portuguese from Satgaon who payed taxes to and rented lands from
the Mughals. Goa had instructed Godinho to evacuate the bandel—
owing to its location ‘far upriver, in the lands controlled by the
Mogores’—and transfer its residents to Chittagong. However, the
Satgaon residents refused to move and did not hesitate to join the
Mughals against the Estado. It was not the first time that the Estado
sought to forcibly relocate its subjects and engineer solutions to
‘close down’ some of their settlements in the bay; this happened
twice (unsuccessfully) in Mylapur—1540 and 1560. From a political
perspective, Goa’s purpose in evacuating Satgaon and alternatively
making Chittagong an official colony in Bengal was clear: the aim
was to territorially separate the Portuguese from the Mughals,
pushing the geographical divide between the two into the Bhati
region. The plan ultimately failed, because the Portuguese
moradores did not all live in a single port or adhere to a single
political order in the region. As discussed earlier, some backed the
rebel ‘Isa Khan while others lived contentedly under imperial
dominion.
 António de Sousa Godinho left Goa as ‘captain major of the fleet
of Bengal’ (capitão mor da armada de Bengala). Once in the eastern
Ganges delta, he took the island of Sandwip, agreed with the raja of
Tripura on the creation of a customs house in Chittagong, and
proceeded to seize the local fort. He then travelled to western
Bengal, determined to ‘confine to that fort [Chittagong] the
Portuguese that were spilled over (derramados) diverse places of
that coast’. The official objective was to put a stop to ‘the offences
that the Portuguese suffer in some of the lands controlled by the
Mogores’, but it is equally obvious that Sousa Godinho—like so
many others after him—intended to ‘corral’ the Portuguese settlers
into one place.33 Sailing upriver 30 leagues north of Satgaon
towards Tanda, he burnt several villages on both banks of the river.
He set barns on fire and maimed hundreds of bulls, destroyed palm
groves and agricultural fields, killed people, and took many
prisoners. Episodes like this left a strong local imprint and were
soon integrated into the collective memory of the riverine
populations; Hindu temples in the region often display terracota
plaques depicting Portuguese vessels and sailor-pirates.34 From his
position of strength, Godinho easily negotiated peace with the
Mughal governor, Sa‘id Khan (g. 1587–94).35 The latter’s
submissive attitude contrasted vividly with the Portuguese
experience of the Mughals in Gujarat:
The viceroy of Tanda told him [Godinho] that he had always been close
friends with the Portuguese, and that he did not understand what this
war was about, and that he was prepared to comply with whatever
needed. He was ready to acknowledge his mistakes, if any. In case this
was deemed insufficient, he would then address Akbar and ask the
emperor to write to him [Godinho] in order to remark that, since [Akbar]
was in peace with the Estado, [Godinho] should not consent the
Portuguese to wage war on his vassals.36

Coming from a subadar, this was a rather unexpected reaction. His

‘soft words’ (palavras brandas) puzzled the governor of the Estado,
Manuel de Sousa Coutinho (g. 1588–91): such words, the
Portuguese governor remarks, ‘are unusual among the Mogores, for
they are naturally arrogant and cruel’.37 The fragility of Mughal
power in the region at that time was obvious, but the imperial
authority would soon expand under Raja Man Singh as subadar (g.
1594–1606). Hence the frightened observation of a Portuguese
Jesuit, Brás Nunes, reporting from Arakan in January 1602: ‘All of
Bengal is at risk of being taken by the Mogor.’38
Despite Nunes’s alarm, the imperial conquest and incorporation
of Bengal proved a much slower process. Travelling through the
western Ganges delta on the eve of the arrival of Islam Khan—
subadar between 1608 and 1613 and Emperor Jahangir’s foster
brother—‘Abdul Latif spoke of the predations that plagued the
flooded lands once the monsoon was over.39 From distant Madrid,
Lope de Vega, in his fictional and far from historically accurate play,
depicted an independent king of Bengal strong enough to defeat his
enemy, the Mughal Emperor (mi contrario Mogor).40 It is true,
however, that Mughal power had been increasing in eastern Bengal
since 1599, and a new, vigorous imperial centre would rise shortly
thereafter: the city of Dhaka (or Jahangirnagar), in fact, became the
suba’s capital as early as 1602. The situation would definitely
improve with Islam Khan, who was successful in subjugating the
‘twelve chieftains’ as well as many other zamindars of eastern
Bengal during his governorship. It was Musa Khan, ‘Isa Khan’s son
and the effective ruler of Bhati since the death of his father in 1599,
who eventually bent to Mughal authority in the 1610s. Far from the
deltaic lands, Jahangir’s authority also extended inland, not without
resistance and following a series of military campaigns, in Kuch
Bihar, Kamrup, and Assam.41 From then onwards, imperial
expansionist designs often impacted lower Burma, consequently
resulting in clashes with Portuguese interests in Arakan.42 The
Estado da Índia feared these developments and was invested in
stalling Mughal inroads eastward. Hence, Philip III’s clear
instructions to his representative in Goa in 1612:
 I received word that the Mogor has sent one captain with a large army
to Bengal and captured the entire Siripur, near to Sandwip, where he
fortified himself. The twelve boiões [bhuyan] gave him obedience and
he was determined to march over Chittagong and reach Arakan. While
the Mogor was in Siripur, the Mogo [Maghs] came down to Bengal with
his fleet and was determined to fight the King of Tripura, his neighbour.
He then retreated to Arakan, leaving most of his fleet and artillery in
Chittagong; some have interpreted this move as a strategy to grow
stronger and later conquer Sandwip, while others thought that he was
barricading himself against the power of the Mogor. I wanted to warn
you and ask you, by resorting to the means deemed convenient, to
obstruct the presumed plans of the Mogor but without creating ruptures,
and also ponder that the people of Bengal are in rebellion.43

Moving within a space that had been heavily shaped by celebrated

Portuguese privateers such as Sebastião Gonçalves Tibau and
Filipe de Brito e Nicote, the Crown attempted to demarcate its
territory at a distance and resist the Mughals.44 Philip III would thus
recommend constructing fortresses in Sandwip and Chittagong so
that, the king reasoned, ‘the entire coast of Bengal will be brought
under our control and one will prevent the Mogor from becoming its
lord’.45 In this context, the strategy of the Estado consisted in
garnering the support of as many Portuguese rebels as possible and
fighting the Mogor by taking sides with the Mogo.46
The available Portuguese sources focus on events in lower
Burma and, therefore, neither recount the consolidation of imperial
authority in eastern Bengal nor provide the details of these conflicts.
In contrast, an important Mughal testimony—‘Alau’ddin Isfahani’s
autobiography—documents this context and contains abundant
references to the firangis. Also called Mirza Nathan, ‘Alau’ddin
Isfahani was an Iranian noble, one of Jahangir’s khanazads, and the
son of the commander of the Mughal flotilla in eastern Bengal. His
autobiography provides intriguing insights regarding the subjugation
of the region to imperial power—in which he actively participated—
under the successive governments of Islam Khan (g. 1608–13),
Qasim Khan (g. 1613–17), and Ibrahim Khan (g. 1617–24).47
 In Nathan’s Baharistan-i Ghaybi, the Portuguese are clearly
portrayed as a relevant, quasi-native piece of the political, military,
and social mosaic of the Ganges delta. Masters of navigation in the
region, the Firangis not only knew the navigable channels of the
riverine system, they took advantage of such expertise. Take the ill-
fated expedition to Jessore under Ibrahim Khan’s command. The
Mughal subadar became lost; with no food, the expedition wandered
for five days in a territory comprising labyrithine channels that not
even the experienced zamindars guiding the subadar truly knew.
Indeed ‘very few men except the Mags and the Firingis were familiar
with that route’.48 The Firangis are invariably associated with both
the rebellious zamindars and the Maghs in Nathan’s account. They
represented sedition, a serious obstacle to imperial authority and the
triumph of Islam. His position is clear in the bitter dialogue between
the subadar Ibrahim Khan and Mirza Nathan himself, recounted in
the Baharistan-i Ghaybi. During this tense conversation, the author
challenged his interlocutor by noting that he was expected to make
Bengal a land of Islam, but the subadar otherwise preferred the
dangerous path of his predecessor: ‘Now as you are following the
same track I am of opinion that the reign of the Firingis and the
Mags is still prevailing.’49
Yet the Firangis are depicted in this account as men without
loyalty, people who did not hesitate to attack the Maghs if need be.
‘Durmish Carbalu’—that is, Domingos Carvalho, who took part in the
capture of the island of Sandwip in 1602—was one such
individual.50 With the systematic dilapidation of the chieftains’ power
in eastern Bengal, the farangian-i-harmads are portrayed as
vultures, opportunists ready to cash in on the imperial offensive and
take advantage of the rebels’ defeats: they killed Daud, one of the
sons of ‘Isa Khan,51 and they plundered Jessore. Mirza Nathan
attributes to Raja Pratapaditya the following prediction, once under
siege by the imperial army and before eventually submitting to Islam
Khan: ‘The Firingis of the Harmad, who never ceased even in
peacetime to attack and plunder the territory of Jessore, will now
become audacious and will make greater attempts than before to
ruin our territory.’52 Pratapaditya was right; once under Mughal
control, Jessore was not to be pacified—governor Ibrahim Khan
spoke of daily attacks by the Firangis, which resulted in as many as
1,500 captives.53 Conversely, hundreds of firangis fought in the
imperial forces during Ibrahim Khan’s time, as noted not only in the
Baharistan-i Ghaybi, but also in the Padshah Buranji.54 Jesuit
correspondence is further confirmation; while seeking to estimate
the number of Christians scattered throughout Bengal, the annual
letter of 1621 refers to ‘six hundred in the infantry of the nawab
captain of the Mogor, and conqueror of the lands of Arakan’.55
Prince Khurram’s revolt and the control he held over Bengal for a
brief period in 1624–5 is the focal point of the final section of
Nathan’s account. The author speaks of the Mughal prince’s court in
Cuttack and notes how several firangis sided with the rebellious
prince. In Hughli they chose to submissively approach Khurram in
what Nathan described as an act of true vassalage:
The report of his victorious advance produced a commotion among the
Zamindars of that region. One of the relatives of the King of Portugal
named Captain Chanika, i.e., a Firingi Sardar, who was holding a post
equivalent to that of an imperial Subadar, and was the viceroy of the
King of Portugal at Hugli, Pipli and other parts of the province of Orissa,
thought that his best interests would be served by kissing the feet of the
prince. So he came with five sea-elephants, and rare gifts of jewels and
jewelled appliances worth about Rs. 100,000 and obtained the eternal
honour of kissing the ground.56

This passage in the Baharistan-i Ghaybi reflects the process of

‘Bengalization’ that the Portuguese had meanwhile undergone. They
were seen as regional zamindars and perfectly at ease with Mughal
rituals of political obeisance. Second, it is worth noting that Nathan
recognized a minimal Portuguese political and administrative
structure existed in the region and sought to provide the reader with
its Mughal equivalent. Last but not least, Nathan’s views corroborate
how unclear the roles and internal power structures were of the
Portuguese in Mughal Bengal. The captain of Hughli was thought to
have been a viceroy of Portugal and a relative of the king himself.
Most likely, Nathan thought—as had the Malays since the conquest
of Malacca in 1511—that the Portuguese came from Goa and that
this city was their country’s capital. In all probability, Nathan did not
consider the Portuguese, or the Portuguese of Bengal for that
matter, to be ‘true’ Europeans.57
Nathan spoke of the firangi attacks on Jahangir’s army, that is,
those who fought alongside Khurram’s supporters, but he also
recounted how ‘Manmil, Durzisuz and other Firingis’ deserted
Khurram to join the imperial forces.58 The Iranian author concludes
his account with Khurram’s defeat in 1626. An important Jesuit
report, however, enables us to continue to monitor the relationship
between the Portuguese in Bengal and the restored Mughal
authority in the area. Dated January 1626, a document titled ‘News
from Bengal’ (‘Nouas de Bengalla’) conveys a rather dark picture of
the western portion of the delta, affected as it was by an epidemic,
rice shortages, and a grasshoper plague.59 This harsh
environmental scenario equated with the fortune of the Portuguese
settlers of the bandel (it is unclear whether the Jesuit writer refers to
Satgaon or Hughli); a man of his times, the anonymous author
sought to collect proof of divine manifestations to prophetically
present them as portents of imminent misadventure and major
punishment.
The ‘News from Bengal’ notes that many residents of the bandel
joined Khurram during his rebellion only to subsequently abandon
him, ‘robbing all they could’ as they went.60 The missionary does
not hesitate to call these men ‘Portuguese strays’ (Portugueses
vadios), clearly separating them from the other settlers who did not
join in Khurram’s revolt. These latter, identified in the document as
‘poor Portuguese’, were soon to be attacked and humiliated by the
former (avexando os tiranicamente), and led them to beseech the
‘Mughal captain’ to intervene. This unnamed imperial officer—likely
a thanadar, if not the faujdar (provincial governor) of the sarkar of
Satgaon—came to the bandel demanding the ‘delinquents’ to
surrender and return what they had stolen from Khurram. It seems,
however, the ‘Mughal captain’ could not stop himself from carrying
out a little thieving himself: he besieged the bandel and seized the
ships docked in the port, capturing, among others, a vessel that had
just arrived from China. Consequently, the moradores asked the
Jesuit Simão de Figueiredo to break through the siege lines, travel
to the imperial capital, and petition Jahangir. After several days’
march, Figueiredo crossed paths with the incoming subadar of
Bengal—presumably Mahabat Khan (g. 1625–6)—who was
travelling from the court. After informing the new Mughal governor of
the situation, the Jesuit decided to return with him to the bandel.
According to the account, the ‘tyrant moor’ presented himself to the
newly arrived subadar bearing ‘a rich gift of things from China’—the
very same objects he had just stolen from the Portuguese. But
Mahabat Khan was unbending, and he imprisoned the ‘Mughal
captain’, lifted the siege to the bandel, and launched an inquiry.
Interestingly, there is no mention whatsoever of these events in
the Mughal sources. Regardless of the accuracy of this Jesuit
account, the intriguing incident of 1625–6 provides a good basis for
understanding the Firangis and Mughal Bengal on the eve of
Shahjahan’s rule. The Portuguese presence in the region triggered
recurrent tensions well before imperial rule was fully established, as
epitomized by the Afghan attack on the bandel of Satgaon in 1560.
Once under Mughal dominion, however, the situation did not
improve: it is clear that the Portuguese challenged Akbar’s authority
in Bengal in the years following the conquest, and there is evidence
of conflicts between firangi residents of Hughli and Mughal officers
in the early years of Jahangir’s reign.61 The events of 1625–6 thus
represent just one link in a long chain of skirmishes. One can view
them as a rehearsal for the major crisis of 1632, a final warning
tremor before a full-blown earthquake was to erupt.

1632: THE ‘FURY OF UGOLIM’

Attack
In the early years of his reign, Emperor Shahjahan ordered an
attack on Hughli, the most important of the Portuguese bandéis in
the Bay of Bengal at the time. The siege lasted from late June to
late September 1632 and consisted of a land and sea offensive. It
predictably ended in an imperial victory and in the death, captivity, or
flight—exact numbers are difficult to ascertain—of the Portuguese
and Christian population of the port city. This major episode is
mentioned in both Persian and Portuguese sources of the period;
while the latter obviously lament the ‘loss of Hughli (perda do Golim)
—or the ‘fury of Hughli’ (furia de Ugolim), as the then Portuguese
viceroy suggestively described it—the former expressed joy at the
overthrow of these ‘mischievous people’.62
Unlike the conflict of the ‘two Moorish ships’ in Surat two years
earlier, the Hughli incident of 1632 was recorded in seventeenth-
century Mughal texts such as ‘Inayat Khan’s Shah Jahan Nama and
‘Abdul Hamid Lahori’s Padshah Nama, and continued to be
remembered for the next century.63 Emphasis was placed on the
uncontrolled growth of the firangi colony at the heart of the Ganges
delta, a colony that had dangerously evolved from a trading
settlement into a fortressed city. Comercially, the rise of Hughli had
led to the twighlight of Satgaon. This alien entity fed off of slavery
and violence, infected the local population through the spread of
Christianity, and ultimately challenged the emperor’s authority in the
suba. It goes without saying that the Portuguese sources offer quite
an opposite picture, emphasizing, as is the case with the Jesuit
João Cabral’s account, that ‘the city had neither walls nor artillery of
any kind’.64 Notwithstanding, the same Portuguese missionary
somehow corroborates the Mughal chroniclers’ observations about
the undeniably weak imperial presence in Hughli:
The supreme power of that country, as of all other territories of Bengal,
belonged to the Mogol King. But, content with receiving the revenues of
the markets and of the customs, he abandoned the immediate
governement to the Portuguese themselves. In fact, they enjoyed
absolute independence, so much so that even the King’s magistrate had
no footing in the town, nor did he ever enter it, except with the goodwill
 and pleasure of the Portuguese. The very fleets of the Viceroy of
Bengal, when they happened to seek shelter there, had to submit to
certain formalities.65

Shahjahan was determined to bring an end to this humiliation.

According to Lahori, he had toyed with the idea of annihilating
Hughli even before ascending the throne; to re-establish Mughal
sovereignty in the port, the chronicler remarked, one had to ensure
‘that the coinage might always bear the stamp of the glorious
dynasty, and the pulpit might be graced with its khutba’.66 The
underlying rationale of this and other Mughal texts on Hughli is
rather interesting because of its parallels to the mainstream Chinese
discourse regarding the Portuguese port city of Macau during the
same period. In both cases, the descriptions evoke an image of
insidious (if small) bandéis located in the littoral areas of sizeable
continental empires, controlled by unruly ‘barbarians’ that threaten
to ‘contaminate’ the region with their imposing religion and via
physical force. Such sites started as mere trading posts, the result of
concessions made by naive-cum-corrupt local officials to scheming
foreigners, posts that were quick to develop into dangerous military
strongholds.67
The precise motives for the Mughal attack of 1632 remain
unclear. One possible answer may lie in the desire of the emperor to
shore up or reconsolidate the commercial interests of the empire
insofar as the rise of ‘Portuguese Hughli’ coincided with the decline
of ‘Mughal Satgaon’. Considering the events of Surat in 1630, it is
also plausible that Shahjahan decided to ‘cleanse’ the maritime
confines of Mughal India by purging or simply disciplining the
Western presence in the two regions. In fact, provinces such as
Gujarat and Bengal were not only marked by the presence internal
protest movements, they were also exposed to mounting foreign
pressure from the Europeans. The Dutchman Joan Tack wrote in
1648 that the condition of Ahmedabad had called Shahjahan’s
attention to the fact that the province had become a nest of pirates
and thieves. Recognizing that Gujarat was ‘rotten and corrupt’, the
emperor it seems made a promise to bring the suba to its former
prosperity.68 Perhaps he considered in 1632 that Bengal was
equally rotten and corrupt, a picture that matches the heavily moral
discourse transmitted in Mughal chronicles of the time. One
Portuguese report out of Surat, written just prior to the 1630 crisis,
very much corroborates this hypothesis: its author noted that
Shahjahan ‘had ordered the Portuguese from Bengal not to carry
guns; the Portuguese protested, but no more than that. If the
Portuguese would not comply, he would have them killed’.69 The
Chinese parallel once again proves pertinent: the turbulent situation
that maritime China faced in the early years of Kangxi’s reign (r.
1662–1722)—for example, the Revolt of the Three Feudatories and
Zheng Chenggong’s potentate in the South China Sea—led to the
adoption of radical measures, namely the evacuation of the
shoreline. Macau was very close to meeting the same fate in the
1660s as Hughli had met three decades earlier.70
The Portuguese held different views regarding why Hughli fell.
According to them, Shahjahan had never forgiven the moradores of
Bengal for their treason during his rebellion against his father in
1623. The other presumed motive for the destruction of ‘Golim’ and
the long captivity that most of the survivors endured in Agra lay in
Shahjahan’s alleged Islamic orthodoxy. The emperor’s religious
policy is a much-debated question that will not be discussed here.
Suffice it to say, the Portuguese and the Jesuit missionaries were
convinced Shahjahan, unlike his father and grandfather, was
fundamentally anti-Christian and that such a stance in itself could
well explain the attack on Hughli. A third possible explanation for the
incident of 1632 can be found in an implicit mea culpa on the part of
the ‘victims’: the self-admitted cupidity of the Portuguese in Bengal
eventually led to an inevitable punishment.
Regardless of the reasons underpinning his beligerant gesture of
1632, it is clear that Shahjahan used the victory over Hughli to
enhance his image, both abroad and at home. In a letter addressed
to the Shah Safi I (r. 1629–42) in April 1633, the Mughal emperor
informed the Safavid ruler that he had taken Hughli and significantly
coupled the incident with the suppression of other substantial
threats to his authority.71 Internally, the inclusion of the episode in
the main chronicles of his reign is in itself a telling sign. In fact,
Hughli and its aftermath were considered relevant enough that they
were painted by some of the imperial artists who had illustrated the
Padshahnama manuscript, today housed in the Royal Library, at
Windsor Castle. Amongst its forty-four illustrations, two are of the
conquest of Hughli: f. 117a, painted c. 1634, represents the Mughal
attack on the port, while f. 116b, painted c. 1650, depicts the
imperial reception in Agra of the Portuguese captives.72
The ‘loss of Golim’ had considerable repercussions in Goa. From
a financial perspective, the Mughal attack caused immediate
substantial losses. A document from 1636 states: ‘In the two ports of
Orixa and Uguly that the moors Mogores have taken from us and
destroyed in Bengal, the losses are estimated in one million eight
hundred thousand xerafins which they seized from us in money and
goods.’73 This incident was by far the greatest economic drawback
of Linhares’s term in office, even taking into consideration that the
author of this estimate—the Augustinian friar Diogo de Santa Ana
(d. 1644)—was a declared enemy of the viceroy. Significant
economic and commercial hardships would hit the Estado da Índia
shortly thereafter, since Goa depended on the saltpetre from
Bengal, as much as Malacca relied on foodstuffs and textiles from
Bengal.
The political effects were no less staggering. Although ‘the loss of
the bandel’ (a perdição do bandel) was neither recorded in
contemporary Portuguese chronicles nor caught the attention of the
printing press in Goa, Lisbon, or Madrid, the incident, nevertheless,
was recurrently discussed in the correspondence exchanged
between India and Iberia after 1632 and left a lasting mark. It
contributed to the shaping of a negative image of Viceroy Count of
Linhares, who found himself under heavy criticism in Goa following
the Mughal attack.74 More broadly, the fall of Hughli often became
associated with the decadence of the Estado da Índia. When listing
the divine signs that had manifested in Goa between 1619 and 1654
and were related to the presumed demise of ‘Portuguese Asia’, the
Dominican Manuel da Cruz catalogued the defeat of 1632 alongside
two other major setbacks: the loss of Malacca and Portuguese
expulsion from Japan.75 The chronicler Faria e Sousa adopted a
similar discursive strategy. He devoted a chapter of his Asia
Portuguesa to summing up the events that had occurred during
Linhares’s viceroyalty opening with the description of a couple of
monstrous births that took place at the time in India; they were
considered auguries that heralded the future loss of ‘the town of
Golin in Bengala’.76
The Church took clear ideological advantage of the events in
Hughli. In the following years, both Jesuit and Augustinian
correspondence and their other accounts were rife with small stories
and side episodes related to the incident and its human and spiritual
consequences. Such texts discuss in length the long march of the
Christian prisoners from Bengal to the imperial capital and the
hardships of the Agra captivity, the forced conversions to Islam and
the dramatic splitting of families, the sale of captives to eminent
members of the Mughal nobility, and the forced entry of Christian
women into several harems, including that of the emperor. The
Augustinian order, which counted many members among those who
died or were made prisoner in Hughli, has contributed its share
towards the written memory of the event and its aftermath.77 The
most relevant text written by the Jesuit camp is the already cited first
person account penned a year later by father João Cabral, who
claimed to have seen in Dhaka with his very own eyes the imperial
farman that ordered the attack on Hughli.78 Tailored to Jesuit and
Portuguese audiences, Cabral’s report includes tales of bravery and
miraculous occurrences. From its cast of characters, special
emphasis is placed on the traitor Martim Afonso de Mello, whom the
Portuguese residents of Hughli nicknamed Martin Luther, and on the
prophet Bento Rodrigues, a fellow Jesuit who divined the Mughal’s
moves during the siege and their expected outcome.
Last but not least, Hughli arguably impacted Portuguese–Mughal
cross-cultural imagery, thus contributing to the creation of what may
be described as a mutual ‘Black Legend’.79 Chronicler ‘Inayat Khan
did not fail to highlight the treacherous and hypocritical behaviour of
the Firangis during the siege of 1632, and Viceroy Pedro da Silva
did not hold back the following remarks that harshly characterized
the Mughals in the instructions (regimento) transmitted to one of his
captains several years later:
You will certainly be confronted with the cunning (astucias) and deceit
(enganos) which the Mogores usually adopt in their wars and
conquests; their stratagem is to not keep their word, giving it lightly so
that, under its cover, they have room to act in treacherous ways. In
other instances, they agree to, or ask for truces, in order to work freely
against those they wish to offend. We have seen this in Bengal, in the
settlement of Hughli, according to what some people say here; people
who have experienced their deceit.80

Prevailing anti-Mughal sentiment in Goa was nurtured after 1632 on

how warfare was conducted and its moral codes, or lack thereof.

Response
More than once, the idea to carry out crushing military action against
Shahjahan crossed the Portuguese viceroy’s mind. For some time
Linhares toyed with the idea of launching a retaliatory attack on
Surat, a response that would certainly hit the emperor hard given
the commercial, fiscal, and symbolic value of the most important
port of Mughal Gujarat, an idea, however, that he never carried out.
As we have seen, Linhares’s enemies in Goa had taken advantage
of the Hughli incident to criticize the viceroy and how he had
conducted the external policy of the Estado da Índia, namely his
strategy (read as passivity) with regard to the Mughal Empire. To
make matters worse, the situation in Bengal continued to deteriorate
after the fall of Hughli, with the subsequent expulsion of the
Portuguese from Pipli a short time later.81 Notwithstanding, the
viceroy would eventually embrace the advantages of realpolitik. In a
letter to Philip IV dated February 1635, Linhares noted that he now
maintained ‘good correspondence’ with Shahjahan despite still
having ‘pierced in his heart the grievance he caused us in Bengal’.
Linhares admitted that he had thought of ‘harshly punishing’
(asperissimo castigo) the Mughal ruler for the sake of maintaining
face, but recognized that the Estado was in no condition to
withstand Shahjahan’s predictably strong reaction. For this reason,
the viceroy confessed to his king: ‘I dissimulate and keep hovering’
(dissimulo e vou pairando).82
The ‘destruction of the port of Ogolim’ was debated in a State
Council meeting held in Goa on 11 March 1633.83 Early in the
discussion it became clear that in spite of the gravity of Shahjahan’s
agression, the Estado was keen to reach an understanding with the
Mughals. Consensus was reached that the emperor must express
publicly his regret over the attack on Hughli; the viceroy and his
councillors were obviously worried about preserving the image of
the Estado vis-à-vis other Asian states, and were therefore
expecting ‘to see whether the Mogor, or his officials (regedores) on
his behalf, would acknowledge the death and captivity of the
Portuguese’. But the ultimate question the Council members had to
discuss was whether ‘one should dissimulate with him [Shahjahan],
place the blame on the Portuguese and thereby reopen the said
port’. This was a rather clever formula. Linhares was willing to
dissimulate and transfer the responsibility of the attack on Hughli to
its Portuguese settlers and their recurrent misdoings, provided that
such a strategy would buy the Estado its return to Bengal. The
viceroy went as far as to admit a few years later that had he known
in real time about the siege on Hughli he still would not have sent
any aid from Goa. ‘The city—Linhares reasoned—belonged to the
Moorish King and, even though there were Portuguese living there,
they were all runaways, fugitives, and disobedient to His Majesty.’84
Different councillors held different views as to whether the goal
should be to recover Hughli or identify alternative ports in the region.
At any rate, they were all in favour of dispatching someone schooled
in the trade and politics of the Bay of Bengal, who could restore the
status quo. The unanimous choice fell on Gaspar Pacheco de
Mesquita, a veteran resident of Cochin; he was sent to the region as
a merchant (com titulo de mercador) despite the obvious political
and diplomatic designs of the planned mission.
Before looking more carefully at Mesquita’s mission, two further
points must be addressed. First, Linhares—and also Shahjahan—
clearly believed the Estado’s interests in the two most important
maritime provinces of the Mughal Empire (Gujarat and Bengal) to be
interrelated. For Shahjahan, the attack on Hughli in 1632 was
justifiable considering the Portuguese capture of the ‘two Moorish
ships’ off Surat a couple of years earlier. As for Linhares, the
‘destruction of the port of Ogolim’ justified the Portuguese return to
Gujarat and the destruction of Surat, which would have humiliated
the Mughals as much as the bloody events of Bengal had humiliated
the Portuguese. Second, although Shahjahan had a direct say in the
destruction of Hughli, unlike in Gujarat, he remained somewhat
invisible in the period immediately following it. During the crisis of
Surat in 1630, Shahjahan had directly intervened, as had his father
in 1613–15. In both instances, as seen in Chapter 4, the mutasaddis
played a central role. Judging from the extant Portuguese records,
the events in Bengal offer a somewhat different picture: the emperor
stayed in the shadows and so did the Mughal officials who were in
charge of the local ports. Thus, the main interlocutors with the
Estado were the subadars of Bengal and Orissa, while the subadars
of Gujarat were virtually absent from the negotiations during the
critical moments of 1613–15 and 1630.
Gaspar Pacheco de Mesquita carried with him three rather cordial
letters penned by the viceroy of Goa and addressed to the most
prominent Mughal officials of the Bengal region. Unfortunately, only
summaries of these documents have survived.85 The letter to the
governor of Orissa, Mu‘taqad Khan, naturally concerned Pipli.86
According to the contents of the letter, Mesquita was to have been
interested in learning the motives behind the destruction of the
bandel and was ready to ‘punish our people’ (castigar aos nossos)
should the former Portuguese residents prove guilty of any
wrongdoing. As decided in the State Council meeting in Goa, the
ultimate objective was to reopen Pipli to Portuguese trade. Another
letter was directed to Masum Khan, the ‘Masnad-i ‘Ali (Moçondoly)
and lord of Hijli (Angely)’, whom the Portuguese identified as a ‘very
great servant of the Padshah’ and who was often treated as
‘emperor’ or ‘king’.87 The letter was meant to thank him for
sheltering all those who had fled Hughli following the Mughal attack;
by resettling in Hijli, the viceroy emphasized that these Portuguese
were living in Masum Khan’s house and were, therefore, his guests.
The third and most significant letter was addressed to the subadar
of Bengal, Mir Muhammad Baqar (g. 1632–5). Linhares reutilizes
the hospitality metaphor employed in the previous letter and
engages in a skillful game of words around the courtesies that are
due one’s invitees: the Portuguese were at peace with the Mughal
emperor, and the destruction of Hughli was not in line with the
decorous behaviour kings and other lords of equal standing were
expected to extend to their guests. Unsurprisingly, the viceroy of
Goa went on to introduce a sharp distinction between the Estado da
Índia and the Portuguese residents in Bengal, in describing the latter
as men ‘who do not obey their own King’. This argument, as we
have seen, lies at the very heart of Goa’s soft response to the
Mughal attack of 1632.
The final destination of Mesquita’s voyage was Mrauk-U. The
Portuguese emissary left Goa with a viceregal letter addressed to
the king of Arakan. Linhares expressed gratitude for his
interlocutor’s willingness to cooperate with the Portuguese in the
aftermath of the attack on Hughli and consequently his willingness
to wage war on the Mughals with his fleet. The possibility of a
Firangi–Magh coalition against Shahjahan had at some point been
put on the table. This solution, however, sat in direct contradiction
with the Estado’s diplomatic efforts towards the Mughal provincial
officials and was consequently abandoned.88 Ultimately, Mesquita’s
mission to Bengal was successful, and in 1632, a mere two years
later, the Firangis would return to the ports of the region, Hughli
included, as though nothing had happened. Notwithstanding, the
Portuguese reaction to the ‘loss of Golim’ could have been
drastically different had the viceroy’s aforementioned plans for
military retaliation materialized. The project that a certain Tomé Vaz
Garrido submitted around 1637 to Linhares’s successor, Viceroy
Pedro da Silva (g. 1635–9), proposed just such a solution. Based on
the ‘experience of the many years I have spent in Bengal, and from
what I have gleaned from the natives of the land’, Garrido suggested
no less would work than carrying out a campaign for the conquest of
Bengal and its full incorporation into the Estado da Índia.89
Garrido’s intriguing proposal ‘to banish the Mogor from these
parts’ clearly aligns with the many Iberian projects that had been
presented to the Portuguese kings since the late sixteenth century
to take entire kingdoms or extensive regions of Southeast Asia and
East Asia.90 True, we do not know of other Portuguese projects of
conquest directed to any of the three Islamic empires of Asia—
Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. But Garrido’s plan targeted
Bengal, not the Mughal Empire itself, and was therefore
geographically and culturally affiliated with similar projects
concerning Southeast Asia. The content and form at play in the plan
resemble that of an ethnographic arbitrio, a type of text that usually
provided a comprehensive description of a particular region—
describing the geography and natural resources, commodities and
trading opportunities, and political and social landscape—and
presented it as the ‘remedy’ for the Hispanic Monarchy.91 Adopting
the linguistic devices of other Iberian arbitristas of the time, Garrido
painted the ‘Great Empire of Bengal’ (Jmperio grande de Bengala)
as though it were ‘larger than all of India’. Garrido was not alone in
his cultivation of such dreams. Right after the loss of Hughli, the
Jesuit João Cabral stated that, with ‘orderly’ Portuguese and a
fortress in Arakan, ‘all the kingdoms of Bengal would be subjected
and tributaries to Your Majesty, as they are today to the Mogor’.92
Roughly two decades later, the Dominican Nicolau da Conceição
presented a proposal rather similar to Garrido’s that argued in favour
of the desirable Portuguese conquest of Bengal.93
The project of 1637 reflects sound knowledge of Bengal’s political
and social fabric. It seems Garrido was indeed well positioned to
observe and strategize; he claims to have been chosen both by the
subadar and the Masnad-i ‘Ali to serve as ‘captain of these two
lands and Bandeis of Hijli and Banja’. Four thousand Christians lived
there, but Garrido appears to have had the power to confine to
Banja all the scattered Portuguese and mestizos. Furthermore, his
authority was not restricted to just the Christian population since he
apparently also had jurisdiction over Muslims and Hindus living in
the region. To this appointment—a Mughal appointment in nature—
he later added a Portuguese one: Gaspar Pacheco de Mesquita
would make him ‘captain of the said lands in His Majesty’s name’.
Garrido was thus well informed of the power structure of the
Mughal Empire in Bengal and in the proposal elaborated on its
flaws, in them identifying opportunities for the Portuguese. Under
the subadar, who governed the province on the emperor’s behalf
from the city of Dhaka, there were twelve bhuyans.94 These
chieftains controlled myriad zamindars—Garrido equated these with
the European ‘marquises and counts’—whose authority derived
from the abundant rents and people at their disposal. Their leader
then was Mansumicão, that is, Masum Khan (b. 1604), the son of
Musa Khan—who joined the imperial service after bowing to
Jahangir and lived in Dhaka until his death in 1623—and the
grandson of the famed ‘Isa Khan. Garrido sees him as both ‘captive
and tributary’, like the many zamindars under his authority. Forced to
pay heavy taxes, they all ‘nurtured hopes of freeing themselves from
captivity and the tributes imposed on them by the Mogor’. Thus, the
arbitrista depicted Bengal to be a ‘reluctant’ Mughal province that
continued in its resistance to imperial control as late as 1637.
Garrido believed that the Estado should therefore seek an alliance
with the boiões, free Bengal from Shahjahan’s rule, and replace the
authority of the Mughal emperor with that of the king of Portugal. He
was convinced that ‘people would be more keen to pay taxes to the
Portuguese than to the Mogor’ and would do so with more grace.
The proposal established that part of this ‘tribute’ would be sufficient
to cover the costs of an effective presence of the Estado in the
region.
 Garrido established that the first step of his plan would be to fight
the main flaw of the Portuguese presence in Bengal, that is, the lack
of unity amongst the residents—2,000 Portuguese and 10,000
mixed race people, according to his own estimate. He observed:
‘Each and every one of them wishes to be the absolute Lord … and
guided by such ambition, and resorting to their own money, they kill
each another every day.’ Among several other drawbacks, this
anarchic behaviour had prevented the timely cooperation between
the Portuguese and local rulers, which Garrido believed would have
been enough to prevent the Mughal conquest of Bengal.
Furthermore, Garrido was convinced that the Mughal conquest of
Bengal would never really take root and that rebellion would always
stir just below the surface. To correct these past Portuguese
mistakes, he advocated forming an alliance with the boiões of
Bengal as a means to free the region from Shahjahan’s yoke. The
plan required the formation of a fleet to conquer the region and
counted on an ‘uprising of the boiões’. Portuguese rule was to be
anchored in three fortresses. The first—intended to prevent the VOC
ships from resupplying at Hughli—was to be built ‘on this branch of
the Ganges that goes to Ugulim’, just outside Mughal control. The
second was to be built in the kingdom of Jessore, while the third
was to be located at the court in Dhaka, ‘where the Mughal viceroy
lives’. According to Garrido’s plan, the captain sent from Goa should
also reside there in replacement of the subadar and in mimicry of his
power and prestige: ‘And in this Court that is the head of this
Empire, shall be the Governor or Captain that Your Excellency
sends, keeping all boiões and petty kings (regulos) in his presence,
like the nawab of Daca does now.’ Finally, by carrying out the mass
conversion of the country to Christianity—with the help of 300 or 400
missionaries (‘cultivators’)—the end of Mughal rule could be
ensured and Goa would hold more power in Bengal than in the rest
of India.
Garrido’s plan was eventually discussed in Madrid but was never
approved; three years after it had been presented, it was rejected
due to the lack of financial resources. This was likely the formal,
‘polite’ way to put an end to a question that neither the home court
nor the viceregal one were keen to pursue in the late 1630s, if ever.
A much more prudent alternative—one that his plan likewise
contemplated—was considered, but also never achieved fully,
namely to dispatch someone from Goa to Bengal to ‘round up’
(recolher) the local Christians and the Portuguese moradores and
build a fortress in a location ‘not under Mogor rule’ (isento do
Mogor).95
Had it been implemented, the mirific project crafted by Tomé Vaz
Garrido would have translated into the Estado da Índia gaining
considerable territorial control in Bengal. This, in turn, would have
resulted in an anomaly: the existence of a ‘true’ Portuguese–Mughal
border in India. At any rate, an effective Portuguese and Catholic
presence in Bengal were seen as the elements that would cement
sovereignty, as epitomized in the imagined figure of a Portuguese
governor ruling from Dhaka in lieu of a Mughal subadar. Garrido’s
plan also left room for suzerainty, however. It acknowledged the
importance of the native political and social fabric, and the support
of the dozen boiões was considered essential to defeat the
Mughals. Only in a second moment did the plan specify that these
chieftains would then defer to the authority of the Portuguese king.
The plan was ingenious, albeit not well thought out; indeed, even as
Garrido wrote, local resistance to Mughal dominion had already
started to fade and the Portuguese continued to be seen in Bengal
as pirates. If in the Bengali literature of the late sixteenth century the
Mughals are compared to monsters that the Goddess Chandi is
expected to defeat, a century later an intriguing phenomenon of
accommodation occurs; faced with the Pax Mughalica, the Bengalis
artfully crafted a situation in which the Mughals capitulated to the
goddess and became her devotees.96 In this way, the Bengalis were
able to abandon their hostile stance towards the Mughals. In
contrast, there was no room for the Firangis, let alone a firangi state,
in these stories.

Reconstitution
In the aftermath of the Hughli attack, the Portuguese return to
Bengal, namely to the Bharigathi region, was surprisingly fast.
Those who managed to escape from Hughli in September 1632
remained, albeit scattered around the country. Not long after, they
returned to the very port they had fled. An Augustinian text dated
1669 states that ‘from the year 1640 until the current one … they
grew so much in number that they are now in the same state they
were before it was lost’.97 Like human tissue regeneration, the
firangi reconstitution in Bengal proved possible and was eventually
successful.
The following lament by an EIC agent speaks of the Portuguese
presence in the area less than a year after the Mughal attack.
Writing from Orissa, Thomas Colley understood that business
opportunities for the EIC in both Hughli and Pipli would still be
scarce. Colley had just travelled from Masulipatnam to Hariharpur in
the company of a handful of Englishmen and upon his arrival
realized that the news on the ‘death’ of the ‘Portingalls’ had been
greatly exaggerated:
Those Portinggalls whilome exspelled Hugly hath found greate favor
with Shawgahan, and reentered that place to the number of 20
persones; hows cavidall for theire commensing a new investment is the
third part of there goods formerly cessed on, which large priviliges and
tashareefes with honer the king hath bestowed on them. So that our
exspecttation [of] Hugly is fursstrayt, and I feare likwise Pippoly will not
by us be obtainened.98

From this letter it seems that the EIC ambition to establish

themselves in place of the Portuguese in Hughli was out of their
reach. Pipli too was not open to them; as one of Colley’s
companions, William Bruton, then put it, Pipli was again ‘a Port
Towne of the Portugals’.99 The situation in Pipli indeed bettered
rapidly for the Portuguese. Regardless, in April 1634, the count of
Linhares worried over the rapid expansion of VOC in the region
owing to news he had received dating six months earlier. The
viceroy considered the port of Balasore to be lost to the Dutch and
remarked that they were equally seeking to set foot in Hughli,
‘establish their factory there and take the port in order to prevent us
from being its masters ever again’.100 The VOC did, in fact, succeed
in opening a factory in Hariharpur in 1633 and another in Hughli two
years later. For some time it was unclear which were the Dutch
commercial nodes in West Bengal, with factories rapidly opening,
closing, and being re-established in different ports.101 But, as
Linhares penned in his diary, in the last two years of his term in
office (1634–5), Portuguese monopoly in Pipli seemed to be
unshaken: ‘The Mogor so far did not want to grant it to them [the
Dutch], and further told them that the port (where presently those
who managed to escape from the fury of Ugolim live) had been
given to the Portuguese.’102
In the following months, the viceroy’s diary would record similar
observations about the Portuguese in Pipli; he wrote that they
enjoyed religious freedom, noting that mass was being celebrated in
an improvised church.103 Linhares’s information came from the
news sent by Gaspar Pacheco de Mesquita, whose voyage to
Bengal proved quite successful. On the one hand, Mesquita
managed to somehow gain control over the Portuguese who were
dispersed (tresmalhados) following the fall of Hughli, in itself a
recurrent concern of the Estado throughout the 1630s and
1640s.104 On the other hand, he artfully fostered good relations with
the provincial authorities, contributing greatly to deescalating the
tension; to ‘appease the situation’ (aquietar estas cousas) was, after
all, one of the priorities of his mission to Bengal. In December 1633,
Linhares’s envoy spoke of the enthusiasm shown by the provincial
officials of Orissa concerning the return of the Firangis: ‘I have
received an answer … on how desirous they are about opening the
port.’ Mesquita felt quite excited, since he saw the port of Pipli as
‘one of the best in these parts, and of more trade’.105 These newly
formed ties grew stronger in the years to come. In a letter to the
Portuguese viceroy—read and analysed in a State Council meeting
held in Goa in June 1636—the subadar of Orissa, Mu‘taqad Khan,
asked ‘the viceroy to send many ships to those ports, while also
soliciting cartazes for his ships to travel safely to these ports, so that
trade could flow as it did before’.106
Several appointments sent by the Estado in the early 1640s to
various posts in Pipli confirm this promising return.107
‘Reconciliation’ in Hughli, too, proved to be easier than expected. In
1633, Francisco Vaz de Araújo, a judge (ouvidor) that had been
assigned to Pipli, ‘had word from the captives of the Golim about the
Moor [presumably the subadar of Bengal] being ready to free them
provided they were willing to reestablish the Bandel’. There were
those among the Portuguese who admitted that ‘the events in
Bengal were less dramatic than it had appeared at first, and that it
would be easy to recover if we were to reestablish a Bandel in
Golim, as the moors desired’.108 There are likewise extant records
of nominations to posts in Hughli during the same period; Jacinto
Botelho do Couto was chosen to be captain of the ‘port of Ogolim,
new bandel’ in 1644 and confirmed again in 1653.109 Another, new
post in the Bhati region—the captaincy of ‘Loricul and Dacá and its
districts in the port of Bengal’—had existed since at least the early
1650s. It was granted to Domingues Rodrigues de Azevedo and
somehow speaks to the mounting presence of the Firangis in the
Bengal delta.110
To avoid tensions such as those that led to the ‘earthquake’ of
1632, Goa invested in monitoring the Portuguese return to Bengal.
This explains the choice Simião Carrilho da Fonseca—praised for
his experience of ‘the things of Bengal’ (das cousas do Bengala)—
made to travel in March 1640 to the area as captain and ouvidor.
This expedition was moulded by prudence and political realism, and
largely conceived as a remake of Mesquita’s mission from some
years before. Seeking to replicate his predecessor’s skillful
diplomatic approach, Fonseca carried letters to the subadars of
Bengal and Orissa as well as to the ‘King of Angelim’, or Masum
Khan. The economic factor prevailed since the Portuguese governor
wished mainly to secure the continued flow of saltpetre and
foodstuffs towards Goa, Ceylon, and Malacca. Predictably, the
Estado granted cartazes to the subadar of Bengal—the ‘nawab of
Dhaka’, who was now Prince Muhammad Shuja‘ (g. 1639–60),
Shahjahan’s son—and whom the Portuguese considered to be a
‘very good friend’.111 Like Mesquita in 1633, Fonseca also had to
reconcile Mughal provincial diplomacy with ‘home affairs’, which he
was to do by policing the Portuguese outlaws of Bengal. He was,
therefore, advised in Goa to be particularly careful exercising justice
in his capacity as ouvidor, ‘since you are going to practice it in a land
that it is not ours and so far from my presence, so that the
disaffection of that people does not lead to a disorder similar to the
past one, which was triggered by the bad behaviour of the
Portuguese who live in those parts’.
It remains to be known whether Fonseca’s mission to Bengal was
spontaneously masterminded in Goa or if it otherwise represented a
reaction to worrying developments on the ground. With some
exaggeration, a later document chronicles the trajectory of those
who survived the Mughal attack of 1632. Six hundred people in forty
ships had fled and settled on an island off Hughli, where they hoped
to remain free from ‘the tyrannies and armies of the Mogores’. They
started to build a fortress ‘on behalf’ of the Portuguese king and
decided to send an ‘ambassador’ to Goa in order to secure the
viceroy’s support. Their objective was to re-establish a Portuguese
settlement in ‘one of the largest and richest empires of this
Orient’.112 The wording of this brief account on the desired rebirth of
Portuguese Hughli recalls the rhetoric and behaviour typical of
privateers in the Bay of Bengal, with, however, the inclusion of
arguments typical of the arbitrista presented by Garrido. Did Goa
respond to the ‘ambassador’ sent by the survivors of Hughli?
Indeed, but not in the way they were most likely expecting: Fonseca
travelled to Bengal to ‘tame’ them, not to support them. Fonseca’s
expedition was not dissuasive enough, for the viceroy announced in
August 1641 that he intended to send to Bengal ‘a person capable
of conducting the Portuguese that wander around there; for this
purpose I maintain friendship ties with the governor that lives there
[that is, the subadar of Bengal], even if those men enjoy very ample
freedom and are hardly controllable’.113
Looking again at Thomas Colley’s letter of July 1633, it is clear
the EIC agent was struck by Shahjahan’s puzzling attitude—the
emperor did not hesitate to favour the Portuguese in Bengal
regardless of the fact that a few months earlier he had expelled
them from Hughli. The question must be begged, why the sudden
change in stance? The answer seemingly lies in a combination of
possible reasons. Was the Mughal ruler ready to admit that the
suppression of a Portuguese-controlled port city in his empire would
bring more disadvantages than advantages to his finances? Most
likely yes, judging from his enthusiastic reaction to the positive
effects Dutch trade in Bengal had on imperial and provincial income;
European presence and business, if regulated, were beneficial.114
Had Shahjahan otherwise reconsidered his position under pressure
from influential, ‘pro-Portuguese’ courtiers? This too is likely,
considering the close relationship between his father-in-law, Asaf
Khan, and the Firangis, as well as the strong commercial nature of
that relationship.115 Or did Shahjahan eventually realize that by
maintaining a harsh policy against the Portuguese, firangi piracy
would inevitably grow in Bengal? Francesco Corsi’s ‘prediction’
points exactly in this direction:
We had news from the Mogor—the Florentine missionary wrote from
Agra in October 1633—that the Corrão [Khurram] ordered the goods
that were taken from our people in Bengal to be deposited; it may well
be that this moorish dog (cão mouro) is now waiting to see how things
unfold in Bengal, for he will probably be loosing more than gaining with
the many assaults that his lands will suffer.116

An imperial farman dated 1633, authorizing and regulating the return

of the Portuguese to Hughli, provides further food for thought in this
respect. This farman is as intriguing as it is problematic since it has
survived exclusively through a Portuguese early nineteenth-century
translation—‘copy of the Farman of the 17 privileges of the Padshah
written in the Persian language, and including its Portuguese
version’ (‘treslado do Firmão dos 17 privilegios do Baixá escritos em
edioma persiana, e junto ao mesmo a sua versão em
portuguez’).117 The document guaranteed religious freedom to the
Portuguese residents as well as rudimentary legal autonomy under
the authority of the ‘Priest of Bandel’, essentially through his right to
administer justice and manage the property of the deceased. It
further included some protective measures vis-à-vis the Dutch
presence and established tax advantages for the Portuguese
residents. Some specific privileges, such as numbers twelve and
fifteen, were designed to encourage the repopulation process; the
former states that ‘if some married families from Europe come and
wish to have a house and live in Hughli, they will be given one for
free and no transport charge made’, while the latter adds that ‘the
families coming from Europe can stay for as long as they wish and
nobody will prevent them from leaving when they wish to return to
Europe’. Furthermore, the Portuguese were given a considerable
plot of land (700 bighas, approximately 260 acres) in the outskirts of
Balagarh. The intended recipients of the farman are not clear. Were
the privileges meant for the ‘Church of the Bandel of Houguli’, as the
Augustinians claimed, or for the Portuguese in general?
Furthermore, some of the privileges speak of ‘Europeans’ and seem
to be aimed at regulating the relations between the Portuguese and
the Dutch, and not just between the two European powers and the
Mughal Empire. Be that as it may, if Shahjahan’s farman of 1633 did
exist, a small Portuguese colony in Mughal Bengal, with its precise
borders and rules, could indeed have been possible.

1 On the Mughals and Bengal, see Sarkar (2003); Bhattacharyya (1994);

Raychaudhuri (1969); Karim (1974), and especially Ray (1998) and Eaton
(1997).
2 The Mughal chronicler is Abu’l Fazl (1993), vol. III, p. 427; his expression
would be recovered in the late eighteenth century by Shah Nawaz Khan
(1999), vol. 1, p. 649. The Portuguese high official is Gonçalo Pinto da
Fonseca and the extract given above is from his intervention in a State Council
meeting held in Goa, 11 March 1633, in ACE, vol. I, pp. 462–7.
 3 Turner (1921), ch. 1.

4 Eaton (1997), pp. 183–93.

5 Chatterjee (2009); Eaton (1997), pp. 186–9, 214–15, 258–9.

6 On this Chinese parallel, see Hostetler (2001). Specifically for Taiwan’s

natives, see Teng (2004).
7 Eaton (1997), pp. 143–4.

8 Flores (2007).
9 Vega (1618).

10 Abu’l Fazl (1993), vol. III, pp. 349–50, 469.

11 For a study of internal colonization in the Russian imperial context, see
Etkind (2011).
12 On this, see Subrahmanyam (1990), pp. 96–127; Malekandathil (2010),
pp. 163–86. Specifically on Satgaon, see Ray (2008).
13 Anonymous, ‘Lembrança d’algumas cousas que se passaram quando
António de Brito e Diogo Pereira foram a Bengala…’ [1521], in Bouchon and
Thomaz (1988), pp. 229–30.
14 Winius (1983); Subrahmanyam (1990).
15 Campos (1919) still represents a useful, if obviously outdated study of
the Portuguese in Bengal. For a recent view, focused on Siam and Southeast
Asia but also looking at the Bay of Bengal, see Halikowski Smith (2011).
16 Sen (1988), vol. IV, pp. 17–55, 117–50 respectively. Also see Ray (1998),
who focuses on Mukundaram Chakravarti and his late sixteenth-century poem
Chandimangal, which may represent the earliest reference to the harmads.
For a full English translation of this poem, see Chakravarti (2015).
17 Sarkar (1907).

18 BPE, CXV/2–9, no. 1, ff. 10r–25r; Hartmann (1994). On the persistent

conflicts between settlers and missionaries in Bengal in the late 1600s and
throughout the following century, see Flores (2002a), pp. 388–9. On the
relation between languages and communities in the early modern period
(albeit exclusively for Europe), see Burke (2004).
19 ‘Manifesta justificação…’, 24 August 1644, in Wellen (2015), p. 449.

20 Vasco da Cunha to King John III, Goa, 6 November 1544, in

Albuquerque and Costa (1990), p. 348; Gabriel de Ataíde to Dom João de
Castro, Mylapur (São Tomé), 20 August 1547, in CSL, vol. III, p. 80; Rui
Gonçalves de Caminha to Dom João de Castro, Cochin, 18 December 1547,
in CSL, vol. III, pp. 555–6.
21 Cunha to John III, Goa, 6 November 1544, in Albuquerque and Costa
(1990), p. 348; Manuel da Gama to Dom João de Castro, ‘Bengal’, 5 January
1547, in Cortesão and Albuquerque (1968–81), vol. III, p. 341.
22 Manuel da Gama to Dom João de Castro, ‘Bengal’, 5 January 1547, in
Cortesão and Albuquerque (1968–81), vol. III, p. 341. Roughly a decade later,
in 1559, the search for alternatives to Chittagong in eastern Bengal led Goa to
sign an agreement with the ‘king of Bacalá’ (that is, the raja of Bakla). See
APO, fasc. 5, pt. 1, pp. 398–402.
23 On the Sundarbans, see Eaton (1997), pp. 208–12; Sarkar (2010).
24 Rui Gonçalves Caminha to Dom João de Castro, Goa, 7 November
1547, in Cortesão and Albuquerque (1968–81), vol. IV, pp. 61–2.
25 António Mendes de Castro to Queen Dona Catarina, aboard the ship São
Vicente, 1 August 1563, ANTT, CC, I–106–80.
26 Rodolfo Acquaviva to the Jesuit Provincial of India, Fatehpur Sikri, 20
July 1580, in DI, vol. XII, p. 55.
27 Acquaviva, Antonio Monserrate, and Francisco Henriques to the
Provincial of India, Agra, 13 July 1580, in DI, vol. XII, p. 42; the Jesuit
missionaries refer specifically to subadar Muzaffar Khan Turbati (g. 1589–80),
killed in April that year. Also see Monserrate to the Jesuit Provincial of India,
Fatehpur Sikri, 9 September 1580, in DI, vol. XII, pp. 70–1.
28 Hosten (1912), p. 208.

29 On all this, see Eaton (1997), pp. 146–8; Bhattasali (1928).

30 Duarte Sande to the Jesuit College of Coimbra, Goa, 7 November 1579,
in DI, vol. XI, p. 677.
31 Foster (1921), p. 28.
32 Haidar (1998), p. 44.

33 Duarte Delgado Varejão to Philip II, Goa, 1 December 1588, AGS, SP,
bk. 1551, ff. 514r–v; Manuel de Sousa Coutinho to Philip II, Goa, 18 December
1588, AGS, SP, bk. 1551, ff. 238r–v. On Godinho’s expedition to eastern
Bengal, but mainly focusing on the relations between Goa and Arakan, see
Guedes (1994), pp. 107–8. Also see Philip II to Viceroy Matias de
Albuquerque, Lisbon, 12 January 1594, in APO, fasc. 3, pp. 257–8.
34 Sengupta (2001).
 35 Governor António de Sousa Coutinho to Philip II, Goa, 4 December
1589, AGS, SP, 1551, ff. 779r–80r.
36 Governor António de Sousa Coutinho to Philip II, Goa, 4 December
1589, AGS, SP, 1551, f. 780r.
37 Governor António de Sousa Coutinho to Philip II, Goa, 4 December
1589, AGS, SP, 1551, f. 780r.
38 Father Brás Nunes to father Bernardo de Macedo, Arakan, 27 January
1602, ARSI, Goa, vol. 48, f. 70v. Similar references are included in letters
written from Bengal by other Jesuit missionaries at the turn of the century. See
Hosten (1925), pp. 52–76.
39 Excerpts of Latif’s account in English translation by Sarkar (1919), pp.
597–603. Also see Sarkar (1928), pp. 143–6.
40 Vega (1618), f. 151v.
41 However, according to Bhadra (1998), p. 489, the frontier uprisings that
broke out in this region at the time may be seen as ‘relative failure on the part
of the Mughals to integrate peripheral zones within the state structure’. Revolts
would continue to breakout in Bengal until the early eighteenth century. See
Ray (1998), pp. 114–92.
42 Eaton (1997), pp. 148–57; Gommans (2002), pp. 170–9.
43 Philip III to Viceroy Rui Lourenço de Távora, Lisbon, 19 March 1612, in
DRI, tom. II, p. 226.
44 On this effort, with a focus on Arakan and the Portuguese involvement in
the region, see Guedes (1994), pp. 149ff.
45 Philip III to Viceroy Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo, Lisbon, 15 March 1613,
in DRI, tom. II, pp. 392–3.
46 Bocarro (1876), vol. II, chs. 98–9, esp. pp. 440–4. Thus, the royal
pardons given to those who then lived as rebels (lançados) in Bengal (Philip III
to Viceroy Dom João Coutinho, Lisbon, 17 January 1618, in APO, fasc. 6,
supp. 1, p. 1131).
47 Nathan (1936). On this text and its author, see Richards (1998), pp. 155–
67.
48 Nathan (1936), vol. II, p. 635.
49 Nathan (1936), vol. II, pp. 500–1.

50 Nathan (1936), vol. I, pp. 334–5.

 51 Nathan (1936), vol. I, pp. 85–6.

52 Nathan (1936), vol. I, pp. 136–7. On the demise of the raja of Jessore,
see Ray (1998), pp. 65–82.
53 Nathan (1936), vol. II, p. 635.

54 Nathan (1936), vol. II, pp. 643, 656, 693, 696, 734, 736, 745–6. The
Padshah Buranji speaks of 500 firangis in the imperial service (Bhuyan [1947],
pp. 112–14).
55 Annual letter of 1621 (Father Jacinto Pereira, Cochin, 27 December
1621), ARSI, Goa, vol. 33 II, f. 667r.
56 Nathan (1936), vol. II, p. 688.
57 Flores (2013).

58 Nathan (1936), vol. II, pp. 745–6, 748, 749–50.

59 ‘Nouas de Bengalla, escritas por hũ Padre nosso em Janeiro de 1626’,
Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, 9/7236, ff. 564r–73v.
60 Father Sebastião Barreto mentions 400 Portuguese scattered around
Bengal (Goa, 15 December 1624, ARSI, Goa, vol. 33 II, f. 771r).
61 Jerónimo Xavier reports in 1608 on ‘how the Moors used to attack the
Christians, unjustly seizing their rights’; letter to the Jesuit Provincial of India,
Agra, 24 September 1608, in DUP, vol. III, pp. 127–8.
62 For a comparative study of this source material, see Subrahmanyam
(1993), pp. 396–401.
63 ‘Inayat Khan (1990), pp. 84–7; Elliot and Dowson (1996), vol. VII, pp. 31–
5, 42–3 (English translation of Lahori’s excerpts on the capture of Hughli and
Shahjahan’s reception of the ‘Christian prisoners’ in Agra almost a year later).
The Mughal memory of the incident was kept alive well into the eighteenth
century thanks to writers such as Khafi Khan and Shah Nawaz Khan. The
Padshah Buranji does not mention the siege of Hughli, but refers to the
capture of some firangis in East Bengal during the governorship of ‘Azam
Khan (g. 1632–5). These Portuguese were then brought to Dhaka, where a
‘Firinghee-bazaar’ existed at the time according to this chronicle (Bhuyan
(1947), p. 122). This bazaar is marked on Van den Broucke’s map of Bengal,
1660 (Ray [1998], p. 109).
64 João Cabral, ‘Segunda parte desta relação em que se trata da perdição
do Bandel de Ogoly’, Ceylon, 12 November 1633, ARSI, Goa, vol. 49, ff. 48r–
57r. English translation (with errors) in Manrique (1927), vol. II, pp. 392–422
(citation on p. 399).
65 Manrique (1927), vol. II, p. 393.
66 Elliot and Dowson (1996), vol. VII, p. 32.

67 On Ming and early Qing visions of Macau, see Fok (1987); Fok (1991).
68 Diary of Joan Tack (1 June to 1 August 1648), Algemeen Rijksarchief,
Overgekomen Briefen en Papieren, VOC 1168, ff. 628v–9r.
69 Manuel da Silva, ‘Das cousas que soube delRey Mogor’, Surat, 27
October 1629, in ACE, vol. I, p. 284.
70 For a synthesis, see Flores (2001), pp. 71ff.

71 Shahjahan to Shah Safi, Agra, 25 April 1633 (25 Shawwal 1042), in Islam
(1982), vol. I, Sh. 114, pp. 249–50.
72 Beach and Koch (1997), nos 19–20, pp. 56–9, 179–80.

73 Diogo de Santa Ana, ‘Resenha das perdas que teue o Estado da India
Oriental, em tempo em que foi Vizorrey delle Dom Miguel de Noronha conde
de Linhares…’, Goa, 12 March 1636, ANTT, Manuscritos da Livraria, 816, ff.
257r–63v, in Blanco (1992), vol. II, p. 328.
74 Anonymous writings circulating in the city at the time violently mocked
Linhares and asserted his culpability for the fall of Hughli. See ‘Conselho sobre
a estatua que se poz ao Conde de Linhares V. Rey na forca do Bazar’, Goa,
16 October 1635, in ACE, vol. II, p. 21; and ‘Treslado de huma carta dum
cidadão de Goa para outro de Lisboa do soçedido na India…’, Goa, 29
February 1636, Alcalá de Henares, Archivo Histórico de la Compañia de Jesus
de la Provincia de Toledo, E–2: 104,8, f. 34r.
75 Fray Manuel da Cruz, ‘Portentos pronosticos milagrosos e divinos
obrados e vistos na cidade de Goa’, in BPE, CXV/2–8, no. 7.
76 Sousa (1694), tom. III, pt. 4, ch. 12, pp. 402–3.

77 See inter alia the anonymous ‘Livro segundo da origem, extenção, e

propagaçam da Religião dos Eremitas de N. P. S. Augº, pellas terras destas
partes orientaes’ (1669), ANTT, Manuscritos da Livraria, no.1699, chs. 13–15,
ff. 38v–49v.
78 The actual farman was presumably shown to Cabral by a nephew of
Muqarrab Khan (whom we have encountered in Chapter 4). See Manrique
(1927), vol. II, pp. 395–6.
 79 For a recent assessment of the ‘Black Legend’, or the Leyenda Negra—
an expression coined in the early 1900s to characterize the highly negative
image of Spain in Protestant Europe since the sixteenth century—see
Villaverde and Castilla (2016).
80 ‘Inayat Khan (1990), p. 86; ‘Regimento que levou Antonio Telles capitam
geral da armada d’alto bordo e das fortalezas do Norte com poderes do Vice
Rey’, Goa, 1 May 1639, HAG, Regimentos e Instruções, bk. 3, f. 151v.
81 Viceroy Count of Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 7 February 1633, ANTT, LM,
bk. 30, f. 288r; Philip IV to Linhares, Lisbon, 12 November 1633, HAG, MR, bk.
9 A, ff. 124r–v.
82 Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 6 February 1635, HAG, MR, bk. 19 B, f. 567r
(partially published in ACE, vol. I, p. 462, n. 1). Also see the same to the same,
Goa, 1 December 1634, HAG, MR, bk. 20, ff. 28r–9r.
83 ‘Conselho sobre a destroição do porto de Ogolim em Bengala e ida de
Gaspar Pacheco de Mesquita aquellas partes…’, Goa, 11 March 1633, in
ACE, vol. I, pp. 462–7.
84 Proceedings of the State Council meeting, Goa, 16 October 1635, in
ACE, vol. II, p. 25.
85 These summaries are included in the proceedings of the State Council
meeting, Goa, 11 March 1633, in ACE, vol. I, pp. 462–7.
86 Mu‘taqad Khan, or Mirza Makki, was subadar of Orissa in 1631–2, and
again in 1636–7. See Ali (1985), S 713, S 1299.
87 See Eaton (1997), pp. 147, 155. The Jesuit João Cabral confusingly
refers to ‘Emperor Maximican [Masum Khan] at Ossondolim [Masnad-i ‘Ali]’
(Manrique [1927], p. 418).
88 On this, and Mesquita’s long-term connection to Mrauk-U, see Guedes
(1994), pp. 143–50.
89 ‘Copia da carta que de Bengala escreveo hum Thome Vaz Garrido’, n.d.
[1637], ANTT, LM, bk. 40, ff. 349r–51r, included in Blanco (1992), vol. II, pp.
351–6.
90 On these projects and their rationale, see Boxer (1985), ch. iii, pp. 118–
36; Subrahmanyam (1993a), pp. 122ff.
91 On this genre for Asia, see Flores (2002b). For the relation between
arbitrismo and conquest, see Brendecke (2016).
 92 ‘…forão ja os Reinos todos de Bengala sogeitos e tributários a Sua
Magestade como o são oje ao Mogor’; João Cabral, ‘Segunda parte desta
relação em que se trata da perdição do Bandel de Ogoly’, Ceylon, 12
November 1633, ARSI, Goa, vol. 49, ff. 56r–v.
93 ‘Relação que dá o Pe. Fr. Niculao da Conceição a El-Rei Nosso Senhor
que Deos Guarde, das couzas de Bengala’, AHU, Índia, box 26, doc. 67,
included in Guedes (1999), pp. 463–79. This document is erroneously dated
1644 insofar as much of its content shows that it could not have been written
before the late 1650s.
94 Hosten (1915a).

95 Philip IV to Governor António Teles da Silva e Meneses, Lisbon, 16

March 1640, HAG, MR, bk. 21 A, f. 69r.
96 Chatterjee (2013).

97 ‘Relação do sucedido na India Oriental desde o fim do anno de 1643 ate

de 1644’, BPE, CV/2–19, f. 62r; ‘Livro segundo da origem, extenção, e
propagaçam da Religião dos Eremitas de N. P. S. Augº, pellas terras destas
partes orientaes’ (1669), ANTT, Manuscritos da Livraria, no. 1699, ff. 48v–9r.
Another coeval testimony of such growth is ‘Privilegio dos Portuguezes do
Bandel de Uguly e mais partes de Bengala’, Goa, 13 April 1665, in APO, fasc.
6, pp. 1278–80. There is sufficient documentary evidence to prove wrong the
traditional opinion that there was a definitive Portuguese demise in Hughli after
1632, as argued by Chaudhury (1967).
98 Letter to Ralph Cartwright (in Balasore), Hariharpur, 17 July 1633, in EFI,
1630–1633, pp. 308–9.
99 Bruton (1638), p. 17.
100 Goa, 25 April 1634 (referring to news dating back to October 1633),
Linhares 3, p. 81.
101 Prakash (1985), pp. 38–9.
102 Linhares 3, p. 81.

103 Goa, 20 August 1634, Linhares 3, p. 161.

104 Philip IV promptly emphasized the absolute need to bring to obedience
‘the great number of Portuguese that are scattered around Bengal and the
other neighbouring kingdoms’. He further asked the viceroy of Goa to provide
him with ‘a list of those who have escaped, and where they reside, so that I
have news of them’; Philip IV to Viceroy Count of Linhares, Lisbon, 12
November 1633, ANTT, LM, bk. 31, f. 135r, published in Subrahmanyam
(1994b), p. 269.
105 Gaspar Pacheco de Mesquita to Linhares, n. pl., 24 December 1633, in
Linhares 3, p. 72.
106 ‘Copia do Conçelho sobre o que se deve responder a duas cartas dos
nababos Matecadão [Mu‘taqad Khan] governador de Bengala [Orissa], e
Assefacão capitão geral da gente de guerra do Rey Mogor’, Goa, 5 June
1636, in ACE, vol. II, pp. 90–1.
107 Damião Godinho, 30 August 1640, HAG, Mercês Gerais, bk. 1, f. 94v;
Pero de Viana, 2 December 1641, in ACE, vol. II, bk. 5, f. 95r; António Pereira,
29 December 1641, ibid., bk. 5, f. 119r; Francisco Pestana, 14 January 1644,
AHU, Índia, box 28, doc. 109.
108 Philip IV to Linhares, Lisbon, 12 November 1633, ANTT, LM, bk. 31, f.
135r, published in Subrahmanyam (1994b), pp. 268–9; Linhares to Philip IV,
Goa, 1 December 1634, HAG, MR, bk. 20, ff. 28r–9r; ‘Sobre a perda do Golim
e estado em que ficavão as cousas do Bemgalla’, Coimbra, Biblioteca Geral
da Universidade de Coimbra, Reservados, no. 459, ff. 370r–1r.
109 26 January 1644, AHU, Índia, box 28, doc. 109; 8 March 1653, HAG,
Mercês Gerais, bk. 6, f. 31r. Also see Simão Gomes Pinhão, 31 July 1640,
HAG, Mercês Gerais, bk. 1, f. 88r.
110 HAG, Mercês Gerais, bk. 6, f. 17v.

111 ‘Regimento que se deo a Simião Carrilho da Fonsequa quando foi por
capitam e ouvidor as partes de Bengala’, Goa, 18 March 1640, HAG,
Regimentos e Instruções, bk. 3, ff. 204r–v.
112 ‘Relação do sucedido na India Oriental desde o fim do anno de 1643
ate de 1644’, BPE, CV/2–19, ff. 55r–62v (citation on f. 62r).
113 Viceroy Count of Aveiras to King John IV, Goa, 3 August 1641, HAG,
MR, bk. 21B, f. 520r.
114 Van Meersbergen (forthcoming).

115 Asaf Khan was then seen in Goa as ‘very fond of the Portuguese, as he
supports them enthusiastically’. The Estado entertained high hopes on this
intervention to free the Portuguese of Hughli that were taken as captives to
Agra; Viceroy Pedro da Silva to Philip IV, Goa, 2 December 1636, ANTT, LM,
bk. 37, f. 17r, in Subrahmanyam (1994b), pp. 269–70.
116 Agra, 5 October 1633, ARSI, Goa, vol. 9 I, f. 153r.
 117 ‘Privilegios, que o Imperador Mogol concedeo á caza do Bandel de
Ugoly dos Padres Augustinianos da Congregação da India Oriental’, in Biker
(1995), tom. XII, pp. 12–17; English translation in Hosten (1915b), pp. 106–11.
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 Index

‘Abdullah Khan 32–6, 38–40, 43, 45, 55–6, 81, 87

death 40, 55
territorial expansion 35
Khan of Turan 35
letter from Akbar 213
rivalry with Akbar 32, 34–5, 38–40
Portuguese approach 33
Qandahar, Akbar’s taking of 36, 47–8
‘Abdullah Nama 39
‘Abdul Mu’min 55
‘Abehi’ (Sahebi) 181–2
Abhang Khan 182–4
rupture with Chand Bibi 182
plan to seize Konkan 183
Abu’l Faiz ‘Faizi’ 49n55, 112, 174
Deccan mission 174
Abu’l Fazl 8–9, 16, 22, 35, 39, 41, 44, 48, 51–2, 76, 78, 83–4, 88,
111–12, 114, 130, 172–4, 184–5, 204, 206, 212
A’in-i Akbari 76
Akbarnama 16, 84, 206, 212
Akbar’s naval strategy 52
on ‘Abdullah Khan 35
on Burhan 173
on Gujarat 78
 ‘Isa Khan 212
Koka’s departure on hajj 114
Portuguese and hajj 84
removing Portuguese from Gujarat 88
Ruq’as to Khan-i Khanan 48
on Portuguese strategy in Sind 51
Abu’l Hasan, Sultan 130, 157, 191
deposition 157
‘Abdul Hamid Lahori 222–3
‘Abdul Latif 215
‘Abdul Qadir Badayuni 39, 41, 44, 84, 86, 111, 114, 172, 174
‘Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan 48, 76–7, 79
Bagh-i Fath 77
conquest of Sind and Qandahar 48
ruq’as from Abu’l Fazl 48
subadar of Gujarat 79
‘subimperial patron’ 76–7
accommodation xv, 6, 13, 118
of religious differences 76, 117, 128–9, 136, 152–3
Acquaviva, Rodolfo 26n72, 34, 84, 212
Akbar’s naval ambition 84
Kabul and ‘true’ Mughals 34
Afghan
rule in Bengal 211
tribes 35, 37. See also Pathans
Agra 1–2, 8–11, 14, 24, 28, 30, 51, 68, 70, 76, 86, 87, 93, 110, 112,
120–1, 123, 126, 131, 139–40, 143–4, 150, 158, 184, 212, 221–2,
224–6, 241
Babur’s capital 1
imperial capital 157–8
on Monserrate’s map 27–8
 part of VOC network 120
Ahmedabad 18, 21–2, 75, 77, 79, 89, 104, 112–13, 121, 130–1, 138,
142, 145–6, 223
farmans for churches 104
Humayun’s entry 18, 75
part of VOC network 120
Ahmadnagar, sultanate of xiii–xv, xvii, 14, 28, 33, 36, 41, 61–3, 65,
71–2, 88, 91, 99, 156–9, 161–3, 165–7, 171–7, 179–84, 186, 202
Akbar’s letter to the sultan 14
announcement of Mughal incursion 173
close links with Isfahan 61, 63
Mughal conquest of 157, 184, 202
frontier zone xiii, 165
demise of xiv, 162
territorial expansion 202
female regent of xvii (see also Chand Bibi)
geopolitical equation 33
imperial siege 177–8
instability 176
looting of 159
Portuguese conquest of Korla 176
second Mughal offensive 182
A’in-i Akbari 76
Akbar, Emperor xi, xiv, xvii, xix, 3, 7–9, 11, 14, 16–18, 21–30, 32–45,
47–56, 60–1, 68–70, 72–3, 75–7, 79–87, 89–90, 95, 104–5, 110–
18, 120, 122, 130, 133–4, 136, 139, 146, 147, 150, 155, 158, 161,
166–7, 171–9, 182–5, 206, 212–14, 221
‘Arif Qandhari xi–xii, 21
birth in Couto 44
Couto on appearance 44
Deccan campaigns 155
 Empresas de terra 32, 55–6
enemy from afar 32
enemy of Firangis 87
entry into Surat 16, 21, 23, 50
farman to Saldanha 30
farmans for churches 104
feared by Portuguese 28–9
first meeting with Portuguese 22
as foreign king 25
fragility 38–40
his India, Goa’s and Lisbon’s perceptions of xiv
idea of Hindustan 7, 25, 30, 34
invasion of Bengal 23
invasion of Gujarat 21
letter to ‘Abdullah Khan 213
letter to Aires Teles 22
naval strategy 52
protector of Islam 86
relationship with Shah ‘Abbas 56
religious experiments 86, 112, 117
rupture with ‘Aziz Koka 110–18
Sande on Akbar 25
suppression of the Gujarat revolt 79
territorial disputes 32
using Goa to subdue Mughal officials 87
Akbarnama 16, 84, 206, 212
drowning of Sultan Bahadur Shah 84
Pero Tavares as Bengali 206
‘Alau’ddin Isfahani. See Mirza Nathan
Albernaz, João Teixeira
map of Gujarat 122n9
Albuquerque, Afonso de 3
Aleixo, Dom. See Muhammad Zaman Mirza
alevantados xvi, 208, 210–12
‘Ali ‘Adil Shah I, Sultan 171, 176
Mughal charges of weakness 171
‘Ali Akbar Isfahani 146–7, 150
merchant and official 146
religious patron 150
‘Ali Tabata 179–80
on Chand Bibi 179
Almeida, Francisco de 3
Almeida, João Fernandes de
Inquisition visit to Northern lands 106
Amin Khan 186
Amin Khan Ghuri 78–9, 87
Anaia, Pedro de 75, 79, 113–16
agreement with ‘Aziz Koka 113–16
Andrade, António de 9, 126, 139, 141, 142, 145
imprisonment by Mir Musa 141
appanage-holders xvi, 93, 97–8, 103
Portuguese xvi
undesignated tenants 93 (see also foreiros)
Arabian Nights 39
Arabian Sea xii, 24, 50, 54, 84, 106, 150, 195
access provided by Gujarat 24
Ottoman presence xii
Portuguese defensive stance 33
arbitrio 232. See also Garrido
armada do Norte 16, 115
Asaf Khan 67, 123, 144, 241
enmity to Mir Musa 144
 relations with Firangis 241
Asirgah 30, 185
Mughal conquest of 30. See also Khandesh
Assam 13, 205, 215
as in Padshah-Buranji 13
Augustinians 40, 42–3, 63, 65, 67, 92, 102, 167, 189, 210, 225–6,
236, 241–2
Aurangabad 76, 155, 157
authority
state vs private 126
imperial vs local 149
Aurangzeb xiv, 1, 16, 30, 41, 76, 128, 144, 155–7, 165
Deccan expansion 155
Deccan strategy 156
emperor xiv, 1, 16
viceroy of Deccan xiv
Azevedo, António de 51
Akbar’s interest in Hormuz 51
Azevedo, Jerónimo de 62–4, 72, 136–8, 152
on Safavid threat in Deccan 63
pamphlet written against him 138
Azevedo, Domingues Rodrigues 239
‘Aziz Koka, Mirza (Khan-i ‘Azam) xvii, 75, 77, 79, 82–3, 86, 110–18,
120, 126, 128, 130, 132, 172
capture of Portuguese traders 86
Deccan campaigns 172
exile 113
letter to Aires Teles 82
rupture with Akbar 110–18
‘subimperial patron’ 77
wakil 117
Babur, Emperor, 1–2, 18, 24, 32, 39, 68
arrival in India 1
death 18
Badakhshan 35, 40, 43, 44–5
capture by ‘Abdullah Khan 35
false princes 40
Muhammad Zaman Mirza’s claim 40
Bagerthat 212
Bahadur Shah, Sultan 18–19, 41, 80, 84, 92, 94, 160, 185–6
arrest 184
drowning 84
Portuguese fortress on Diu 18
retreat to Asirgah 185
Martim Afonso de Sousa’s account 18
Baharistan-i Ghaybi (Mirza Nathan) 217–19
Bakla 211–12
Balagarh 242
Balkh
capture by ‘Abdullah Khan 35
Balsar 89
Bangham, Nicholas
Safavid Eastern expansion 60
Banias xvi, 46, 79, 85, 106–7, 113, 123, 145–7, 151
Portuguese vassals 107
Baroda
part of VOC network 120
Barreto, Sebastião 60, 220
on Safavid plan to attack Kabul 60
Barros, António de
Islam in Hormuz 71–2
Barros, João de 25–6, 60
 maritime perspective of India 25–6. See also Da Ásia
Bassein 4, 23, 45, 49, 88–9, 91–4, 96–9, 101–3, 108–10, 152–3,
185
as Portuguese city 99
nodal point in maritime network 4
use of Catholic imagery 103
Beaulieu, Augustin 121
Benazir 36
Bengal xii–xvi, xviii, 1, 6, 13–16, 19, 21, 23–5, 28, 30, 40, 78, 96,
103, 105, 144, 154, 160, 204–42
Bengalization of Portuguese 219
capture of Hughli 207
composite Firangi identity 209
contact zone 14
difficulty of control 204
East Bengal 205
Estado’s early weakness 208
Estado’s strategy 216
economic incentive for conquest 24
events in, shockwaves of xvi
fantastical stories 205–6
fragility of Mughal power 215
geography 205
heterogeneity 205
improvised empire 209
integration into Timurid India xiv
Islamization 103
Mughal conquest of 23
Mughal maritime sphere 206
Mughal pathway to sea 21, 122
Mughal–Portuguese frontier xii–xiii, 14–15, 204–42
 plague 153, 177, 205, 220
politics of ethnicity 209–10
Portuguese expulsion from Pipli 228
Portuguese return 236
resistance to domination 205, 233
‘shadow empire’ 209
suba 206
trade hub 24
transfer of capital 205
West Bengal 205
Berar, sultanate of 157, 160–2, 174–5, 177–9, 182
annexation 157
gate to the Deccan 179
natural Mughal–Portuguese border 160
protective topography 179
Berckhout, Joan 143–4
Bhati region 30, 205, 212–13, 215, 239
Bhimji Parekh 123–4
Bijapur, sultanate of xii–xvii, 3, 28, 33, 49, 61, 63, 65, 71, 124, 143,
150, 155–8, 160, 163–9, 171–3, 176, 179–81, 186–203
announcement of Mughal incursion 173
close links with Isfahan 61
‘Deed of Submission’ 158, 186
events in, shockwaves of xvi
geopolitical equation 33
incorporating Goa 3
Mughal annexation 203
Mughal–Portuguese frontier xii, 165
resistance to Mughal rule 157
submission of xiv, 155
Bocarro, António 91, 99–100, 137–8, 175, 193, 216
 Muqarrab Khan and Gonçalo Pinto da Fonseca 138
Muqarrab Khan’s religion 138
border vii–xiii, xv, xvii, 4–8, 11–12, 15–16, 37, 52, 57, 61, 64, 71, 74,
84, 90, 94, 97, 104–5, 107, 108, 110, 128, 147, 150–4, 158, 160–
1, 171, 197, 203, 206–7, 235, 242
Akbar’s farman on Daman 89
Mughal Empire as ‘borderless’ 8
cartazes as symbol 87
communities 6
crossing 107, 150–4 (see also Erédia)
Deccan as 158
demarcation 90–1, 206
liquid border wars 150–2
Mughal–Portuguese in Bengal 207
permeable 91
reliance on conceptual binaries 20
religious 102–3, 117, 136, 152–3
borderland xvii, 4–6, 11–12, 64, 74, 97, 110, 128, 147, 206
concept xii, 4–5
destructive disruption 96–7
disputes 11
Gujarat as xv, xvii, 6, 74, 84–5
tensions, role of Mirza ‘Aziz Koka xvii, 75
perspective on imperial centre 12–13
reliance on conceptual binaries 20
Botelho, António 14, 68, 203
boundary 6, 91, 165
concept 4
reliance on conceptual binaries 20
Bragança, Constantino de 102
Brahmins xvi, 182, 190, 193–4, 202
 Shenvi xvi, 194 (see also Iroji Shenvi, Santu Shenvi)
Brito, António de 208–9
Broach 76, 79, 81, 83, 89, 110, 121, 145, 148, 154
part of VOC network 120
Bruton, William 337
Buddhist kingdoms xiv. See also Maghs of Arakan
Bukhara xv, 24, 32–5, 39, 45
Mughal rivalry 24, 34
piece in Estado’s geopolitical conundrum xv, 33
Bulaqi (painter) 135
Burhan Nizam Shah III 41, 61, 162, 166, 172–7, 179, 183
conflict with Portuguese 175
refuge at Mughal court 172
submission to indirect rule 173–5
Burhanpur 11, 30, 60, 121, 162, 164, 185, 190
Akbar’s farman to Saldanha 30
Mughal capital 11
part of VOC network 120
Burhan-i ma’athir (‘Ali Tabata) 179
Butsad (pargana of Daman) 95, 98

Cabral, Francisco 36, 40, 52–3, 77, 78, 117, 130

Mughal exploitation of Gujarat 78
Cabral, João 222, 227, 231–2
dream of Bengal conquest 232
Hughli incident 222, 227
Calcutta
eclipse of Hughli 208
cartazes 15, 84–5, 87, 113, 123, 137, 141, 145, 149–51, 197, 238–9
capture of Mughal ships 122–4, 141, 145
records of attribution 123
 symbols of Mughal–Portuguese border 87, 150–1
cartography 7, 8, 20–1, 27–8, 88–9, 93, 110, 120–2, 161, 222
lack of Mughal 7
Portuguese 20, 109–10, 121–2, 161
Carvalho, Domingos 218
Carvalho, Gaspar 46
Casanatense codex 20
Castanheda, Fernão Lopes de 18–19
his Historia do Descobrimento 19
Castro, Dom João de 20, 211–12
correspondence with Islam Shah 20
Castro, José de 8, 126,
curious objects 126
Ceylon 3–4, 30, 45, 105, 150, 222, 232, 239
Chagatais 1, 34, 111
Mughal identity 34
Chand Bibi xvii, 158, 171, 176–7, 179–84
as antidote to Ibrahim’s effeminacy 171–2
Chand Sultana 179
favouring Bahadur 177
letters to Francisco da Gama 182–3
Queen regent 176
rupture with Abhang Khan 182
shift in Portuguese view 182
Chaul 3, 37, 45, 49, 60, 88, 91, 92, 97, 99, 101, 103, 107–10, 159,
175–6
Ottoman springboard 37
as Portuguese city 99
use of Catholic imagery 103
chauth 89
China xii, 3, 6–7, 9–11, 13, 29, 59, 61, 88, 106, 108, 146–7, 205,
220, 223–4
internal cohesion and foreign policy 10–11
universalistic stances 8–10, 29, 127
Chittagong xii–xiii, 130, 207–9, 211, 213, 216
customs house 213
decline 207
geopolitical situation xii
Mughals’ eastern frontier 1
Portuguese seizing of fort 213
circulation 11, 26, 45, 50, 56, 61, 63, 85, 109, 142, 150, 153, 156,
161
competing narratives 98–9, 162
information 33, 39, 45, 52, 109, 119, 144, 156, 162
people 45, 150
overland mail 109
Cochin 4, 29–30, 211, 218, 229
nodal point in maritime network 4
Cojagilan
hiding Muhammad Zaman Mirza 43–4
Colaço, Francisco Gomes
escape to Mughal territory 105
Colley, Thomas
Portuguese in Hughli 236–7, 240
Colombo
nodal point in maritime network 4
Conceição, Fray Nicolau da 233
contact zones 5, 19
Portuguese reluctance 14, 84
conversion 26, 29, 41–3, 45, 102–4, 110, 135–6, 138–9, 152, 210,
226, 234
 political tool 103, 234
Muhammad Zaman Mirza 43
Corai, Michel Angelo 172–3
Corsi, Francesco 120
Shahjahan’s Bengal strategy 241
Coryat, Thomas 121
Coutinho, Manuel de Sousa 37, 80, 214–15
on Sa‘id Khan 214–15
Couto, Diogo do 17, 22, 41–5, 79, 85, 89, 90, 148, 153, 160, 169–
72, 199
Akbar’s birth 44
Akbar’s farman on Daman border 89
false prince 41–3
Gujarat 80
Ibrahim 169–70
Konkan as target 160
Muzaffar Khan’s rebellion 79, 87
Couto, Jacinto Botelho do 239
Coutre, Jacques de 121, 142–3
victim of Mir Musa 142
Covarrubias, Sebastián de 168, 202
Cruz, Fray Gaspar da
his Treatise 17
Cruz, Manuel da 226
Cunha, Nuno da 20, 80, 89, 90
relations with Humayun 20, 80, 89–90
Cunha, Vasco da 210–11
Cuttack 218

Da Ásia (Diogo do Couto) 44

Dabhol 49, 62, 69, 160, 195, 197
Daman 23, 85, 87–99, 101–2, 105, 107–10, 138–9, 141, 144, 151–3
as Portuguese city 99
Mughal–Portuguese boundaries 89–90
Portuguese legal claims 95
província do Norte 91
Danda 62, 159, 193
Daniyal, Prince 50, 76
letter to Shah ‘Abbas 50
Darwish Beg 61
Da’ud Karrani 23, 210
end of Mughal détente 23
death 23
Daulatabad 11, 159, 163, 184, 186
fall 159, 186
Mughal capital 11
Murtaza Nizam Shah II 184
Daulat Khan 191, 194, 197, 199–200
connection to Mustafa Khan 191
connection to Murari Pandit 194
execution 197
Shahjahan’s prejudice 199
Dawar Baksh, Sultan (Bulaqi) 41
Deccan xiii–xviii, 7, 11, 13, 15–16, 28, 33, 40–1, 49–50, 55–6, 58,
61–72, 76, 78, 91, 144, 154–201, 203, 206
effects of epidemics, scarcity, and climate 178
Estado’s paternalistic stance 166
ethnic tensions 194
as a non-imperial space 156
Faizi’s mission 174
its sultans as weak rulers 167–9
gendered views of the Deccan 166–72
 geopolitical equation 33, 65
government 166–7, 171, 183–4
Monserrate’s map 27–8
Mughal–Portuguese relationship 14–15, 28, 33
Mughal transformation 156–7
Mughal vassal states 158
Mughal–Portuguese border 158, 203
natural and political barrier xv, 160, 165
Portuguese buffer zone 158, 203
Portuguese discourse of fragility 165
Portuguese ideas of conquest 159
preventive economic war 163–5
Safavid lever 11, 33, 65
strategy of indirect rule 155–6
target of Mughal expansion 28, 65, 155
Western, as frontier zone xiii, 33, 71
Delhi 1, 19, 21, 27–8, 68, 123, 129, 132, 139, 144
on Monserrate’s map 27–8
Della ragion di Stato (Giovanni Botero) 170
De Regis Institutione et Disciplina (Jerónimo Osório) 169
Dhaka 215, 222, 227, 233, 234–5, 239
capital of suba 215
Dinis, Manuel 187, 193–4, 200–2
on Mustafa Khan 187, 200–1
Discurso sobre el aumento de esta monarquía (Anthony Sherley)
on Safavid Eastern expansión 60
dissimulation 15, 118, 135, 138, 201–2, 228–9
Covarrubias’s definition 202
Domingos Rebelo Lobo 201
Francisco dos Mártires 201
count of Linhares 228
 Muqarrab Khan 138–9
Mustafa Khan 201–2
Diu xvii–xviii, 3, 18–19, 22–3, 30, 36–8, 46, 51–3, 60, 72–3, 75, 79–
80, 82–7, 92–5, 97, 99–102, 106–8, 110, 113–18, 120–1, 141,
151, 160, 172
‘Aziz Koka affair 110–18
concession 92
foreign inhabitants 100
fortress of xvii, 92
frontier city 100, 117
inclusive policy 107
‘Little Daman’ 101
Portuguese city 99
Portuguese intelligence 36, 102
property 100
província do Norte 3
shared sovereignty 22
Dutch xii, 12, 69, 85, 102, 120–4, 132, 138, 140–3, 180, 182, 186,
195–6, 198, 223, 237, 241–2
Surat factory 121
trade in Bengal 241
VOC agents xii, 121

East India Company (EIC) xii, xiv, 69–70, 120–2, 124, 131–2, 138,
140, 142–3, 223, 236, 240
agents of xii–xiii (see also Colley, Thomas)
Hughli 336
as hybrid enterprise xiii
reports on Muqarrab Khan 139
Elkington, Thomas 131
encounter
Mughal–Portuguese xi, xv, 2, 17, 24–5, 28, 74
 effect of maritime frontier 25
English xii, xxii, 14, 60, 69–70, 85, 110, 120–2, 124, 132, 141–2,
144, 196, 212, 236
Ambassador to Jahangir 120
EIC agents xii
portrait of Mir Musa 142
Erauso, Catalina de 181
Erédia, Manuel Godinho de 88–9, 110, 120–1, 161
map of Gujarat 88–9, 110, 120
Deccan 161
Estado da Índia xi–xiii, xc, xvii, xxii, 3–4, 8, 11, 14, 15, 18, 21–3, 25,
28, 29–30, 32–3, 36–8, 42, 44–7, 50–3, 56–8, 61–4, 67, 69–72,
74, 79–80, 84–5, 87, 89–97, 100–10, 113–24, 129, 133–4, 136–
42, 146–7, 150, 153, 158–60, 165–6, 169, 172–3, 175–6, 179,
181, 183, 185–6, 189–90, 105–97, 201, 203–4, 206–8, 211, 213–
14, 216, 225–6, 228–32, 234, 235, 237–9, 241
between Mughals and Afghans 19, 211
Deccan strategy 172
as intermittent polity xii
onvolvement in Bengal 207
part of Mughal ‘garden’ 4
paternalistic stance vs Deccan 166
permission to construct fort on Diu (see also Bahadur Shah)
political and administrative framework 3
political strategy 70, 87, 94
strategy in Bengal 216
quashing Qandahar route 70
exotic commodities 22, 24, 125–6, 129, 131–2, 134–5, 148, 150
Mir Musa 150
Muqarrab Khan 132, 134, 150, 153–4
Portuguese 22, 24, 125–6
 Qutbuddin Muhammad Khan 148
expansion xiv–xv, xvii, 1, 10, 13, 28, 30, 32–3, 36, 48, 57, 60, 65, 68,
97, 109–10, 166, 204, 216
Akbar’s empresas de terra 32, 70
concrete and imaginary 30–1
profitable land 95–6

famine xiii, 152–3, 162, 251

impact on imperial conquest 162, 178
Farrukh Beg (painter) 16
Farrukhsiyar, Emperor 203
Fatehpur Sikri xix, 16, 21, 23, 34, 205–6, 212
Monserrate’s map 27–8
Mughal capital 34
symbol of power 21
Fawaidul Insan (Hakim Ruhullah) 76
Ferghana Valley 1
Fernandes, Gaspar 81, 86
on Gujarat 81
Figueiredo, Simão de 220
Fitch, Ralph 212–13
limited Mughal strength 212
on ‘Isa Khan 213
Firangis 14, 50–1, 83, 87, 89, 128–9, 136, 148, 151, 217–18, 221,
227, 231, 235, 238–9, 241
Akbar’s plan to exterminate 213
Firangi nation 209–10
obstacle to imperial authority 217–18
reconstitution in Bengal 236
rival religious groups 210 (see also Bengal)
Fonseca, Gonçalo Pinto da 137–8, 204
Fonseca, Simião Carrilho de
mission to Bengal and Orissa 239–40
foreign relations 10, 24, 50, 132–3, 195, 228
maritime shift 24, 50
Mughal–European 132–3
foreigners 2, 13, 19, 22, 25, 31, 100, 129, 157, 177–8, 223
Mughals as 2, 19, 25, 100. See also Firangis
foreiros xvi, 93, 97–8, 103
Northern Province 93
defence of territory 97–8
Franciscans 92, 102, 140, 201
Fróis, Luís 103
frontier xii–xviii, 4–7, 10–15, 25, 32–3, 46, 62, 71, 83, 88, 100, 108,
118, 128–9, 153, 161, 166, 187, 204
battlefield 68
Chinese 6
cities 100
civilizational 4
creation and evolution of xvii Deccan 32–3
line 5
management xii, 46
maritime 24–5, 50, 83–4
memory and historic legacy 68
Mughal concept 7–8
Mughal policy 11
Mughal perspective 13, 99
Mughal–Portuguese, in Bengal xv, 206
Mughal–Portuguese, in Gujarat 83–8, 118, 129 (See also
Muqarrab Khan, Mir Musa)
negotiation of 87–8
Ottoman 6
 peoples 13, 15, 108
permeable 14
perspective 13–14
provinces 88
relations 129
religious frontier 71, 76, 102–4, 118, 129, 136, 152–3
role of forts 37
Safavid 6
travel routes 90
uprisings 215
zone xii–xiv, 62, 118, 153, 166

Galvão, António (chronicler) 17

Gama, Francisco da 29, 39–40, 50–4, 56, 67, 85–6, 97, 105–6, 109,
116–17, 127, 136, 159–60, 168–9, 171, 179, 182–5, 190, 211
against churches in Northern cities 105
Akbar in Burhanpur 185
Akbar’s maritime attempts 53, 85
‘Aziz Koka affair 117
contact with Abhang Khan 184
death of ‘Abdullah Khan 39–40
death of Burhan 183
dislike for Akbar 29
letters from Chand Bibi 182–4
Shah ‘Abbas 47
weakness of Ahmadnagar 182
Gama, Manuel da 98, 211
Garrido, Tomé Vaz 232–5, 240
plan for conquest of Bengal 231–5
official appointments 233
Gaur 205, 207–8
 transfer of capital 205
geography xiv, xix, 1, 2, 4–5, 13, 15, 18, 20–1, 28, 33, 46, 49–50,
86, 91–2, 106, 108–9, 122, 160–2, 164, 188, 205, 207,
constraints 161–2, 178
distance 4, 50
knowledge 109
political 33, 46, 91, 188
Portuguese–Jesuit 28
position 92, 106, 108, 122, 205
prisms 13
shifts 207
space 5
zones 1. See also frontier
gift-giving 12, 56, 61, 66, 92, 116, 112, 127, 134, 138, 145–6, 153–4,
179, 188, 219–20
Goa xii, xiv–xviii, xxi, 3–4, 8, 11, 14–18, 20, 23, 25–30, 32–3, 36–47,
50–4, 56, 58–9, 61–5, 67, 69, 71–2, 74, 80–1, 85–8, 91, 93, 97,
100–1, 105–7, 109–10, 114–16, 119, 123, 129, 133–42, 146, 149–
51, 154, 158–67, 169, 171–9, 181–201, 203–10, 213, 216, 219,
225–6, 228–31, 234–5, 238–40
capital of the Estado da Índia xii, 3
danger of Mughal conquest 203
gendered views on safety 166
nodal point in maritime network 4, 69
Godinho, António de Sousa
evacuation of Satgaon 213
violent campaign 214
Sa‘id Khan’s submission 214
Golconda, sultanate of xiii, 1, 28, 45, 61, 155–8, 179
close links to Isfahan 61
Deed of Submission 158
 overthrow of 1–2, 155
resistance to Mughal rule 157
Gombroon 57, 59–60, 69
González de Clavijo, Ruy 26
government ix, 7, 9, 12, 15, 30, 34, 40, 43, 59–60, 69–70, 83–4, 94,
134, 147, 156, 166, 168, 171, 175–6, 183, 195, 200–1, 211, 213,
221, 234–5
cosmopolitan officials 128–9
merchants vs rulers 125, 146–50
shared 34
Guerreiro, Fernão 30, 131
Akbar’s farman to Saldanha 30
Gujarat xi, xiii–xviii, 6, 13–28, 35, 40–1, 45, 48–50, 55, 58, 60, 69,
73–85, 87–96, 101, 104–6, 108, 110–16, 118–29, 131–3, 137,
139, 141, 144–5, 147–51, 154, 196, 203, 206, 214, 223, 228, 230
contact zone 14
economic incentive for conquest 24, 82
Erédia’s map (see Erédia)
events in, shockwaves of xvi
frontier zone xiii, xv, 118
hajj gateway 24, 82
illegitimacy 78
imperial visit 77
interests at play 74, 82
Monserrate’s map 27–8
Mughal invasion 21–3, 50, 75, 78
Mughal pathway to sea 21, 82
Mughal–Portuguese relationship 14–15, 74
Mughal strategy 94–5
Mughal treatment of Portuguese merchants 85
political administrative framework 75
 Portuguese control over sea 15
província do Norte xv
province vs sultanate 120
resistance to Mughal rule 78, 81
Martim Afonso de Sousa’s account 19
suba vs província 75, 88, 100–1, 108, 151
sultanate of, integration into Timurid
India xiv, 16
Sunnism 83
Western travellers 121
Gulbadan Begum
Babur’s attempted assassination 39

Habash Khan 62–3

hajj xvii, 43, 48–9, 82–3, 86, 113, 116, 118, 122, 149, 180
Akbar’s patronage 49, 82
imperial concern for 24, 82
Mirza ‘Aziz Koka xvii, 113
Muhammad Zaman Mirza 43
Hamid Khan 184
Hamida Banu Begum
birth of Akbar 44
hammams 38–9. See also Hormuz
Hari Vaisya
relations with Mir Musa 144
Hasan al-Wazzan 135
Herat 35, 55, 68
‘Abdullah Khan taking 35
Safavid recapture 55
Hideyoshi, Toyotomi 9
Hindustan 3, 7, 14–15, 24–6, 30, 34, 45, 51, 79, 89, 160, 165, 203
 in Mughal imaginary 7, 25, 34
and Firangistan 14
História da Índia (António Pinto Pereira) 17
Historia do Descobrimento (Fernão Lopes de Castanheda)
on Portuguese precedence on subcontinent 19
Hormuz xiv, xviii, 4, 26, 28, 30, 33, 36, 42–4, 46, 49–64, 67, 69–73,
181
building of mosques 72
connecting Isfahan and the Deccan 61–2
correspondence flow 63
‘Door of Hormuz’ 63
fear of Ottoman offensive 36
geopolitical impact 33
hammams 72
Mughal plans to control xiv, 28, 47, 50–1, 54–5
nodal point in maritime network 4
Portuguese intelligence 36
Safavid conquest 57
Safavid–Portuguese conflict 33, 56
taxes 58
Hughli xiv–xv, xviii, 28, 204, 206–8, 219–32, 234–42
consequences of destruction 225–6
destruction of xv, 221
Monserrate’s map 28
Mughal accounts of destruction 222
official response to destruction 229
Portuguese views on fall 224
Portuguese–Mughal ‘black legend’ 227
Portuguese return 331
vibrant colony 207–8
weak imperial presence 222
Humayun, Emperor 1, 18–20, 23, 25, 34, 44, 80, 89–90, 92, 94, 111
conquest of Gujarat 18
exile in Iran 1
in Martim Afonso de Sousa’s account 19
overthrow by Sher Shah 18
relations with Nuno da Cunha 20, 89–90
vision of Mughal state 34
Husain Beg Tabrizi 61
Husain Shahis 210–11

Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II 61, 65, 160, 167–71, 173, 176, 181, 186, 188,
190–1, 194, 199
effeminacy 170
entente with Jahangir 190
letter to Shah ‘Abbas 65
Portuguese charges of weakness 167–9
Ibrahim Khan 217–18
Ikhlas Khan 194
imperial province. See suba
‘Inayat Khan 164–5, 191, 194, 199, 222, 227–8
Hughli incident 222, 227
preventive economic war 163
intelligence 11, 26, 33, 36–7, 49, 54, 95, 119, 133, 144, 162, 237
gathering 36–7, 39, 51, 102, 119, 144, 162
commercial correspondence 122
Inquisition 46, 71, 105–6, 181, 201–2
Iranians 63, 67, 72, 100, 123, 129, 143, 147, 190, 194, 197
at Mughal court 67
Iroji Shenvi 194, 202
‘Isa Khan 212–13, 215, 233
Isfahan xv, 24, 33, 47, 57, 59–63, 65, 67–8, 146, 217
 Mughal rivalry 24
piece in Estado’s geopolitical conundrum xv, 33
Iskandar Beg 59, 61, 66
on Deccan–Safavid connection 61
Iskandar Nama 98
Islam Khan 215, 217–18
Islam Shah
correspondence with Cunha 20
I‘timad ud Daula 67

Jahangir, Emperor 3, 7–9, 12–13, 41, 53, 62–3, 65–7, 71, 76–7, 104,
110–12, 117–20, 122–3, 126, 129–30, 132–7, 139–40, 142–4,
150, 154, 159, 161, 167, 169–70, 189–90, 215, 217, 219–21, 233
cosmopolitan port officials 129
entente with Ibrahim II 190
farmans for churches 104
globe as object 8
idea of Hindustan 7
inclusive attitude to non-subjects 8–9
naturalist 127
Nur Jahan 66–7, 119
Qandahar 66–7
rarities 134, 150
self-representation 9
vision of borderland 12
Jahangirnagar. See Dhaka
Jani Beg, Mirza 51
Jarecos 79
Jask 58–9, 70
in Safavid plans 57–8
Jawhar 89, 123–4
Jessore 221–2, 217–18, 234
rajas of 211
Jesuits xiii, xvi–xvii, xxi, 2, 8–9, 11, 14, 21, 23, 25, 25–6, 28–30, 34,
36, 40, 52–3, 60, 66–8, 76–8, 81, 84, 86–7, 90, 92–3, 102–5, 111,
117–20, 126–7, 130–1, 133–5, 138–9, 141, 145, 149, 151, 153,
161, 171, 185, 203, 210, 212–13, 215, 218, 219–22, 224, 226–7,
231–2
corpus of primary materials xvii
Mughal–Portuguese relations 28–9
fears of Mughal expansion 29–30
geography of India 28
hopes of conversion 29–30, 103–4, 117, 139 (see also Muqarrab
Khan)
missions to Mughal court xiii, 26, 29, 52, 67, 117
on Firangis in Bengal 218–20
rebellions in Bengal 212
relationship with Mir Musa 149
warning to Satgaon 212–13. See also Duarte de Sande, Fernando
de Meneses, Antonio de Monserrate, Fernão Guerreiro, Rodolfo
Acquaviva, Manuel Pinheiro, Jerónimo Xavier, Sebastião
Barreto, Gonçalo de Sousa, Gonçalo de Silveira, Luís Fróis,
Francesco Corsi, José de Castro, António de Andrade, Nicolau
Pimenta, António Botelho, Brás Nunes, Simão de Figueiredo,
João Cabral, Bento Rodrigues
Jesus, Sebastião de 189
Jinji 1–2, 155
Mughal capture of 1–2
John III, King 18–19, 210–11
John IV, King 43, 106, 187–8, 201, 203, 240
justice
administration of 75, 102, 105, 238–9, 242
Kabul xi, 1–2, 9, 11, 17, 21, 27, 32–4, 40–1, 43–4, 47, 60, 68, 70,
157
Jahangir’s abolishment of imposts 9
Monserrate’s map 28
Muhammad Zaman Mirza in 43
origin of Mughal state 21
Portuguese intelligence 33, 36
Safavid plans for attack 60
strategic importance 34
Uzbek threat 34
Kalan Beg, Khwaja. See Cojagilan
Kamrup 205, 215
Kanhoji Parekh 123–4
Kashmir 1, 28, 35, 38, 52
Monserrate’s map 28
Mughal conquest 35
Mughal frontier 1
Kavasji Doshi 106, 108
Keshava Doshi 145, 151
Keshavdas 13
Khadija Sultana 180
Khambayat xi, 17, 21–2, 78–9, 85–6, 90, 104–5, 114, 119, 121–2,
125, 129, 133–4, 142, 145–6, 150
Akbar’s visit xi, 16, 21–2
capture of Portuguese traders 86
competition for merchants 125
farmans for churches 104
Jahangir’s visit 119
part of VOC network 120
Khandesh, sultanate of 30, 50, 96, 112, 157, 161, 173–4, 184–5
Akbar’s conquest of 30, 157, 184
Khawas Khan. See Daulat Khan
Khurasan 35, 48–9, 55, 65
‘Abdullah Khan’s invasion 35
Safavid conquest 55
Khurram, Prince 41, 123–4, 131–2, 143, 170, 190, 200, 218, 219,
220, 241
court 218
defeat 219
imperial ship 124
in Mirza Nathan 218
replacement of Muqarrab Khan 132 (see also Shahjahan)
khutba 10, 21–3, 65, 72, 174, 223
as measure to assert power 10, 22–3, 72
Bengal 223
Deccan 65, 72
Khyber Pass 32
Khwaja Nizam 133
Khurshah 107
Kishandas 123
Kollis 88
Konkan xiii, 3, 16, 28, 49, 62–3, 69, 91, 159, 160, 183, 189–90, 193,
195, 198, 203
frontier zone xiii
Monserrate’s map 27–8
Portuguese target 160
source of Mughal intelligence 49
Kortogadh (pargana of Daman) 95
Krieger, Georg 172
Kuch Bihar 205, 215

La octava maravilla (Lope de Vega) 206

Lahore xv, 11, 28, 32–3, 35–7, 40, 43–5, 47–9, 52–3, 58, 67–8, 90,
111, 116–18, 120, 130, 143, 157–8, 175–6
connection to Kabul 32
imperial capital 11, 32, 35
on Monserrate’s map 27–8
piece in Estado’s geopolitical conundrum xv, 33
shipbuilding 52
Lahori Bandar
Portuguese comercial interest 50, 59, 63
Lemos, Jorge de 29, 115–16
on multiple Mughal warfronts 29
‘Aziz Koka affair 115–16
Leo X, Pope 135
Leo Africanus. See Hasan al-Wazzan
Lima, Miguel de Abreu de 25
Linhares, count of 107, 141–2, 145–6, 149–52, 160, 162–4, 171,
173, 186, 189, 191, 193–5, 197–200, 225–6, 228–32, 237–8
arrest of Gujarati merchants 141
destruction of Hughli 226
expansion of VOC 237
farman from Jahangir 142
gifts from Mir Musa 145
Khawas Khan 194
letters from Mir Musa 145, 151
Mughal advance towards Burhanpur 162
ownership of the sea 150
response to Hughli 228
Livro das cidades e fortalezas que a Coroa de Portugal tem nas
partes da Índia 99
livros das plantas 99
Lucena, Martim de 208–9
Macau
Ming–Qing challenge to Portuguese xii
nodal point in maritime network 4
Maghs of Arakan xiv, 214–16, 218, 231–2
Mughal relations 24, 216
Mahabat Khan
meeting with Figueiredo 220
Mahmud Shah, Sultan 94
Malacca 4, 101, 219, 225–6, 239
nodal point in maritime network 4
Malik ‘Ambar 184, 190
Man Singh, Raja 215
Mansur (painter) 134
Manuel I, King
universalistic stances 8
Marathas xvi, 49, 88, 105, 107, 155, 157, 165, 180, 191
maritime dimension xi–xii, xv, 3–4, 15, 21, 24–5, 28, 33, 46, 48–54,
58–60, 68–9, 81–3, 86, 106, 109, 121–2, 124–5, 129, 132–3, 142,
144, 147–8, 154, 195–6, 206–7, 211, 223–4, 229
assertion of regional supremacy 49, 50
distorted Portuguese perspective 58
Mughal Empire xv, 3, 21–2, 24, 28, 33, 50, 52, 54–5, 68–9
Mughal shipbuilding 52
Mughal trade 122
perspective of India 25
Safavid empire 56, 68–9
Maryam-uz-Zamani 123, 136–7
Portuguese capture of her ship 136–7
Mascarenhas, Francisco de 43, 181
Masqat 36, 47, 54, 60
attack by Mir ‘Ali Beg 47
Masum Khan 230–1, 233, 239
Maw‘izah-i Jahangiri (Muhammad Baqir Kahn Najm-i Thani) 189
Meghraj Parekh 107
Mello, Martim Afonso de 227
Mendoça, Luís de
on ‘Abdullah Khan 38
on Muzaffar Khan 79–80
Meneses, Duarte de 32, 37, 80, 85
on Muzaffar Khan 80
Meneses, Fray Dom Aleixo de 42, 72, 167–8
Meneses, Fernando de 25–7, 171
Mertiyos of Merto 13
Mesquita, Gaspar Pacheco de
mission to Bengal 229–32, 237–9
Mir Abu Turab Wali 83
Mir Muhammad Baqar 231
Mirat-i Sikandari 79, 115
Mir Musa Mu‘izzul Mulk xvii, 128–9, 140–51, 196
agreement with Portuguese 141
enmity of Asaf Khan 144
gifts to Linhares 145
jagirdar of Khambayat 142
letters to Linhares 145, 151
Mutasaddi 147–50
Portuguese capture of ships 140
relationship with Jesuits 149
religious patron 150
Shahjahan’s protégé 143
Miscelânea (Garcia de Resende) 2
mobility 10, 74, 128, 181, 204
Bengal 204
 Mughal ruler 10–11
Mongolicae Legationis Commentarius (Antonio Monserrate) 26
Monserrate, Antonio 9, 11–12, 25–9, 86, 96, 212
Akbar’s territorial prudence 12
geography of India 26–8
Gujarati revolt 86
on the term Hindustan 25
revolts in Bengal 212
moradores xvi, 102, 104, 213, 220, 224, 235
Moura, Dom Cristóvão de 57, 71
Safavid solution to Mughal–Portuguese conflict 57
Mrauk-U 331
‘Mughalization’ 74, 76–7, 81–2, 120, 156
architecture 77, 156
cartography 120 (see also Erédia)
economic and social 81–2
patronage 76, 156
military camp 76–7
Muhammad ‘Adil Shah, Sultan 163, 180, 188, 190–1, 193, 197–8,
200–1, 203
ascension 191
buying his freedom 203
Mustafa Khan’s letter to Shahjahan 200
on Mustafa Khan 198
puppet of Khawas Khan and Mustafa Khan 191
Muhammad ‘Arif Qandhari xi, 21–2
on Akbar in Khambayat xi
Muhammad Baqir Kahn Najm-i Thani 188–9
Muhammad Beg 61–3
Muhammad Hakim, Mirza 12, 27, 34, 86
ideal Mughal ruler 34, 86–7
 insurrection against Akbar 12
Muhammad Lari, Mulla 190, 192, 199, 200
Muhammad Qutb Shah 61, 180
Muhammad Raza 188, 191, 193, 198
Muhammad Shuja‘, Prince 41, 239
Muhammad Zaman, Mirza 23, 94
Muhammad Zaman, Mirza 40–5
Mulla Abdul Ghafur 53, 148
Muqarrab Khan (Shaikh Hasan) xvii, 77, 126, 128–40, 144, 146–54,
227
aristocratic surgeon 150
ascent at court 129–31
conversion 135, 152
disposition to Christians 139–40, 149
embassy to Goa 133
merchant-prince 150
mutasaddi 147–50
proximity to Jahangir 130–1
removal as subadar of Gujarat 132
replicating Akbar’s religious tolerance 139, 149
subadar of Delhi 139–40
Murad III 36, 116
farmans for ‘Aziz Koka 116 (see also Ottomans)
Murad, Prince 76–8, 112, 177, 182
Murtaza Nizam Shah I 91, 176
Murtaza Nizam Shah II 168, 173, 184
Murtaza Nizam Shah III 61, 160
Musa Khan 215, 233
submission to Mughals 215
Mustafa Khan (Mirza Muhammad Amin) xvii, 158, 186–2, 194–203
Augustinian missionary-ambassador to 189
 Daulat Khan 191
dealings with Europeans 196
exclusion of Habshis 194
havaldar of Konkan 190
imprisonment 197
in Shahjahan’s view 199
Iranian provenance 188–9
letter to Shahjahan 200
likening to count-duke of Olivares 186
marriage of Taj Jahan Begam 188
Mughal allegiance 198–9
network of power 190–3
political responsibilities 195–6
qiladar of Ponda 189–90
VOC’s interlocutor 196
Mu‘taqad Khan 230, 238
mutasaddi xvi–xviii, 104, 123–4, 128–9, 133, 140, 143–9, 151, 230.
See also Muqarrab Khan, Mir Musa, ‘Ali Akbar Isfahani
collector of rarities 129
consistent profile 147–50
diplomat 129
imperial vs local authority 149, 151–2
merchant 129, 146
political entrepreneur 129, 146
religious patron 129, 149
Mutribi Samarqandi 126
Muzaffar Khan 78–9, 81, 87, 148, 212
Mughal capture 81
Portuguese support 81
rebellion 78–9
Muzaffar Shah 21, 83
 defeat by Akbar 83
Mylapur 45, 211, 213
Mymensingh 212

Naqshbandi order 44, 112

Nathan, Mirza 13, 217–19
Firangis in Bengal 217
Firangi attacks on Jahangir’s army 219
perspective on Mughal frontier 13
subjugation of eastern Bengal 217
Nautaques
maritime threat to Portuguese 58
negotiation xv, 5, 12, 53, 80, 86, 113, 116, 122–3, 137–9, 145, 151–
3, 160, 177, 180, 188, 196, 203, 214, 230
neighbourship xiii, xv, 5, 14–15, 21, 24, 30, 31, 39, 49, 64, 73, 154,
158, 165, 172, 180, 191, 195, 197, 206, 207, 216, 237
bad neighbours 178, 206
coalitions 172, 180
ethnicity 89
foreign policy 195
rejection 14
diversity of strategies 15
improbable 24
language 159
natural boundary 165
tense 197
unavoidable 21
undesired 31
views of Mustafa Khan 197
vizinhos 39
Nicote, Filipe de Brito e 216
Niquelus
maritime threat to Portuguese 58
Noronha, Cristóvão de Brito 98
Noronha, António de 89–90
Northern fleet. See armada do Norte
Northern Province xv, 88, 92–4, 96–9, 104–6, 108–9
Catholic province 103–4
communal identity 108
complex defensive system 98
contested territory 88–9
spread of Islam 106
land grants and rents 92–3
profitable land 95–6
permanent state of conflict 97
Nunes, Brás
Mughal threat in Bengal 215
Nusrat Shah 207

Omanis 88
Orissa 24, 207, 219, 230, 236, 238–9
Mughal conquest 24
ports 207
Osório, Jerónimo 169–70
Ottomans xii, xiv, 2, 6–7, 18, 24, 33, 35–7, 43, 47–9, 55, 57, 71, 82,
88, 92, 118, 161, 232
Mughal relations 24
role in Mughal–Portuguese rivalry xiv, 33, 36
Safavid relations 55
‘Turkish menace’ 116

Padshah-Buranji 13, 218, 222

Padshah Nama (‘Abdul Rahim Lahori) 222, 225
Pais, Francisco 93, 95, 115–16, 118
Panipat
Battle of 1
Panjab
overland link to the Arabian Sea 50–1
Pathans (Patanes) 18, 20–1, 211–12
patronage 20, 47, 49, 65, 76–7, 82, 127, 129, 139, 149–51, 155,
167, 176, 189, 197, 199
Pelsaert, Francisco 12, 121
on Jahangir’s realm 12
Perestrelo, Rafael 208
Persian Gulf xii, xviii, 22, 48, 57–8, 60–1, 64, 67, 69–70, 114, 193,
197
in Mughal imperial complex 33
perspective 26, 56–8, 70, 82, 185
distorted maritime 58
conflicting narratives 98–9
Peso de todo el mundo (Anthony Sherley) 197
Peth 89, 91
Philip II, King 8, 29, 32, 36–9, 46–7, 50–4, 56, 73, 80, 85, 93, 114–
15, 168, 172, 174, 176–7, 206, 214–15
Akbar’s interest in Hormuz 50
Gujarat 80
Koka–Akbar rupture 115
universalistic stances 8, 29
Safavid alliance 37
Philip III, King 40, 47, 50–1, 53–4, 56–9, 62–3, 64–5, 72, 81, 85–6,
97, 105–6, 117, 119, 136, 152, 159, 168, 174–5, 182–3, 185, 189,
216
Hormuz 62
Iranian–Deccani connection 64
 Mughal eastward expansion 216
Mughal–Safavid conflict 62
Mughal strategy in Deccan 175
Philip IV, King 62, 67, 71, 92, 106, 109, 159, 163, 191, 197–8, 202,
228, 235, 237–8
Mughal–Safavid war 67
overland mail project 109
Pimenta, Nicolau 133, 125, 161, 185
conversion of Muqarrab Khan 135
siege of Asirgah 185
Pinheiro, Manuel 36, 126, 133–4, 136, 161
curious objects 126
embassy with Muqarrab Khan 133
Muzaffar Mirza 36
Pipli xiii, 207–8, 219, 228, 230, 236–8
Portuguese return 237–8
Poser, Henrich von 121
povoações 4. See also settlements
Pratapaditya, Raja
Firangi assaults on Jessore 218
property 74, 94, 100, 107, 118, 123, 137, 200
legal fictions 95, 150–1
Provínica do Norte. See Northern Province

Qandahar xv, 11, 21, 28, 33, 35–6, 46–8, 51, 55, 58, 60–3, 65–71,
162
challenging Safavid rule in 11, 33, 47–8, 55
commercial threat to Hormuz 58
frontier battlefield 68
link to Safavid strategy in the Deccan 65
link with the conquest of Sind 48
 memory and historic legacy 68
Mughal conquest 35–6
nexus of trade 48
peace in Estado’s geopolitical conundrum xv, 33, 70–1
Safavid conquest 48, 60
strategic connection to Sind 61
symbolic importance 60–1
Ulugh Beg’s ruby 66
Qasim Khan 217
Qilij Muhammad Khan Andijani 83–6
orthodox Sunni 86
Portuguese view 84–5
Qutbuddin Muhammad Khan 78–9, 81, 83–4, 86, 128, 148
orthodox Sunni 86, 129, 148–9
Portuguese view 84–5

Rajasthan 13, 24, 28

Rajputs 13, 76, 79, 88, 111
Ramnagar 89, 91
Rauzat ut-Tahhirin (Tahir Muhammad) 133–4
rebels xvi, 12, 79–80, 105, 107, 164 207–8, 211, 213, 216, 218.
See also alevantados
rebellion xv, xvi, 15, 35, 79–81, 87, 111, 120, 154, 183, 212, 216,
220, 224, 234
Abhang Khan 183
Afghan 35
Bengal 212, 216, 234
Gujarat 120, 154
Khurram 220, 224
Khusrau 111
Muzaffar Khan 79–80, 87
Red Sea 24, 37, 49, 52–3, 82, 85, 113–18, 122–4, 137, 197
Mughal trade network 24
Reformação da milícia (Silveira) 29, 114–15
renegades 52, 105, 208
revenue 24, 50, 74–6, 93–4, 96, 102, 110, 125, 146, 222
customs 50, 74, 222
collection in Gujarat 75
registers 93–5
Revoredo, Francisco de 101
Relação do Equebar, rei dos mogores (Antonio Monserrate) 26
Relação dos Reis Vizinhos 195
Resende, Pedro Barreto de 99–100
residents xvi, 78, 94–5, 92, 102, 104, 106, 108, 115, 127, 142, 144,
151, 190, 213, 220, 221, 227, 229–31, 234, 242. See also
moradores
road system 10, 12, 27–8, 60, 109–10, 131, 161, 165
Rocha, Fray João da 189, 195
Rodrigues, Bento 227
Rodrigues, Francisco 21, 29, 93, 114, 148
Roe, Thomas 70, 120, 133, 144, 170
On Qandahar route 70
rumours xviii, 39, 45–6, 52, 184

Sa‘dullah Khan 122–3

Saldanha, Aires de 30, 56, 174, 185
farman from Akbar 30
instructions to befriend Akbar 56
Safavid Empire xii, xiv–xv, xviii, 2, 6, 11, 25, 28, 32–3, 35–7, 38–9,
43, 55–73, 156, 188–9, 225, 232
challenging Mughals in Qandahar 11, 33, 55
intelligence gathering 36
 interest in taking Sind xv
land-based power xii
maritime interests 33, 50, 56, 68–9
Mughal rivalry 24, 33, 50, 55
Ottoman conflict 35, 55
Portuguese rivalry 57–8
Portuguese fear of Deccan ties 63, 71
presence in the Deccan 63, 65, 188
relations with Mughals–Uzbeks 33, 35–6
role in Mughal–Portuguese rivalry xiv, 33, 55, 61
Shi’ism and the Deccan 65
Sa‘id Khan
submission to Godinho 214
Saiyid Hamid Bukhari 83
Samarcand 17
Sampaio, Diogo Melo de 102
Sampaio, Francisco Melo de 102
Sande, Duarte de 23, 24, 213
on Mughal conquest of Gujarat and Bengal 23
Akbar as foreign king 25
Sandwip 213, 216, 218
Santa Ana, Fray Diogo de 225
Santa María, Juan de 169
on effeminacy 170
Santu Shenvi 193–4
Sarcetas 95
Satgaon 28, 206–8, 211–14, 220–23
Afghan attack 211, 221
Satpura Range 160
sea passes. See cartazes
settlements 4, 45–6, 48–9, 50, 58–9, 105, 109, 120, 125, 132, 142,
144, 164, 175, 177, 184, 207, 213, 222, 240
Shah ‘Abbas I 32, 36–7, 39, 46–8, 50, 55–7, 60–6, 68–72, 170, 188
geopolitical puzzle 33
maritime vocation 57
Mughal superiority 47
Portuguese alliance 37, 55
referee between the Deccan and Mughal empires 66
religious currency 72
reputation in Goa 46
territorial disputes with Akbar 32
weakness 35
Shah Abu’l Hasan 157, 191–2
Shah Isma’il
in Martim Afonso de Sousa’s account 19
influence in India 64
Shah Jahan Nama (‘Inayat Khan) 222
Shah Nawaz Khan 83, 111, 130–2, 204, 222
on Muqarrab Khan 131
Shah Quli Beg 61
Shahjahan, Emperor xv, xvii, 8, 11, 41, 68, 85, 122, 124, 129, 140–1,
143–5, 152, 156, 161–3, 171, 186, 190, 198, 199–200, 202, 207,
222–5, 228–31, 234, 239–41
Deccan strategy 156
destruction of Hughli xv, 221–3
farman to Portuguese in Bengal 241–2
favouring Portuguese in Bengal 240–1
globe as object 8
letter to Shah Safi I 225
letter to Taj Sultana 199
motives for Hughli attack 223
 on Mustafa Khan 199–200
submission of Deccan 202
Shahrukh, Mirza 40, 43
Shah Safi I 225
Shah Saib 191, 193, 198
Shah Shuja‘ 40–1, 239
Shamsuddin Ahmad Ghaznavi 111
Shaykh Mustafa Gujarati
in Akbar–Koka rupture 112–13
Sher Shah 18, 20
overthrow of Humayun 18
Sherley, Anthony 55, 59–60, 197
on the courtly favourites 197
on Safavid Eastern expansion 60
Shihabuddin Ahmad Khan 83, 85
Portuguese view 84–5
ships xvii, 15, 24, 36, 52–3, 69, 82, 84, 85–7, 113–14, 116–17, 122–
3, 133, 137, 140–1, 144–6, 152, 197, 203, 211, 220, 222, 226,
230, 234, 238, 240
Portuguese capture xvii, 136–7, 141, 145, 151
Sikka 10, 23
imposition of 10
in Bengal 23
Silva, Pedro da 16, 202, 227, 232, 241
on ethnic diversity of Mughal army 16
Mughal deceit 227
raiding arable lands 95–6
Silva y Figueroa, Don García de 58–60, 64
Safavid plans to conquer the coast down to Thatta 58–9
Silveira, Francisco Rodrigues 29, 114–15
Mughal universalism 29
 Koka–Akbar conflict 114–15
Silveira, Gonçalo de
appropriation of the Daman mosque 102–3
Sind xii–xiii, xv, 1, 24, 28, 30, 33, 36, 44–6, 48–52, 53, 55, 57–61,
69–71, 114
commercial proxy to Hormuz 50
geopolitical impact 33, 71
link with conquest of Qandahar 48
Mughal conquest 24, 28, 50, 70
Mughal’s western frontier 1
Mughal–Portuguese frontier xii, 58,
70, 73
Portuguese strategy 51, 71
sources
‘nationalities’ of xviii, 122–3, 186–7
Sousa, Gonçalo de
on Ulugh Beg’s ruby 66
Sousa, Jerónimo de 211
Sousa, Manuel de Faria e (chronicler) 181, 226
Sousa, Martim Afonso de 18–19, 25
on Bahadur Shah 18–19
Sousa, Nicolau Pereira de
capturing renegades 105
sovereignty xiii, 5, 22, 34, 65, 94, 156, 223, 235
shared 22, 34, 73, 90–1
space xiii, xiv, 2, 4–8, 10, 12, 15, 22, 28, 30–1, 37, 68, 74–5, 77, 87,
91–2, 94, 103, 108, 153–6, 165, 181, 216
authority 74
borderlands 12
colonial 103
diversified 92, 165
 discontinuous 108
ethnic 5, 15, 27, 194
gendered 181
geographical 5, 7, 27–8
imperial 10, 77
liminal 6, 31, 37
marking of 77
Mughal conception 10
Mughal analytical conception 10
‘naked’ 28
non-imperial 156
political xiii–xiv, 1–2, 4–5, 7–8, 15, 22, 68, 90–1
religious 5, 15, 27, 76, 103, 117, 129, 152–3
sacred 153
spatial limits 91
urban 5, 121–2
Sripur 212
suba xv, 34, 75–7, 79, 81–3, 87–8, 91, 95–6, 101, 104, 108, 110–11,
118, 122, 124, 126, 131, 132, 139, 144, 151, 154, 156, 172, 198,
204, 206–7, 212, 214–15, 217, 219–20, 222, 224, 230–1, 233–5,
238–40
Sundarbans 211
Sulaiman Karrani
end of Mughal détente 23
Sunnism 65, 83, 86–7, 118, 167, 168–70
Surat xv, xvii, 16–17, 21–3, 28, 49–50, 69, 74, 78, 80, 83, 85, 88–9,
95, 101, 110, 120–5, 128–9, 131, 133, 137–46, 148–51, 153, 206,
222–4, 228, 230
Akbar’s entry 16, 21, 23, 50
Albernaz’s map 121–2
capture of Mughal ship 136–7
 competition for merchants 125
epicentre of Mughal–Portuguese conflicts xv, 50, 58
English factory 120
European factories as part of city landscape 122
gateway to continental India 28, 122
Mughal governors 126
Portuguese capture of Mughal ships xvii
Portuguese plans of conquest 80–1, 88

Tabriz
Ottoman taking 35
Tack, Joan 143, 223–4
Tahir Muhammad 133–4
Tahmasp, Shah 9, 48, 64–5, 68
conquest of Qandahar 48
influence in India 64–5
Taj Sultana
letter from Shahjahan 199
Tanda 23, 28, 205, 213–14
Mughal conquest of 23, 205
Portuguese acceptance of Mughal rule 213
transfer of capital 205
Taqiyya. See dissimulation
Tarabai 180–1
Tavares, Pero 206
Távora, Dom João de. See Muqarrab Khan
Távora, Rui Lourenço de 105, 127, 134, 136, 159, 170, 216
Muqarrab Khan embassy 134
Mughal interest in curiosities 126–7
Teles, Aires 22, 82
letter from Akbar 22
territoriality xii, 3–5, 7–8, 20, 29, 32, 54, 69, 88, 92, 110, 156, 159–
60, 172, 202, 213, 235
belonging 108
concept 4
Mughal internal cohesion 8
political community 107–8
sovereignty 5
territorial and cultural distinctions 7
territorial ambition 8
Tesoro de la lengua Castellana o Española (Sebastián Covarrubias)
168
Thana 92, 104–5
Thatta xii, 28, 49, 50–3, 57, 59–60, 69
Estado’s commercial interest 50
geopolitical situation xii, 69
Mughal shipbuilding 52
The Enchantress of Florence (Salman Rushdie) xix
Tibau, Sebastião Gonçalves 216
Tibet
Qing incorporation of 10
as putative Christian territory 27
Portuguese intelligence 36
Timur Nama 98
Timurid xiv, xvii, 5, 10, 25, 30, 48, 55, 71
Tombo Geral do Estado da Índia (Simão Botelho) 93
Tombos 93–4, 99, 116
Toscano, Francisco (Kutti Ali) 45
Tratado de República y Policia Christiana para Reys y Principes
(Juan de Santa María) 169
Tukaroi, Battle of 23
Uzbeks xiv, 33–40, 43, 47–9, 53, 55–6, 58, 62, 70, 81–2
entente cordiale 35
Mughal relations 33–5, 37
role in Mughal–Portuguese rivalry xiv, 35, 70

Van Twist, Johan

on Mustafa Khan 196
Varejão, Duarte Delgado 36, 38–9, 46, 158, 168, 172, 214
Akbar’s fear of ‘Abdullah Khan 38
Velho, Bartolomeu 20, 21
Velho, Manuel 141, 145
imprisonment by Mir Musa 141
Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) xii, xiv, 120–2, 144,
196
agents of xii–xiii
Bengal 237
hybrid enterprise xiii
Mustafa Khan 196
Vega, Lope de 206, 215
Vieira, Diogo 93
Vindhya Range 160
Vizinhança 5–6, 14. See also neighbourship

Xavier, Francis 2
allegorical representation of India 2
Xavier, Jerónimo 8, 36, 40, 42, 52–3, 86, 111, 117–18, 130–1, 151,
161, 176, 185, 221
Akbar’s sailors 52
‘Aziz Koka 111, 117
Berar 161
letter on Muhammad Zaman Mirza 42
Mughal reaction to seizure of the
Morro 176
Muzaffar Mirza 36
release of Portuguese traders 86
siege of Asirgah 185
 About the Author

Jorge Flores was educated at the University of Lisbon and the

New University of Lisbon, Portugal. He is professor of early modern
global history at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. In
2004 he co-curated (with Nuno Vassallo e Silva) the exhibition ‘Goa
and the Great Mughal’ for the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum,
Lisbon. He is the author of several books and articles that explore
the social and cultural history of the early modern Portuguese
Empire in Asia, especially in South Asia and the Central Indian
Ocean. Most recently, he has published The Mughal Padshah: A
Jesuit Treatise on Emperor Jahangir’s Court and Household (2016).
Flores is currently preparing the companion volume of Unwanted
Neighbours, tentatively titled The Accidental Persianate State:
Political Communication between Portuguese Goa and Mughal
India.