Pegu > Bago Pegu Myanmar

Pegu, on the Pegu River in southern Burma, is founded in about 825 as the capital of the Mon state, which is organized according to Indian political principles and ruled by kings held to be divine.

The town of Pegu, which had declined when the Burmese conquered the area in the eleventh century, becomes the capital of the revived Mon kingdom in 1369.

Toungoo forms an alliance with the Mon kingdom of Pegu in Lower Burma…

Soalu, the Shan ruler of the semiautonomous Burmese kingdom of Toungoo on the Ava-Pegu border, dies in 1437, and Pegu’s king Binnya Ran installs his son Minsaw as Toungoo’s ruler.

The energetic reign of King Razadarit of Hanthawaddy had (r. 1384–1421) had cemented the kingdom's existence.

Razadarit had firmly unified the three Mon-speaking regions together, and had successfully fended off the northern Burmese-speaking Ava Kingdom in the Forty Years' War (1385–1424), making the western kingdom of Rakhine a tributary from 1413 to 1421 in the process.

The war had ended in a stalemate but it was a victory for Hanthawaddy as Ava finally gave up its dream of restoring the Pagan Empire.

Pegu in the years following the war had occasionally aided Ava's southern vassal states of Prome and Taungoo in their rebellions but carefully avoided getting plunged into a full-scale war.

Hanthawaddy after the war had entered its golden age whereas its rival Ava had gradually gone into decline.

Hanthawaddy from the 1420s to the 1530s has been the most powerful and prosperous kingdom of all post-Pagan kingdoms.

Under a string of especially gifted monarchs—Binnya Ran I, Shin Sawbu, Dhammazedi and Binnya Ran II—the kingdom had enjoyed a long golden age, profiting from foreign commerce.

Its merchants trade with traders from across the Indian Ocean, filling the king's treasury with gold and silver, silk and spices, and all the other stuff of early modern trade.

The kingdom has also became a famous center of Theravada Buddhism.

It has established strong ties with Sri Lanka and had encouraged reforms that later spread throughout the country.

The powerful kingdom's end comes abruptly, subjected from 1534 onward to constant raids by the native Burmese Taungoo Dynasty from Upper Burma, previously ruled, since the waning of Mongol power, as a Chinese tributary under the hereditary kings of Burma’s Buddhist Shan people (linguistically, culturally and physically related to the neighboring Thais).

King Takayutpi is unable to marshal Hanthawaddy’s much greater resources and manpower against the much smaller Taungoo, led by King Tabinshwehti and his deputy general Bayinnaung.

Pegu becomes the capital of the united Burmese kingdom.

Binnya U, descendant of the Thai chief Wareru, had established Hanthawaddy as the capital of the Mon Hanthawaddy Kingdom, which covers all of what is now Lower Burma.

In 1519, António Correia, then a merchant from the Portuguese casados settlement at Cochin, had landed in Bago, then known to the Portuguese as Pegu, looking for new markets for pepper from Cochin.

A year later, Portuguese India Governor Diogo Lopes de Sequeira had sent an ambassador to Pegu.

Tabinshwehti and his court had selected Hanthawaddy as their first target because its king, Takayutpi, is a weak leader who does not command respect of his vassals.

Takayutpi's brother-in-law Saw Binnya practically rules the Martaban region as a sovereign, and scarcely acknowledges the high king at Pegu.

Takayutpi in turn makes an alliance with the Prome Kingdom, a vassal of the Confederation of Shan States.

Toungoo's opening maneuvers amounted to a mere raids of Hanthawaddy territory: its initial dry-season raids in 1534–1535, 1535–1536, and 1536–1537 have all failed against Pegu's fortified defenses, aided by foreign mercenaries and firearms.

In each campaign, Toungoo armies have only six thousand to seven thousand men, a few hundred cavalry and a few dozen war elephants, and do not yet have access to foreign troops and firearms.

Unlike his father Binnya Ran II, Takayutpi cannot organize any retaliatory actions.

His nominal subordinates in the Irrawaddy delta and Martaban send no aid.

Nonetheless, Pegu's defenses, led by two leading ministers of the court, Binnya Law and Binnya Kyan, have withstood the raids.

Both Binnya Kyan and Binnya Law had been childhood tutors of Takayupti, and are absolutely devoted to him.

Nonetheless, both ministers are executed in 1538 by the young king, who believes Toungoo's misinformation that the ministers are Toungoo moles.

After their death, the king finds himself helpless.

When Toungoo forces arrive once again in late 1538, he decides, rather than fight, to flee Pegu for the Prome Kingdom, where another brother-in-law of his, Narapati of Prome, is king.

(He does not retreat to Martaban, which is nominally still part of Hanthawaddy because he does not trust its governor Saw Binnya.)

The Toungoo forces take the Mon capital without firing a shot.

Pegu becomes the capital of Tabinshwehti’s united Burmese kingdom in 1539.

Tabinshwehti makes Pegu his capital in 1547.

Bayinnaung, moving south with his Burmese troops and Portuguese mercenaries, defeats Mon rebel leader Smim Htaw in battle outside Pegu in 1551, and soon executes him.