After effecting a landing, the Portuguese ordered 'three gunners with axes to cut the supports of the mosque, which was a large and very beautiful edifice, the greater part being built of timber finely carved, and the upper part of stucco,' and it was accounted a propitious miracle by the Portuguese that the men who performed this deed were not killed by the falling timber. Maskat was then burnt and utterly destroyed; and 'having cut off the ears and noses of the prisoners he liberated them.' The commentator concludes his remarks on Maskat as follows: 'Maskat is of old a market for carriage of horses and dates; it is a very elegant town, with very fine houses. It is the principal _entrepot_ of the kingdom of Ormuz, into which all the ships that navigate these parts must of necessity enter.' The hundred and forty years during which the Portuguese occupied Maskat and the adjacent coast town was a period of perpetual trouble and insurrection. The factory and forts of Jellali and Merani were commenced in 1527, but the forts in their present condition were not erected till after the union of Portugal and Spain, in 1580; the order for their erection came from Madrid, and the inscription bears the date 1588. Not only were the Arabs constantly on the look-out to dislodge their unwelcome visitors, but the Turks attacked them likewise, with a navy from the side of the Persian Gulf, and the naval victory gained by the Portuguese off Maskat in 1554 is considered by Turkish historians to have been a greater blow to their power than the better known battle off Prevesa in 1538, when D'Oria defeated Barbarossa and obliged Solyman to relinquish his attempt on Vienna. When, after the union of Portugal with Spain, the colonial activity of the former country declined, the colonies in the Persian Gulf fell one by one into the hand of the Persians and Arabs. Out of the kingdom of Oman they were driven in 1620, and confined to the town of Maskat by the victorious imam, Nasir-bin-Murshid, during whose reign of twenty-six years the legend is told that no man in Oman died a natural death. Two years later they were also driven from Maskat itself, and those two forts Jellali and Merani which they had built, the last foothold of the Portuguese on the Omani territory, were taken from them.