The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c25.1

c25.1

As early as Alexander's time the Indians possessed walled and fortified towns (Mc Crindle, *Invasion of India*, 119). The practice of building such strong places was never abandoned, and by the sixteenth century, when the Moghul rule began, petty forts held by chiefs of Hindu clans or by grantees from Mahomedan sovereigns, were scattered thickly over the country. Speaking of the Mahratta territory at the end of the 18th century, Colonel Blacker, 305, believed that no province of the same extent in India, or perhaps in any part of the world, possessed so many fortresses.