Goa

Goa, on the south bank of the Mandovi River, was a harbour city whose sheltered waterways and roads up the Ghats to the Deccan made it a gateway for horses, spices and cloth. The Bijapur sultans, who held it from the end of the fifteenth century, made Goa their second capital, with a moat, a palace, mosques and temples.

On 25 November 1510 Afonso de Albuquerque took the city for Portugal. Goa became the capital of Portuguese India and the seat of a viceroy and an archbishop, and the Inquisition arrived in 1560. Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians and Jesuits built churches and convents, and the body of Francis Xavier, who died in 1552, was later brought to the Bom Jesus church. A Dutch traveller of the 1580s described a rich city of merchants, slave auctions and Persian horses. In the next century Dutch fleets blockaded the harbour, and Goa's trade passed to others. Epidemics of malaria and cholera emptied the city in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The viceroy left the riverside for Panjim in 1759, and by 1775 only about fifteen hundred people lived in Old Goa.