Chapter 1362: Let's Defend India Together!

"Your Majesty!" Bruis van Diemen shook his head repeatedly. "What you say is not right. When have our two countries ever gone to India to rob money? We went to help the people of India!"

Help?

Li Jicheng thought to himself: Help the people of India spend their money? Do the people of India have so much money they cannot spend it all themselves, so the Shun and the Dutch have to go help them spend a bit of it?

Bruis continued: "And the Ming Emperor's act of taking Aurangzeb's daughter as a Noble Consort shows that he harbors enormous ambitions toward the rich land of India. His marriage to the Indian Princess Nisha may very well become a bridge for his invasion of India. If India should ever fall into Ming hands, then the entire world could be dominated by the Ming Son of Heaven.

When that time comes, will Your Majesty's Shun still be able to stand as an equal against the Ming? If the Ming naval fleet gains a foothold in India, if the Timurid Empire of India becomes a vassal state of the Ming, will your armies still be able to freely enter and leave India to help the people there?"

Li Jicheng now felt the gravity of the problem!

His Shun had already lost the land of abundance in Sichuan, and who knew how much longer Yunnan could hold out? Only Burma looked somewhat reliable.

But Burma was only a place that could barely fill one's belly. To grow rich and prosper, one still had to rely on India!

After plundering India twice, Li Jicheng had also figured out India's measure. This place was simply weak in arms and rich in money!

Although that Timurid state or whatever had some strength, the Timurid state's territory was vast and its enemies many, so it had no way to concentrate its forces to guard the coastline of Bengal and Orissa to the east. If the Shun wanted to raid and run, opportunities were everywhere. As for the states south of Orissa province — Golconda, Coromandel (right next to Fort St. George), and Malabar — the Shun and the Dutch could come and go as they pleased.

But once the Ming and the Timurid Empire formed an alliance and sent a naval fleet to Bengal, could the Shun still have any good days?

Would the bitterness of being bottled up and suffocated in Sichuan and Yunnan have to be swallowed once more in Burma?

"Mister Van is right!" Li Jicheng dared not take this lightly, and said hurriedly, "We Shun indeed cannot let the remnant Ming and the Timurid state of India collude together. Neither of them is any good. Once they collude, they will surely devour the people of India clean!"

Bruis van Diemen let out a breath, turned to the French envoy Nicolas Fouquet, and said in French: "Mister Ambassador, His Majesty the Emperor of the Shun Empire says that he, like King Louis, is deeply concerned for the welfare of the Indian people, and does not wish to see the evil, greedy Ming Empire and the brutal, savage Timurid Empire collude together to jointly enslave the Indian people."

Nicolas Fouquet had once been sent by Cardinal Mazarin as an envoy to the Ming, and had spent quite some time in the Ming, during which he had learned a little Chinese. However, he could not understand the Shaanxi dialect, so he could only let Bruis van Diemen spout nonsense with a straight face.

But even if he could understand, he was perfectly happy to let Bruis van Diemen act as interpreter. This interpreter's skill was, after all, very high, and it also served his mission.

Nicolas Fouquet did not want to linger too long in Kunming, or else Colbert's schemes would succeed — after Cardinal Mazarin's death, that scoundrel Jean-Baptiste Colbert had begun to "maliciously slander" him, Mazarin's successor.

If Fouquet were not "thoroughly familiar" with Eastern affairs, if he were not a China expert in King Louis's eyes, he would probably already have been thrown into prison by King Louis!

But even though King Louis still had use for Fouquet, his position was precarious and could collapse at any moment.

So he had to produce some results as quickly as possible, and at the same time return to France quickly, back to His Majesty the King's side.

"Your Imperial Majesty!" Fouquet gave Li Jicheng a French-style bow. "King Louis hopes that the Shun Empire can stand together with France and Holland, to jointly stop the Ming Empire's invasion of India, and to place India under the joint protection of our three nations."

His words were still translated by Bruis. Bruis turned his head to Li Jicheng and said: "Your Majesty, over in Europe right now France is the biggest, but they are only strong on land. At sea, they still have to rely on us Dutch! But that King Louis has let it go to his head, thinking he is some kind of leader of the Catholic faith, some kind of Sun King, wanting to be the sun of Europe, wanting to lead the European nations in resisting the Ming's westward advance. That is why he wants to stick a foot into India. In truth, he does not really mean to fight the Ming; he just wants to save a bit of face. The benefits of India should still be split evenly between our two sides."

How could that crafty merchant Bruis know that Louis XIV was contending with the Ming for India from the height of grand strategy!

The calculation was actually very simple. Right now the whole world was roughly divided into three great blocs: the Celestial Empire bloc, the Islamic bloc, and the Christian bloc. Of these, the Celestial Empire and Christendom were far apart, and their strength was roughly equal, so neither could shake the other's home ground. All they could do was develop themselves and contain their rival!

Therefore, to contain the other side and develop oneself, the only option was to seize territory outside one's own home ground.

And there were two great regions of territory up for grabs: one was the New World, and the other was the Islamic world's territory.

In the New World, the Christian side had temporarily gained the upper hand, but had expanded to its limit — this limit was determined by Europe's population base. Relative to the vast New World, Europe's population was simply too small, and the number of emigrants it could send out each year was correspondingly limited. Thus it was very difficult for them to completely occupy North and South America, and they were powerless to stop the Ming Empire from exporting population to the northwestern part of North America.

So in the New World, the Christian world led by France was in fact strategically on the defensive.

And in the contest for the territory of Islamic civilization, Christendom currently had no particular advantage over the Ming either. Because the Ming had already taken the Strait of Malacca and opened the sea route for westward advance. The Christian civilization, on the other hand, was facing an aggressive Islamic power — the Ottoman Empire!

In the direction of southern Europe, Christian civilization was still on the defensive, so it could not reach eastward through the Middle East to lay hands on India, the richest and most easily invaded part of the Islamic world. It could only take a great detour around Africa.

But with such a detour, the forces the Europeans could commit were limited. Even if France and Holland joined hands, they could only put a few thousand troops into India. Facing Aurangzeb's two or three hundred thousand troops, what use were a few thousand men?

Aurangzeb's empire was still very hard to deal with!

Moreover, even if Aurangzeb were defeated, he could still receive military aid from the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were an Islamic power that could beat down the Holy Roman Empire. Could a few thousand European expeditionary troops who had sailed around to the Indian Ocean defeat them? And the Christians of Europe also had to consider the consequences of India's money combined with Ottoman military might!

And now Aurangzeb had also pulled in the Ming Empire, that giant of East Asia!

When news of the marriage alliance between the Timurid Empire of India and the Ming Empire reached Europe, Holland, England, and Portugal all felt grave concern for their interests in India.

Of course, the dog-eat-dog infighting among these three nations would not end just because of the marriage alliance between the Ming and the Timurid Empire.

Because their relations with the Timurid Empire were also rather complicated, and their ambitions each differed, so it was hard for them to unite just like that.

Otherwise there would not have been the affair of the Dutch using the Shun to seize the English colony of Fort St. George...

And the English were extremely angry at the Dutch for joining with the Shun to seize their territory, but in awe of the Franco-Dutch alliance they dared not retaliate openly. So they vented their anger on the Portuguese instead, using the pretext that the Portuguese had participated in the attack on Fort St. George to seize several islands the Portuguese held off the western coast of India (Bombay).

The Portuguese, bullied by the English, went weeping to the French, wanting to ask this overlord of Europe to step forward and uphold justice.

And Louis XIV was not so foolish as to pick a fight with England for the sake of Portugal, that weakling. Those Puritan madmen could really fight!

But he also wanted to put on the airs of Europe's overlord, and wanted to use this opportunity to meddle in Indian affairs. So he came up with this plan of uniting all parties to jointly intervene in India, force the Timurid Empire to "open its markets," and prevent the Ming from interfering in Indian affairs.

And in Louis XIV's plan, there was also the role of the Shun Empire, the Ming's mortal enemy!

(End of Chapter)