READING HALL DOORS OF WISDOM

"THIRD MILLENNIUM LIBRARY"

BABAR

CHAPTER II

FARGHANA

1494 A.D.

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

Fergana or Farghana

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 (Amu Darya) 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. Mawaránnahr 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 Mirzás 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 Mirzá, 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 Badakhshán, 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 grandfather, 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—Zahír-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 submission, 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 snowcapped 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, much as the Saxons miscalled the ancient Britons “Welsh”. The Tájiks were the hewers of wood and drawers of water for their Mongol and Turkish conquerors. In the towns the same Persian race, under the name of Sarts, formed the trading class, and performed the part of general utility. The ruling race was a mixture of those tribes which from time immemorial have migrated from the central steppes and swept over the lands which other folk had made ready for them. They comprised people of the Turkish nations, Uighurs, Naimans, Karluks, with Mongols proper and Kálmaks. When a Khan conquered another Khan he usually took his daughter or widow to wife, and the result of this constant crossing was the gradual obliteration of the distinctive characteristics of race among the upper classes. Yunus Khan, for example, a Mongol by paternal descent, who ought to have been smooth-cheeked with Mongolian features, was described as having “a full beard and a Tájik face” and doubtless he was one of many similar cross-breeds.

Babar himself was through his mother a grandson of Yunus, and a descendant of the great Mongol Chingiz Khan, but on his father’s side he came down from Timur, the Barlás Turk. The Mongols called him and his kindred “Chaghatais” but he always called himself a Turk, and spoke of the Mongols with superb contempt. The Indian empire of the Great Moghuls had not then restored honor to the name, and the Mongols of the pastoral steppes east and north of Farghana must certainly have appeared an uncouth race to the comparatively polished gentlemen of the towns, who wrote charming Persian odes, and had a horror of the discomforts of the deserts. These town “Turks” (as we must call them, despite their mixed breed) occupied themselves with the pleasures and profits of a governing class. They were intelligent, often cultivated, brave, and energetic; they were also cruel, vicious, and treacherous. As liars they had few equals. They could rarely be trusted if anything was to be gamed by betrayal. The Memoirs contain some spirited portraits of the men among whom Babar spent his early years. We can see his father, Omar Shaikh, almost as clearly as if we had met him: a short “podgy” monarch, with stubbly brown beard, carelessly dressed, and apt to burst his coat strings in moments of energy or repletion; an assiduous toper, taking kindly to malt liquor, and poppy juice and bhang, but hardly steady in nerve after his two regular drinking bouts a week. A strong man, nevertheless, who never struck out but he floored his man; something of a poet, too, who could turn out a fair copy of verses, and delighted in reading the Shah Náma; in character honest to a fault, but hasty in temper and policy, and too ready to change peace for war, and friendship for hatred. “His generosity was large” says his son, and so was his whole soul: he was of a rare humor, genial, eloquent, and sweet in his discourse, yet brave withal and manly. His weakness, besides the bottle, was backgammon.

His court held men of many turns. There was Babar’s tutor, Shaikh Mazíd, a great disciplinarian over others, but himself unbridled in sensual abominations. Khwája Husain was a good-tempered easygoing fellow, of simple habits, who sang a capital song when the wine was going round. He had a genial comrade in Hasan Yakub-Beg, who could reel off an ode, was inimitable at leap-frog, played a good game at polo, and was altogether a frank, good-humored, clever, handy man. They were not all thus, for Ali Majid is described bluntly as “a vicious, treacherous, good-for-nothing hypocrite”; and the Grand Hunts-man, who pretended to sorcery, was a disagreeable, sour-faced, conceited boor, whose vulgarity and insincerity were matched by his meanness and greed of gold. The Great Seal made a pleasing contrast, “a most witty and humoursome personage—but reckless in debauch”. Kambar Ali, once a skinner by trade, seemed to have his wits but skin-deep: “he talked a great deal, and very idly—a great talker can’t help saying foolish things at times—his talents were narrow, and he had a muddy brain”. In spite of this unfortunate peculiarity, Kambar Ali served his uncomplimentary master well at many a pinch.

One of Babar’s best sketches is of his uncle Ahmad, the King of Samarkand, who so nearly swallowed up his nephew’s inheritance. He was a true Turk, “tall, ruddy, and corpulent”, bearded only on the chin, and particular about the lie of his turban, which he always wore in the four-plait fashion with the hitch over the eyebrow. He was scrupulously devout, never omitting the regulation-prayers, even between the decanters, and his veneration for his Khwája or spiritual director was such that he would not think of uncrossing his leg, were it never so cramped, whilst they were engaged in serious discourse. Only once did he break this rule, and then it was found that the king had been sitting by chance upon a bone—some relic of a royal banquet—in sore discomfort. He was not intellectual, one must admit, and did not read at all; for a town-bred Turk he was conspicuously illiterate and unrefined; genius had not been lavish to him: but he had the virtues of his defects, he was a plain honest Turk, a man of few words, just and true in his dealings, faithful to his treaty, and never swerving by a line from his covenant.

His words were bonds, his oaths were oracles,

his heart as far from fraud as heaven from earth.

He was a sportsman, moreover, of rare skill, such as had not been known since Ulugh Beg forgot the intricacies of astronomy in the excitement of the chase. Hawking was his favorite sport, and seldom did his goshawk miss the quarry. He was a famous archer, and a sure marksman when taking a galloping shot at the Mongolian popinjay (a platter set upon a pole). So modest and discreet were his manners that he was never known to let his bare foot peep out from beneath his robes, even in private: yet “he would drink day and night without a break for twenty or thirty days on end”, not indeed in morose solitude, but in full court, toping jovially among his Begs. Then for an equal interval he would abstain, and comfort his stomach with pungent delicacies, to restore its tone. Unfortunately he had no will of his own, and his boon fellows, who were also his ministers, led him as they pleased, so that he found himself plunged into adventures to which his sober judgment—when it was so—would not have committed him. But Ahmad Mirzá’s drinking days were nearly over at the date when this history begins. He died on his way home from his invasion of Babar’s country, and in the struggles that ensued the young prince soon began to play a conspicuous part.