Place · Portuguese fortified town · India
Vasai (Bassein) Fort
The northern capital of Portuguese India, ceded by the Gujarat sultan in 1534 and built up as a walled city of churches, convents and fidalgo houses — called the Court of the North. The Marathas took it in 1739 after a three-year siege, and it has stood ruined and overgrown since.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 19.331, 72.816
Worth knowing
Bombay came to the English crown as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry in 1661 and was a minor dependency of this city, not the other way round. Vasai's collapse and Bombay's rise happen within a generation of each other.
Connections (5)
- Power passed toVictorian Gothic & Art Deco, Mumbai
Bombay's seven islands came to the English crown in 1661 as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry, transferred from a Portuguese administration that regarded them as a minor dependency of Bassein. Bassein fell to the Marathas in 1739 and never recovered; Bombay was leased to the East India Company for ten pounds a year and became the largest city in western India. The two events are a generation apart and the same story seen from both ends.
- Power passed toShaniwarwada, Pune
Chimaji Appa, brother of the Peshwa Baji Rao I, besieged Vasai for three years and took it in May 1739, ending two centuries of Portuguese rule over the coast north of Bombay. The campaign was directed from Pune, and Vasai's fall is the clearest single transfer in the repository: the Estado's northern province becomes Maratha territory in one siege.
- Power passed toBombay Castle
Bombay was a minor dependency of Vasai until Charles II received it in Catherine of Braganza's dowry in 1661; the Company leased it in 1668 for ten pounds a year and moved its western headquarters there from Surat in 1687. Vasai fell to the Marathas fifty-two years later. The Portuguese north was divided between the two powers that inherited India.
- BirthplaceGonçalo Garcia
Gonçalo Garcia was born at Vasai about 1556 to a Portuguese father and an Indian mother, one of the mestizo population Albuquerque's marriage policy had encouraged. He left for Japan as a trader, joined the Franciscans as a lay brother in Manila, and was crucified at Nagasaki in 1597. The Estado's northern capital produced India's first canonised saint.
- Imperial administration ofEstado da Índia — Portuguese India
Vasai — Bassein of the Portuguese — was the northern anchor of the Estado da Índia on the Konkan, held from 1534 to 1739 when the Marathas took it after a three-year siege. The Estado ran the shipyards here, and the fort still holds the churches of the seven Portuguese orders that were founded inside its walls. Its loss ended Portuguese territorial control north of Goa.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Fort Vasai”. Historical Archives of Goa; Charles Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825.
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