Page:History of India Vol 3.djvu/231

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THE PORTUGUESE IN GUJARAT 185 had himself placed upon a chair at the foot of the mainmast, and gave his orders as coolly as ever. Shortly afterwards, a second cannon-ball struck him in the breast, and the young hero, who was not yet twenty- one, expired, in the words of Camoens, without knowing what the word surrender meant. He was avenged a few months later when, on February 2, 1509, his father, the viceroy Franciso de Almeida, utterly defeated the combined fleet of Egypt and Gujarat off Diu. In the following year the King of Gujarat offered Albu- querque, the conqueror of Goa, the port of Diu, and a Portuguese factory was there established in 1513, though the celebrated fortress of the Christian invaders was not built till 1535. Though unable to withstand the Portuguese or perhaps not unwilling to see his powerful deputy at Diu humiliated Bahadur was one of the most brilliant figures among the warrior kings of Gujarat. The Raj- puts of the hills and the kings of the Deccan owned his superiority, and in 1531 he annexed Malwa. A Rajput rising and the advance of the Moguls under Humayun, the son of Babar, for a time destroyed his authority, as will presently be seen, but he recovered it bravely, only to fall at last, drowned in a scuffle with the Portuguese whom he had admitted to his coast. The account of the final absorption of Gujarat into the fabric of the Mogul empire in the year 1572 belongs to a later chapter. Nothing has been said regarding the affairs of the Deccan since the reign of Mohammad Taghlak,