Lord Hawkesbury bowed with a grave expression. "Something serious has indeed happened, Prime Minister."
Pitt the Younger frowned slightly and gestured for him to enter the office. "Please, sit down and tell me."
"Civil War has broken out in the Marat Alliance," the Minister of Foreign Affairs said anxiously. "In the name of the Peshwa, Ratrao Scindia sent troops to sack Indore City.
"In mid-July, Yeshwant Holkar gathered an army and declared war on Scindia.
"At present, more than eighty thousand troops from both sides are fighting fiercely south of Ujjain. Bajirao II has demanded that the other states of Marat reinforce Scindia..."
Pitt the Younger quickly made a gesture for him to pause, then signaled his secretary to fetch a notebook from the bookshelf and began leafing through it carefully.
He could hardly be blamed for that. There were dozens of different powers in that place called India, and their names were all very strange; even the Governor of India could not possibly remember them all.
A moment later, with Lord Hawkesbury's help, he finally managed to roughly sort out the internal situation of the Marat Alliance.
The Marat Alliance was the most important state in southwestern India. It was made up of five major powers, and the ruler of the alliance was called the Peshwa. The current Peshwa was Bajirao II, a weak and useless piece of trash.
Scindia, one of the two strongest military powers in the alliance, had taken control of the capital, Idar, three or four years ago. From then on, Bajirao II had become a puppet of the Scindia family.
After that, Scindia had tried to use the Peshwa's name to completely control the other three great families. This had provoked fierce opposition from Holkar, another powerful military clan in the alliance.
Thus, Scindia