Sometime in 1453, the same year that the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople carried Persian civilization to the frontiers of Europe, a high-born Iranian merchant named Mahmud Gawan stepped onto India's western shores. From the docks of Dabhol, Gawan oversaw the off-loading of the consignments he had brought with him from Iran to India. Gawan joined the stream of other Westerners who for decades had been migrating to the Deccan and had taken up service in Bidar, the Bahmani capital. Notwithstanding Bidar's cultural enrichment owing to the court's patronage of Westerners like Mahmud Gawan, that enrichment came at a heavy cost. Gawan's protracted expedition, which lasted from 1469 to 1472, thus aimed at subduing both the hill-forts and the sea forts from which local chieftains had been harassing strategic trade routes. Focused on its glittering Royal Chamber and Hall of Public Audience, Bidar in the fifteenth century came close to becoming what Delhi had long been, an imperial center.