ABSTRACT
Therefore it was quite natural that trade and commercial activities were brisk in medieval Bengal and hence her ports played an important role in the economy of the then Bengal. Till the middle of the sixteenth century Satgaon was the most important port which from ancient times was the chief emporium of trade in the western part of Bengal. It was the advantageous position of Satgaon – on the river Saraswati in the loop formed by it before it falls into the Ganges – that made it ‘the great port of Bengal for ocean-going ships in the middle Ages’. Its wealth was the theme of medieval Bengali poetry and foreign travellers’ tale. According to the poet Mukundaram, it used to attract so much foreign trade that the merchants of Satgaon never left their home town.9 It was the royal port of Bengal till the emergence of Hugli in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and the latter prospered so rapidly that made the former ‘hide its diminished head’ in the beginning of the seventeenth century.10 As the chief mart of Bengal, it attracted merchants from different parts of India and diverse other countries.11 It was the chief emporium of Portuguese trade since 1537 and popularly known to them as ‘porto piqueno’.12 Even in 1567 Caesar Federici found Satgaon ‘a remarkable faire cite’ where ‘every year they lade thirtie or five and thirtie ships, great and small, with rice, cloth of Bombast of divers sorts, Lacca, great abundance of Sugar, Mirabalans dried
and preserved, long Pepper, Oyle of Lerzeline and many other sorts of merchandise.’13
