When Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty conquered northern India in 1526, the wealth of the country already largely depended on foreign trade, exporting India's enormous production of many types of commodities, in particular textiles. These left India by land and by sea, the latter in relatively small ships making relatively short voyages from the east and west coasts, as they had done for centuries. But political changes in the lands between Europe and India meant that Indian exports to Europe were probably much less than at the peak of the Roman Empire.
