READING HALL DOORS OF WISDOM

"THIRD MILLENNIUM LIBRARY"

BABAR

CHAPTER X

SAMARKAND

1510-1514 A.D.

In the midst of this uneventful interval, Babar was suddenly called to action. A messenger arrived at Kabul in the winter of 1510 with a letter from Khan Mirza. It related how Shah Ismail, the new ruler of Persia, founder of the imperial Safavi line of Shahs, had fought and conquered Shaibáni Khan, and how the Uzbegs were flying from Khurasán over the Amu to Kunduz. The passes were blocked with snow, but Babar heeded it not. He was once more inspired with the dream of his life, the dream of empire on Timur’s throne; mere obstacles of ice and snow were nothing to one spurred on by

Ambition, the desire of active souls,

That pushes them beyond the bounds of nature

And elevates the Hero to the Gods.

The recovery of a lost Eden was before his eyes, and he set on at once to join forces with the Persians, and give the final blow that should crush the great oppressor of his house. He did not then know that after the fatal battle near Merv, Shaibáni was smothered among a heap of dying men and horses, and his head was presented to Shah Ismail, who had the skull set in gold for a drinking cup. In spite of this calamity, the Uzbegs had no thought of evading a battle with Babar, whatever they might have done had the Shah himself been at the front. Hamza Sultan, one of their chiefs, marched to meet him, but the two armies missed each other on the way, and each arrived at the other’s camping-ground only to find it deserted. It was a game of cross-purposes, and each suspecting some insidious ruse on the part of the other, and being totally misinformed as to their respective strengths, beat a hasty retreat, thanking trod for a merciful escape.

The Uzbeg power was still very strong in Transoxiana; though Shaibáni was dead, his veteran captains still led the tribes; and Babar could not venture to attack them until he was reinforced by a body of Turkman troops sent to his support by the Persian Shah. The enemy, still greatly superior in numbers, courted the issue of battle, and Babar withdrew at his top speed to a strong position in the mountain passes towards Abdara, where he awaited their attack. The battle took place early in 1511. “At midnight news came that the Uzbegs were advancing in full force; the commanders announced this simultaneously to the whole army, and up to daybreak every man was busy getting his arms ready. About sunrise our pickets came in and reported that the Uzbeg army was approaching. Thereupon the Emperor mounted his horse and rode to the top of some rising ground”

And from their tents the Tartar horsemen filed

Into the open plain.

The enemy were deploying on the plain, and the only road by which they could approach was in a ravine between two hills. They preferred to climb one of the hills, rather than risk being shut up in the gorge. One of their chiefs led 10,000 men to the assault. Khan Mirza was given the post of honor, and he hurried to meet the climbing squadrons. The furious charge of the Uzbeg horse bore down every one before it, and they had almost reached the Mirza himself, when an opportune reinforcement saved the day.

It was the boy Haidar who was thus proudly able to reward his benefactor. Babar had brought him most reluctantly from Kabul, only at his piteous entreaty not to be left behind; on the way a number of Haidar’s hereditary retainers had joined him, and these veterans Babar had hurriedly dispatched to the rescue of Khan Mirza. Haidar himself he kept at his side—you are still too young for such business he said—and one can imagine the eager joy of the young prince as he watched beside his patron and saw his men, his very own followers, rallying the Emperors vanguard, and driving the enemy down the hill. It was a glorious moment for him, and when one of his own people brought the first prisoner to the Emperor, and Babar said, “Inscribe the name of Mirza Haidar upon the first trophy” he was radiantly happy.

The battle raged all day on the left wing; but when it grew dusk, and the enemy began to fall back, in order to pitch a camp near water, Babar’s men seized the moment of confusion, and rushed down in hot pursuit, shouting “Hai! Hai!” at the top of their voices, and charging with reckless fury on the retiring squadrons. The result was a total rout; the generals were captured and killed, and for a whole day the fugitives were hotly pressed.

The end of the Uzbeg domination in Mawarannahr seemed at hand. They abandoned Karshi, they were driven out of Bukhara, they fled from Samarkand into the deserts of Turkistan. With the consent of his ally the Shah, Babar once more mounted the throne of Samarkand, which he had twice before filled. All the inhabitants of the towns of Mawarannahr, high and low, nobles and poor men, grandees and artisans, princes and peasants, alike testified their joy at the advent of the Emperor. He was received by the nobles, while the others were busy with the decoration of the city. The streets and bazars were draped with cloth and gold brocades, and drawings and pictures were hung up on every side. The Emperor entered the city in the middle of the month of Rejeb in the year 917 [October, 1511] in the midst of such pomp and splendor as no one has ever seen or heard of before or since. Never before had his dominions stretched, so wide and far. From Táshkend and Sairam on the borders of the deserts of Tartary, to Kabul and Ghazni near the Indian frontier, in Samarkand, Bukhara, Hisar, Kunduz, and Farghana, Babar was king. He abandoned all thoughts of India, despised his little Afghan throne, which he presented to his brother Nasir; henceforth he resolved to reign in the seat of Timur on the imperial throne of Samarkand.

But the triumph was short-lived. The fates had decreed that, try as he might, Babar should not hold Timur’s scepter. The obstacles were not all from without: they were partly of his own making. In the absence of his autobiographical reminiscences of this critical period, it is difficult to determine his exact position and policy, but from the statements of Haidar and Khwándamír, confirmed in a striking manner by a coin in the British Museum, it is evident that he held the throne of Samarkand as the vassal of Shah Ismail, and that in dress and even in religious doctrine he conformed to the rule of his suzerain. To Babar, who was an easy-going Muslim, too well read in Persian poetry to be shocked at heresy, the change probably meant very little, but to his subjects it represented the sort of effect that incense and monstrance would produce in an “Auld Licht” kirk. For the Shah belonged to the fanatical Shiah sect, abhorred by orthodox Sunnites, whilst the people of Samarkand and Bukhara were the most bigoted Muslims of the straitest orthodoxy to be found outside the holy City of Medina. When they saw their Emperor and his followers going about in the garb of the “red-heads” (Kizilbásh), with the symbolical twelve-pointed cap and its long puggaree of red cloth—the badge of schismatics; when they fingered coins bearing the heretical formulas of the Shiah, and setting Shah Ismail’s name in the place of honor above Babar’s; when they heard the orthodox Caliphs cursed from the pulpit, and saw their holy teachers murdered for steadfast non-juring:—their enthusiasm died away, their loyalty cooled, they lampooned their sovereign’s strange disguise, and they began almost to regret the cruel tyranny of Shaibáni, who might be a devil but was at least an orthodox fiend.

Babar soon found that he had lost the support of his subjects, and a defeat at Kul Malik, where an Uzbeg leader with only 3,000 men repulsed the imperial army of 40.000, compelled him finally to abandon a throne which he dared not defend, and to fly, for the third and last time, from the city of his ambition. He left Samarkand in May, 1512, after a reign, or viceroyalty, of only eight months. In vain the Shah sent him large reinforcements of 60,000 “red-heads” under a savage and relentless general, whose cruelty disgusted his humane ally. Nothing could save him. The Uzbegs were not to be denied. At the last fight (November, 1512) at Ghujduwán or Ghazdiván, taking advantage of every wall and cover, they began to pour forth their arrows from every corner, so that “very soon the claws of Islam twisted the hands of heresy and unbelief, and victory declared for the true faith ... They sent Mir Najm and all the Turkman Amirs [of Persia] to hell” and it cannot be doubted that they deserved their fate.

Babar fled, “broken and crest-fallen” to Hisár. Here the Mongols, turning, as usual, against the weaker side, revolted, attacked his quarters by night, and the Emperor, leaping out of bed, barely managed to escape into the fort. They had made proposals some time before to Said Khan offering to make away with the Emperor in his favor; but ha id had replied that when he was buffeted in the waves of calamity during the hurricane of Shaibáni’s conquests, he had been saved upon the island of Babar’s benevolence, and he could not play so ignoble and ungrateful a part towards his preserver. So rare an example of Mongol gratitude is worth recording; but it did not prevent the revolt of the treacherous tribes­men, who now laid waste the whole province of Hisár, and squandered its wealth and crops and cattle. A terrible famine was the result of their devastating violence, “the living ate the dead, and then fell upon one another”. A pestilence succeeded, and then winter came on with excessive severity; there was a protracted snowfall, till the plains became like hills and the hills like plains; and at last the Uzbegs came to finish the work. They fell upon the Mongols, who threw themselves into the river Surkháb: “most of the wretches passed through the water to the flames of hell; some few escaped; and all those who did not reach the river went to hell by way of the flashing scimitar. Those that survived were taken prisoners, and all the suffering that they had inflicted upon the people in Hisár during a whole year, God Almighty, by the hand of Obaid-Allah Khan, now caused to descend upon them in one hour”.

Babar had watched these calamitous doings from his refuge at Kunduz, whither he had contrived to escape. From the summit of success and wide authority, he was reduced to great distress and even positive want. He had lost his kingdom, and the return of the Uzbegs deprived him even of the chance of recovering the province of Hisár. He might have claimed a suzerain’s right, and taken Badakhshan from Khan Mirza; but he was too generous for that. “He bore the situation patiently, and ... at last despairing altogether of recovering Hisár, he returned to Kabul” in 1513 or 1514l. It was perhaps the bitterest experience of his life. He had barely regained the ancestral throne of Timur, only to lose the respect of his subjects, to be worsted by the enemy, and to see his beloved country harried and destroyed by the Mongols whom he loathed.

Deprived of the last hope of recovering his own land, the banished Emperor turned his eyes eastward. Rejected by his countrymen, Babar might have said with St. Paul, “Henceforth I turn to the Gentiles”

CHAPTER XI

THE INVASION OF INDIA

1519-1524 A.D.