Babar E-Book

Stanley Lane Poole

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 239

Beschreibung

Babar is a short biography of the first Mughal emperor.

Das E-Book Babar wird angeboten von Charles River Editors und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
khan; mughal; moghul; emperor; tamerlane; free; biography

Leseprobe

Introduction

 THE chief authority for Babar’s life is his own Memoirs or Commentaries, the Wakai or Tuzak-i-Bábary. The English translation by Erskine and Leyden, and Pavet de Courteille’s French version, are both cited, but not always verbatim. The blanks in the Memoirs are to some extent filled by notices in the Tarikh-i-Rashidi, a history of the Mongols in Central Asia, written by Babar’s cousin, Mirza Haidar, and completed within seventeen years after the Emperor’s death : this important work has been admirably translated and edited by Professor E. Denison Boss and the late Consul-General N. Elias (1895). The Tabakat-i-Babari of Shaikh Zain-ad-dín is little more than an inflated paraphrase of the later portions of the Memoirs. Babar’s daughter, Gul-badan, who survived her father, also left some interesting Memoirs, which remain in MS. in the British Museum. The Shaibáni-náma of Muhammad Salih gives the rhapsodical view of an enemy, and Mirzá Iskandar’s history throws light upon Babar’s relations with Shah Ismail; on which the coins of the period also bear evidence, as interpreted in the late Professor R. Stuart Poole’s Catalogue of Persian Coins in the British Museum (1887). Farishta, and Abu-1-Fazl (in the Akbar-náma) base their narratives upon the Memoirs, with little addition of much consequence, and there are but few supplementary notices in Badáóni and other writers extracted in Elliot and Dowson’s great History of India as told by its own Historians. Erskine made excellent use of most of the available materials in the first volume of his History of India (1854), a most scholarly and profound work. Mr. H. G. Keene has also treated the subject ably in his Turks in India (1879). Essays relating to Babar have been published by Silvestre do Sacy, Teufel; and also by Mr. H. Beveridge, to whom, through Sir W. W. Hunter, I am indebted for bibliographical information. Unfortunately there was no European traveller who visited Babar’s court either in Farghana, or Kabul, or Agra, and we are thus deprived of the advantage of a western estimate of his person and character.

The map is based upon several sources : my own map of mediaeval India, published in my Catalogue of Indian Coins in the British Museum; Mr. Elias’s admirable map of Central Asia in the Tarikh-i-Rashidi; Sir H. Yule’s map in Wood’s Oxus; Waddington’s map prefixed to Erskine’s translation of Babar’s Memoirs; and my map of Western Asia in the Historical Atlas edited by my brother (Oxford, 1899).

The portrait is from the MS. in the British Museum, and though probably not earlier than the end of the sixteenth century, doubtless represents a tradition, and probably copies an earlier miniature. The British Museum possesses a magnificent copy of the best Persian translation of the Memoirs, illustrated by a series of sixty-eight exquisitely beautiful pictures of scenes in Babar’s life, painted chiefly by Hindu artists of the time of Akbar, some of whom are mentioned by Abu-1-Fazl in the Ain-i-Akbari.

S. L. P.

TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN, May, 1899.

CHAPTER I. Introduction

“In the month of Ramadan of the year eight hundred and ninety-nine [June, 1494], I became King of Farghana”. Such are the opening words of the celebrated Memoirs of Babar, first of the Moghul Emperors of Hindustan.

Babar is the link between Central Asia and India, between predatory hordes and imperial government, between Tamerlane and Akbar. The blood of the two great Scourges of Asia, Chingiz and Timur, mixed in his veins, and to the daring and restlessness of the nomad Tatar he joined the culture and urbanity of the Persian. He brought the energy of the Mongol, the courage and capacity of the Turk, to the listless Hindu; and, himself a soldier of fortune and no architect of empire, he yet laid the first stone of the splendid fabric which his grandson Akbar achieved.

His connection with India began only in the last twelve years of his life. His youth was spent in ineffectual struggles to preserve his sovereignty in his native land. His early manhood, passed in his new kingdom of Kabul, was full of an unsatisfied yearning for the recovery of his mother country. It was not till the age of thirty-six that he abandoned his hope of a restored empire on the Oxus and Iaxartes, and turned his eyes resolutely towards the cities and spoils of Hindustan. Five times he invaded the northern plains, and the fifth invasion was a conquest. Five years he dwelt in the India he had now made his own, and in his forty-eighth year he died.

His permanent place in history rests upon his Indian conquests, which opened the way for an imperial line; but his place in biography and in literature is determined rather by his daring adventures and persevering efforts in his earlier days, and by the delightful Memoirs in which he related them. Soldier of fortune as he was, Babar was not the less a man of fine literary taste and fastidious critical perception. In Persian, the language of culture, the Latin of Central Asia, as it is of India, he was an accomplished poet, and in his native Turki he was master of a pure and unaffected style alike in prose and verse. The Turkish princes of his time prided themselves upon their literary polish, and to turn an elegant ghazal, or even to write a beautiful manuscript, was their peculiar ambition, no less worthy or stimulating than to be master of sword or mace. In some of the boldly sketched portraits of his contemporaries which enliven the Memoirs, Babar often passes abruptly from warlike or administrative qualities to literary gifts; he will tell how many battles a king fought, and then, as if to clinch the tale of his merits, he will add that he was a competent judge of poetry and was fond of reading the Sháh Náma, yet had such a fist that “he never struck a man but he felled him”. Of another dignitary he notes regretfully that “he never read, and though a townsman he was illiterate and unrefined”; on the other hand a “brave man” is commended the more because he “wrote the nastalik hand”, though, truly, “after a fashion”. Wit and learning, the art of turning a quatrain on the spot, quoting the Persian classics, writing a good hand, or singing a good song, were highly appreciated in Babar’s world, as much perhaps as valor, and infinitely more than virtue. Babar himself will break off in the middle of a tragic story to quote a verse, and he found leisure in the thick of his difficulties and dangers to compose an ode on his misfortunes. His battles as well as his orgies were humanized by a breath of poetry.

Hence his Memoirs are no rough soldier’s chronicle of marches and countermarches, “saps, mines, blinds, gabions, palisadoes, ravelins, half-moons, and such trumpery”; they contain the personal impressions and acute reflections of a cultivated man of the world, well read in eastern literature, a close and curious observer, quick in perception, a discerning judge of persons, and a devoted lover of nature; one, moreover, who was well able to express his thoughts and observations in clear and vigorous language. “His autobiography”, says a sound authority, “is one of those priceless records which are for all time, and is fit to rank with the confessions of St. Augustine and Rousseau, and the memoirs of Gibbon and Newton. In Asia it stands almost alone”. There is no doubt a vast deal of dreary chronicle in the Memoirs, much desultory trifling, some repetition, and needlessly minute descriptions of secondary characters and incidents; the first part is infinitely better than the end; but with all this, the shrewd comments and lively impressions which break in upon the narrative give Babar’s reminiscences a unique and penetrating flavor. The man’s own character is so fresh and buoyant, so free from convention and cant, so rich in hope, courage, resolve, and at the same time so warm and friendly, so very human, that it conquers one’s admiring sympathy. The utter frankness of self-revelation, the unconscious portraiture of all his virtues and follies, his obvious truthfulness and fine sense of honor, give the Memoirs an authority which is equal to their charm. If ever there were a case when the testimony of a single historical document, unsupported by other evidence, should be accepted as sufficient proof, it is the case with Babar’s Memoirs. No reader of this prince of autobiographers can doubt his honesty or his competence as witness and chronicler.

Very little is known about the mode in which they were composed. That they were written at different dates, begun at one time and taken up again after long intervals, as leisure or inclination suggested, is to be inferred from the sudden way in which they break off, generally at a peculiarly critical moment, to be resumed without a word of explanation at a point several years later. The style, moreover, of the later portions is markedly different from that of the earlier, whilst the earlier portions bear internal evidence of revision at a later date. The natural (though conjectural) inference is that the Memoirs were written at various dates; that the earlier part was revised and enlarged after Babar’s invasion of India, though memory failed or time was wanting to fill the gaps; and that the later part remains in its original form of a rough diary because its author died before he had leisure or energy to revise it. The Memoirs were written in Turki, Babar’s native tongue. A copy of the work was in his cousin Haidar’s hands, who probably obtained it during his visit to India within ten years of its author’s death. Another copy, which appears to be the original of all the existing manuscripts, was transcribed from an original in Babar’s own handwriting by his eldest son, the Emperor Humayun, in 1553, as is stated in an interpolation by Humayun in the body of the work. That the son was a faithful copyist is evident, for he has not suppressed several passages in which his own conduct is censured by his father.

The Memoirs were more than once translated from Turki into Persian; notably, with scrupulous accuracy, by the illustrious Mirza Abdu-r-Rahim, son of Bairam Khan, in 1590, by the desire of the Emperor Akbar. The close agreement, even in trifling details, of the various Turki and Persian manuscripts preserved in several collections, shows that the original text has been faithfully respected, and such variations as exist do not affect the essential accuracy of the document. Even the gaps in the narrative unfortunately occur at the same places and for the same intervals in all the manuscripts, Turki and Persian, with the exception of two or three short but interesting passages which one Turki text alone presents. This text was printed at Kazan by M. Ilminski in 1857, and was translated into French by M. Pavet de Courteille in 1871. Long before this, a translation into vigorous English, by John Leyden and William Erskine, based upon a collation of Persian and Turki manuscripts, and enriched with a valuable introduction and copious notes, appeared in 1826, and has ever since held its place as the standard version. It represents the Persian more than the Turki text, but how little the two differ, and how trifling are the emendations (save in Turki words and names) to be gained from the Turki version, may be seen by a comparison of the French and English translations.

This comparison of two versions founded upon several manuscripts written in two languages brings us to the remarkable conclusion that Babar’s Memoirs have come through the ordeals of translation and transcription practically unchanged. We possess, in effect, the ipsissima verba of an autobiography written early in the sixteenth century by one of the most interesting and famous men of all Asia. It is a literary fact of no little importance. The line of Emperors who proceeded from Babar’s loins is no more. The very name of Mongol has lost its influence on the banks of Iaxartes; the Turk is the servant of the Russian he once despised. The last Indian sovereign of Timur’s race ended his inglorious career an exile at Rangoon; a few years later, the degenerate descendants of Chingiz Khan submitted to the officers of the Tsar. The power of Babar’s dynasty is gone; the record of his life, the littera scripta that mocks at time remains unaltered and imperishable.

CHAPTER II. Farghana 1494

In 1494 Babar inherited the kingdom of Farghana from his father, Omar Shaikh, a son of Abu-Said, the great-grandson of the Amir Timur or Tamerlane.

A hundred years had passed since the Barlás Turk, in a series of triumphant campaigns, had made himself master of the western half of Asia, from Káshghar on the edge of the terrible mid-Asian desert, to the cliffs of the Aegean sea. He had driven the Knights of Rhodes out of their castle at Smyrna, and had even marched into India and sacked Delhi. In 1405 he was on his way to subdue China and set all the continent of Asia beneath his feet, when death intervened. Timur’s conquests were too recent, too hasty and imperfect, to permit the organization of a settled empire. They were like a vast conflagration driven before the wind, which destroys the herbage for a while; but when the flame has passed away, the earth grows green again. Many of the princes, who had fled before the blast of Timur’s hurricane, came back to their old seats when the destroyer was departed; and it was only over part of Persia and over the country beyond the Oxus that his descendants maintained their hold when that iron hand was stiff. Even there, a single century witnessed their universal downfall; the fire had only left some embers, which smoldered awhile, but, lacking the kindling and stirring of the great incendiary, finally died out. After that, the sole relic of Timur’s vast dominion was the little kingdom which an exiled prince of his own brave blood set up among the crags and passes of the Afghan hills, whence came the “Great Moghuls” and the glories of Delhi and Agra.

Babar in exile founded a grandiose empire, but Babar in the home of his forefathers was but a little prince among many rivals. Every one of the numerous progeny of Timur was a claimant to some throne. Mawarannahr or Transoxiana—the land of the two great rivers, Oxus and Iaxartes, the Amu and Sir Darya of today—was a cockpit for the jealousy and strife of a multitude of petty princes, who, whether they called themselves Mirzas in Persian, or Khans in Turki, or plain Amirs in Arabic, resembled one another closely in character and ambition. The character was earthly, sensual, devilish; the ambition was to grasp power and wealth, quocunque modo rem, at the sacrifice of kindred, faith, and honor.

Over this crew of scheming adventurers, the King of Samarkand endeavored to maintain some show of authority. This was Sultan Ahmad Mirza, Babar’s uncle, a weak easy-going toper, managed by his Begs or nobles. He represented the central power of Timur’s empire, but he represented a shadow. Further east, from his citadel of Hisar, Ahmad’s brother Mahmud ruled the country of the Upper Oxus, Kunduz, and Badakhshan, up to the icy barrier of the Hindu Kush. A third brother, Ulugh Beg, held Kabul and Ghazni; and a fourth, Babar’s father, Omar Shaikh, was King of Farghana, or as it was afterwards called Khókand. His capital was Andiján, but he was staying at the second city, Akhsi, when happening to visit his pigeons in their house overhanging the cliff, on June 9,1494, by a singular accident the whole building slid down the precipice, and he fell ingloriously to the bottom “with his pigeons and dovecote, and winged his flight to the other world”. Besides these four brothers, Sultan Husain Baikará, a cousin four times removed, ruled at Herat, with much state and magnificence, what was left of the Timurid empire in Khurasán, from Balkh near the Oxus to Astarábád beside the Caspian sea.

These were the leading princes of Timur’s race at the time of Babar’s accession; but they do not exhaust the chief sources of political disturbance. Further east and north the Mongol tribes, still led by descendants of Chingiz Khan, mustered in multitudes in their favorite grazing steppes. Yunus Khan, their chief, who owed his position to Babar’s paternal grand-father, had given three of his daughters in marriage to three of the brothers we have named, and one of them was the mother of Babar. The connection in no degree hampered the Mongols’ natural love of war, and Mahmud Khan, who had succeeded his father Yunus on the white pelt or coronation seat of the tribes, played a conspicuous part in the contests which distracted Babar’s youth. Yet Mahmud Khan, for a Mongol, was a man of sedate and civilized habits, who abhorred the rough life of the tents, and held his court in the populous city of Táshkend, a little north of his nephew’s dominions. His defection sorely galled the Mongol patriots,  but fortunately his younger brother Ahmad Khan had his full share of the national passion for the wastes, and to him was drawn the fealty of the clans who retained their primitive customs in the plains to the east of Farghana. He, too, mixed in the struggles of the time, and like his brother Mahmud fixed his eyes on Samarkand, the stately capital of Timur, whilst both felt the Mongol’s fierce delight in mere fighting.

Besides these chiefs who were entitled, by descent from Chingiz or Timur, to wrangle over their inheritance, there were many minor nobles who had no such title, but, like the Dughlát Amirs of Káshghar and Uratipa—Mongols of blue blood—or the Tarkháns of Samarkand, came of a privileged family, and, if not the rose, were so near it that they often plucked its petals. And beyond these, like a cloud on the horizon, gathered the Uzbeg tribes of Turkistan and Otrár, on the lower Iaxartes—soon to overshadow the heritage of Timur, and under their great leader, Shaibáni Khan, to become the most formidable power on the Oxus,—the one power before which even Babar turned and fled.

In the midst of the confusion and strife of so many jarring interests, the child of eleven suddenly found himself called upon to play the part of king. Of his earlier years hardly anything is known. He was born on the 6th of Muharram, 808, St. Valentine’s ,day, 1483. A courier was at once sent to bear the good news to his mother’s father, Yunus, the Khan of the Mongols, and the grand old chief of seventy years came to Farghana and joined heartily in the rejoicings and feasts with which they celebrated the shaving of Jus grandson’s head. As the ill-educated Mongols could not pronounce his Arabic name—Zahir-ad-dín Muhammad—they dubbed him Babar. At the age of five, the child was taken on a visit to Samarkand, where he was betrothed to his cousin Aisha, the infant daughter of Sultan Ahmad; and during this visit, on the occasion of a great wedding, Babar was sent to pluck the veil from the bride, for good luck. The next six years must have been spent in education, and well spent, for he had little leisure in after years to improve himself, and his remarkable attainments in the two languages he wrote imply steady application. Of this early training we hear nothing, but it is reasonable to suppose that an important part of it was due to the women of his family. The Mongol women retained the virtues of the desert, unspoiled by luxury or by Muhammadanism. They were brave, devoted, and simple; and among the constant references in Babar’s Memoirs to the almost universal habit of drunkenness among the men, we find but one solitary allusion—evidently a reproach— to a woman “who drank wine”. The women of Babar’s Mongol blood clung to him through all his troubles with devoted fortitude, though his Turkish wives deserted him; and their sympathy in later life must have been the result of tender association in childhood. Above them all, his grandmother, Isán-daulat Begum, the widow of Yunus, stood pre-eminent. “Few equaled her in sense and sagacity”, her grandson says; she was wonderfully far-sighted and judicious; many important matters and enterprises were undertaken after her instance. The story told of her when her husband fell into the hands of his enemy reveals a Spartan character. The conqueror had allotted her to one of his officers, though Yunus was living. The Begum, however, offered no objection, but received her new bridegroom affably. The moment he was in her room, she had the doors locked, and made her women servants stab him to death, and throw his body into the street. To the messenger who came from the conqueror to learn the meaning of this, she said: “I am the wife of Yunus Khan. Shaikh Jamal gave me to another man, contrary to law; so I slew him; and the Shaikh may slay me too if he pleases”. Struck by her constancy, Jamal restored her in all honor to her husband, whose prison she shared for a year, till both were freed.

This great lady was a rock of strength to her grandson in the years of his premature kingship. He was at the Pavilion of the Four Gardens at Andiján when the news of his father’s sudden death reached him, in June, 1494. His first thought was to make himself sure of the capital before a brother, an uncle, or some disloyal Beg should take the chance and seize it. He instantly mounted his horse, called a handful of his followers, and rode to the citadel—the vital point to secure. As he drew near, one of his officers caught his rein, and bade him beware of falling into a trap. How could he tell whether the garrison were loyal? He was turning aside to the terrace, to await overtures, when the Begs who held the citadel sent a message of welcome by one of those Khwájas or holy men whose word was as sacred as their influence was profound in the politics of the day. Babar entered the citadel as king, and they all set to work without delay to put the fortress into a state of defence.

It was not a moment too soon. The little kingdom was menaced on three sides by invasions bequeathed by his hasty-tempered father. Two uncles were already on the march to seize the throne: they had agreed that their quarrelsome brother, Omar Shaikh, had become unbearable, and though he had meanwhile made his singular exit from life through the dovecote, they did not change their plans. Ahmad Mirzá advanced from Samarkand; his brother-in-law Mahmud Khan from Táshkend. Uratipa, Khojend, and Marghinán, in rapid succession opened their gates to Ahmad, and he was close to Andiján at the very time when Babar got into the castle. Resistance seemed hopeless, and the boy sent an embassy of sub-mission, protesting that he was his invader’s “servant and son” and begging to be allowed the rank of viceroy over the land where by right he was king. The overture was harshly repelled, and the advance continued. fortunately for Babar, a river lay between, a black and turbid stream with a slimy bottom. On the narrow bridge the enemy pressed too eagerly, and many fell over and were drowned. The croakers recalled a disaster that had happened once before to an army on that very bridge in just the same way. Panic seized the superstitious troopers, and they could not be induced to move forward. The horses, too, were done up, and sickness broke out in the camp. Ahmad was no man to face an emergency. He made terms with Babar, retaining the cities he had taken, and ingloriously made his way homewards, only to die on the road.

Mahmud Khan, meanwhile, had annexed the northern town of Kasán and was laying siege to Akhsi, the second city of the kingdom. Here he met with an unexpected resistance: the fort was stoutly defended by the Begs of Babar’s father, and Mahmud, after several assaults, retired to his own country. He was more celebrated for beginning than for achieving a campaign. A third invader, the Dughlát Amir of Káshghar and Khotan, seized Uzkend, and built a fortress to secure it; but Babar’s men had little trouble in dislodging him.

The danger was over, but not the loss. Babar was now indeed king of Farghana, but his kingdom was shrunk to the eighty miles of rivage between Andiján and Akhsi. The rest had to be won back from his powerful neighbours. For many years he never lost sight of this object. His dearest ambition was, not only to recover his father’s realm, but to seat himself at Samarkand on the throne of his great ancestor Timur. This was the grande idée to which he devoted his youth and early manhood.

To those who imagine the country beyond the Oxus to be a desert dotted with ruins buried in sand, it may seem an idle dream. They forget that the great provinces, known to the Greeks and Romans as Sogdiana, Margiana, and Bactriana, were a favored part of Alexander’s empire, where more than one Alexandria marked the conqueror’s path. Samarkand, Bukhárá, and Balkh were famous cities of antiquity, and throughout the middle ages they were renowned for wealth and commerce, and not less for learning and the arts. The Persian Sámánids had held their splendid court there; Timur had enriched Samarkand with the spoils of his universal conquests; he had brought skilled craftsmen and artists from the uttermost parts of Asia to build him stately pleasure domes and splendid mosques; and his capital became one of the most beautiful as it had long been one of the most cultivated cities of the East. Science had found a home in the Oxus province since Fárábi the philosopher and Fargháni the astronomer pursued their researches there in the ninth century; and Timur’s grandson, Ulugh Beg, carried on the tradition by building the observatory at Samarkand where his famous star tables were drawn up for the perpetual information of astronomers. The incomparable Avicenna himself was a Bukháriote.

Centres of learning are usually centres of plenty. Men of science do not burrow like conies in the desert rocks: they live where the toils of learning may be alleviated by the comforts that attend wealth. The country about the two great rivers and their tributary streams was one of the most fertile in Asia. Farghana itself was prodigal of fruit and laden with heavy harvests. Abundantly watered by the Sir, and sheltered on all sides from the outer world by fostering hills— save where a gap to the south-west opened out towards Samarkand—the little province, smaller than Ireland, was a garden, an orchard, a vineyard. Grapes and melons ripened to perfection at Andiján, innumerable mills plashed in the watercourses and ground the grain yielded by the generous earth. The beautiful gardens of Ush, a day’s march to the south, were gay with violets, tulips, and roses in their seasons, and between the brooks the cattle browsed on the rich clover meadows. At Marghinán, a little to the west, the third city of Farghana, grew such apricots and pomegranates that a man would journey from afar to taste them : many years after he was banished from his land, Babar recalled with a sigh the flavor of the dried apricots stuffed with almonds which were so good at Marghinán. The luscious pomegranates of Khojend were not to be despised, but the melons of Akhsi—who could resist the melons of Akhsi, which had not their equal in the world, not even in the spreading melon fields of Bukhara? If he  thought of the apricots of Marghinán in the days of his exile, Babar suffered the dreams of a Tantalus when he remembered the lost joys of the melons of Akhsi. But there was more sustaining food than melon-pulp among the hills and woods of his native land. The pastures nourished herds of cattle, sheep and goats cut their devious tracks on the mountain sides, pheasants, white deer, hares, wild goats, gave sport to the hunter and his hawk. Farghana indeed was a land of milk and honey, an oasis of plenty between the deserts of Khiva and the Takla Makán. The snow-capped hills that clipped it tempered its climate, and during the heats of summer welcomed its inhabitants to their cool retreats.

The people with whom the child-king was to dwell were of mixed race and varied character. The old Persian sons of the soil still formed the mass of the population, and tilled the earth for their masters; but they were of so little political account that they were known as “strangers”, tájiks