Walk through the older quarters of Chittagong today and the layers of the city are not always visible at first glance. There is no single Portuguese quarter preserved like a museum, no Arakanese palace standing intact, and no Mughal citadel dominating the skyline in the way that forts do in some other South Asian cities. Yet the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is still present in place names, in the memory of neighbourhoods like Firingi Bandar, the Foreigners' Port, and in the shape of a port city that learned, over more than a century, to live with traders who were also pirates, kings who were also raiders, and empires that arrived by sea as often as by land. To understand old Chittagong, it helps to see it not as a city belonging to one power, but as a prize fought over by three: the Portuguese, the Arakanese kingdom of Mrauk U, and the Mughal Empire.
The Portuguese Arrive at Porto Grande
The Portuguese came to Bengal by sea, as part of a trading empire that stretched from Goa to Malacca. The first official Portuguese emissary to the region, João da Silveira, reached the Bay of Bengal in 1517, on the instructions of Lopo Soares de Albergaria, the Governor of Portuguese India, anchoring first in Arakan before proceeding to Chittagong. In 1528, the Sultan of Bengal permitted the Portuguese to establish factories and customs houses in the Port of Chittagong. A fort and naval base was established in Firingi Bandar. The settlement grew into a prominent Eurasian port on the Bay of Bengal during the Age of Discovery, and the Portuguese called Chittagong Porto Grande, the Grand Port, while Satgaon, and later Hooghly, became Porto Pequeno, the Little Haven.
The harbour of Chittagong became the most important port to the Portuguese because of its location, navigational facilities and safe anchorage. The port is very close to the mouth of the Meghna, which was the principal route to the royal capital of Gaur. Portuguese ships from Goa and Malacca began frequenting the port city in the sixteenth century. The cartaz system was introduced and required all ships in the area to purchase naval trading licences from the Portuguese settlement. In practice, this meant that Portuguese sea power, not just Portuguese goods, shaped who could trade and on what terms.
The settlement was not a small factory staffed by a handful of officials. The increased commercial presence included bureaucrats, merchants, missionaries, soldiers, adventurers, sailors and pirates. The enclave had a highly laissez-faire administration led by traders. Major traded products included fine silk, cotton muslin textiles, bullion, spices, rice, timber, salt and gunpowder. According to a note by Caesar Federici in 1567, every year thirty or thirty-five ships, great and small, anchored in Chittagong port. In 1598, there lived about 2,500 Portuguese and Eurasians in Chittagong and Arakan. The Roman Catholic Church was established in Bengal during Portuguese rule in Chittagong, and the port city was the seat of the first Vicar Apostolic of Bengal. The Portuguese also encouraged intermarriage with the local population, and their descendants, in places like Firingi Bazaar in Dhaka after the Portuguese moved there, are part of the longer story of this period.
This commercial success had a second face, and it is important not to separate the two. Slave trade and piracy flourished in the enclave. The Portuguese took over the eastern portion of the Arab slave trade networks and sold their slaves in Tamluk and Balasore, and in Deccan ports. Slaves were sold at Dianga and Pipli, and transported by ship. The Portuguese built a fort at Pipli in 1599 for prisoners brought by the Arakanese. In 1629, the Portuguese under the command of Diego da Sa raided Dhaka and took many prisoners, including a Syed woman, the wife of a Mughal military officer, and carried her off in chains to Dianga. The prisoners were converted to Christianity. These are not footnotes to the trading story; for the people seized from villages along the rivers, they were the story.
The Arakanese Kingdom and a Shifting Alliance
Chittagong's fate in this period cannot be understood without the Kingdom of Mrauk U, the Arakanese kingdom to the southeast. The Bengal Sultanate lost control of Chittagong in 1531, after Arakan declared independence and established the Kingdom of Mrauk U. This altered geopolitical landscape allowed the
Portuguese wide scope in Chittagong for over a century. Chittagong became a major bone of contention between the Mughal Empire, the Kingdom of Mrauk U, the Burmese Empire and the Kingdom of Tripura.
The relationship between the Portuguese and the Arakanese kings was volatile, shifting between alliance, rivalry and outright violence. The King of Mrauk U massacred 600 members of the Portuguese community in Dianga in 1607. Subsequently, the Portuguese allied with Arakan, and Portuguese-Arakanese piracy increased against Mughal Bengal in the seventeenth century. In response, in one account, the Portuguese ravaged the Arakan coast and carried off the booty to the king of Barisal, a detail that shows how fluid these alliances were: the same Portuguese who allied with Arakan could also raid its coast when it suited them.
The nearby island of Sandwip illustrates the same instability. Sandwip was conquered by the Portuguese in 1602, from Kedar Rai of Sripur, according to one account, while another account dates a Portuguese conquest of Sandwip to 1590 under António de Sousa Godinho. Portuguese pirates named Gonçalves and Carvalho ruled the island for several years. In 1615, the Portuguese Navy defeated a joint Dutch East India Company and Arakanese fleet near the coast of Chittagong. In 1616, after the arrival of Delwar Khan, a high-ranking Mughal naval officer, the Portuguese pirates were driven away from Sandwip, and Delwar Khan ruled the island independently for about fifty years. The discrepancy in dates for Sandwip is a useful reminder that the chronology of this frontier period is reconstructed from scattered Portuguese, Mughal, Arakanese and Dutch sources, and not every episode can be dated with certainty.
The human cost of the piracy is described in stark terms by contemporary and later historians. The Mughal-era writer Shihabuddin Talish described how raiders carried off Hindus and Muslims, male and female, great and small, pierced the palms of their hands, passed thin canes through the holes, and threw them one above another under the deck of their ships. The French traveller François Bernier, quoted in later histories, described how the pirates scoured the neighbouring seas in light galleys, entered the arms and branches of the Ganges, ravaged the islands of Lower Bengal, and often penetrated forty or fifty leagues up the country, surprising and carrying away the entire population of villages. The marauders made slaves of their captives and burnt whatever could not be removed. The historian G. E. Harvey noted that Rennell's map of Bengal, published in 1794, marks the area south of Backergunge as deserted on account of the ravages of the Maghs, the Arakanese. These accounts come from writers with their own perspectives, and their language reflects the horror with which Mughal Bengal viewed the raids, but the scale of disruption they describe, villages emptied, river districts depopulated, is consistent across sources.
The Mughal Reconquest of 1666
For the Mughals, Chittagong was both a commercial prize and a security problem. As long as Arakanese and Portuguese raiders could use its harbour and its creeks, the river districts of Bengal, from Dhaka to the coast, remained vulnerable. In 1632, the Mughal army expelled the Portuguese from Satgaon, or Hooghly, owing to Portuguese association with the slave trade, kidnapping and refusal to support Shah Jahan. That removed one Portuguese base, but Chittagong itself remained outside Mughal control for another three decades.
The decisive campaign came in 1666, under the Mughal viceroy Shaista Khan. The Mughals attacked the Arakanese from the jungle with a 6,500-man army, supported by 288 ships of war bound for the seizure of Chittagong harbour. After three days of battle, the Arakanese surrendered. Chittagong promptly became the capital of the new Mughal administration in the area. To combat the pirates' skill over water, the Mughals called for the support of Dutch ships from Batavia, although before the Dutch ships reached the coast of Chittagong, the battle had already ended. To carry soldiers, Shaista Khan constructed several large ships and a large number of galleys. The conquest of Chittagong brought an end to Portuguese dominance of more than 130 years in the port city, and the conquest was similarly aimed mainly at driving Arakanese slave raiders out of Bengal.
The Mughals renamed the city Islamabad, and integrated it into Mughal Bengal. The Grand Trunk Road connected it with North India and Central Asia. Economic growth increased due to an efficient system of land grants for clearing hinterlands for cultivation. The Mughals also contributed to the architecture of the area, including the building of Fort Ander and many mosques. Shipbuilding increased dramatically under Mughal rule, and Ottoman sultans had many Ottoman warships built in Chittagong during this period, according to accounts of the port's shipbuilding industry. After the Mughals took Chittagong, the Portuguese moved to the Ferengi Bazaar in Dhaka, and descendants of the Portuguese still reside in these places.
It would be a mistake to present 1666 as a clean ending. One account notes that plundering by Magh-Portuguese pirates continued throughout the eighteenth century, even after the Arakanese left Chittagong and never reoccupied it. The Mughal conquest changed who controlled the port, but the creeks, islands and river routes that had made piracy possible did not disappear overnight. What changed was the balance of power: a port that had been a semi-independent frontier, where Portuguese traders, Arakanese kings and local adventurers bargained and fought, became part of a large empire's provincial administration, with its trade, revenue and shipbuilding directed towards imperial needs.
What Remains of Those Layers
For a traveller in Chittagong today, the Portuguese, Arakanese and Mughal layers are best understood as influences rather than monuments. The Portuguese left words in the language, a Catholic presence that began in this period, and the memory of Firingi Bandar. The Arakanese period left a frontier history that still shapes how the southeastern coast relates to Myanmar, and a reminder that Chittagong has always looked east as well as west. The Mughals left the name Islamabad, used for a time, the administrative integration of the port into Bengal, and buildings such as Fort Ander and mosques from the period.
More than any single building, what remains is the character of the city itself: a port that has always been open to outsiders, and has always paid a price for that openness. Traders brought silk, spices, bullion and new words. Pirates brought fear, depopulation and the slave trade. Empires brought roads, revenue systems and shipyards, and also the armies needed to hold the port. Chittagong's old city was made by all of these forces together, not by any one of them alone, and that tangled inheritance is still the most honest way to tell its story.