WEST COMES EAST 219ever, why would he say no? His people had businesses to run! You don't
make money by refusing to sell your products.
The Europeans did encounter a flash of hostility from Muslims there-
abouts a bit later, but the Muslims were interlopers themselves that far
south and so the Portuguese got local Hindu support to build a little town
and fort at a place called Goa. They had nothing very remarkable to trade,
but they did have money to buy, and as the years went by more of them
were coming along with more and more money to spend, as the gold of
the Americas flooded the European economy. Goa became a permanent
Portuguese implant in India.
Then more traders came along from other parts of western Europe.
The French set up a "trading post" at Pondicherry and the British set up
one at Madras.^1 The Dutch sailed by and looked in as well. These Euro-
pean communities started fighting among themselves for business advan-
tages, but the Indians paid little notice. Why should they care who won?
Babur and his descendents were just establishing the Moghul empire up
north, and they were the big story of the time, much bigger than a few
obscure traders building little forts along the coast. And so the sixteenth
century passed without Europeans making much of an impact on the Is-
lamic world.
Then again, not all Europeans came to the Muslim world as traders. Some
came as business advisers or technical consultants. In 1598, a pair of Eng-
lish brothers, Robert and Anthony Sherley, found their way to Persia,
which was well into its "golden age" under the greatest of the Safavid mon-
archs, Shah Abbas. The Englishmen said they came in peace with an in-
teresting proposition for the Persian king: they wanted to sell him cannons
and firearms and they could promise technical support to back up their
products-they would have their people come in and train the Shah's peo-
ple in the new weapons, teach military strategy to go with them, plus how
to fix the weapons if they broke, things like that.
Shah Abbas liked what he heard. Safavid Persia lagged behind its
neighbors in military technology. The Qizilbash didn't like firearms; they
were still fighting mostly with spears and swords and bows; this deficit
had cost the Safavids the battle of Chaldiran, and now the hated Ot-
tomans were trying to stop weapons shipments to Persia. Getting