Shivaji and His Times c16.s3.1

c16.s3.1

Portuguese India touched only a fringe of Shivaji's activities and did not influence his policy or history to any appreciable extent. The smallness of the population of Portugal for maintaining a colonial empire, the suppression of the national energy during the sixty years of Spanish domination (1580—1640), the ruinous naval war with Holland (1650—1663), and the rapid moral decline of their settlers in Asia,—all made the Portuguese in India in Shivaji's time a decadent Power, anxious only to hold their own, and timidly averting an armed encounter with every other State by employing friendly appeal, patient endurance, and diplomatic evasion. Their territory of Goa was then much smaller than now, as it did not include Phonda, Bicholim, Pernem or Sanquelim. But their Konkan possessions, called the Province of the North, practically stretched from Chaul to Daman along the coast and for a short distance inland.