READING HALL DOORS OF WISDOM

"THIRD MILLENNIUM LIBRARY"

BABAR

CHAPTER III

SAMARKAND LOST AND WON

1494-1500 A.D.

In reading the story of Babar’s adventures, two reflections at once arise: in no country or period of history was the influence more obvious of the sentiment or “divinity” that “doth hedge a king”, and seldom has a king’s personal character responded more generously to the homage. The long obedience of the patient East set a halo of reverence around the youthful sovereign, without which even his indomitable spirit could scarcely have asserted itself; but this obedience of the dumb animal, this time-honored respect for inherited authority, was transformed among the masses into something like enthusiastic devotion by the brave and noble qualities of the boyish hero. Babar possessed a power of winning hearts, winch stood him in good stead with the many, even when his influence waned among the chiefs.

It seems absurd to treat a child of twelve as if he were a ruler of men, and it would be idle to deny a share in the result to his more mature advisers. But we have seen the characters of some of the men who formed his father’s court and afterwards constituted the “ministry” of the youthful heir, and it is not reasonable to suppose that such men, of their own initiative, could have planned what was demonstrably achieved in Babar’s “teens”. Most of them, as will appear, were corrupt and self-seeking, and the higher their rank and talents the less trustworthy they became. A sufficient bribe, an opening for power or plunder, or the mere prudence that might save their skin, promoted “hedging”, and led them to desert their master in critical emergencies.

Ministers and commanders changed, hesitated, intrigued, forsook him, but Babar remained steadfast. He used their service as long as they yielded it, but if they chose to desert him he had the gift to supply their place. When almost all abandoned him, and none believed in his star, Babar never lost faith. His serene constancy of purpose, his noble fortitude, are the only invariable elements in the vicissitudes of his early life, the one unfailing antidote to the poison of intrigue. Making every allowance for the temporary and often time-serving assistance of his shifty we must admit that, despite his absurd youthfulness, the prime cause of his early successes was Babar himself. After all, a boy in the East has often shown signs of precocious ability. Akbar was not fourteen when he came to the throne; Suleiman the Great was in trusted with high commands in his youth; and Babar was but another example of rapid development.

How little even the best among his officers could be trusted was shown when he had hardly mounted the throne. The pleasant-spoken adept at leap-frog, the delight of the polo-field, Hasan Yakub, who had been made prime minister, almost regent, of the realm, began an intrigue to crown Babar’s younger brother Jahángir, as a readier tool, to his own ambition,—or to that of his fellow-conspirator, the new King of Samarkand. He forgot that he had to reckon with a shrewd old woman. Babar’s grandmother scented the plot, and the agile minister had to take to his heels; on his way to Samarkand he fell in a skirmish, “a sacrifice to his own misdeeds”, shot by a chance arrow by his own men. The episode evidently made an impression on the little king, who seems to have taken his responsibilities seriously, and set himself to live by rule: “This year” ho says, “I began to abstain from forbidden and doubtful meats, and extended my precautions to the knife, the spoon, and the table-cloth. I also seldom omitted my midnight prayers”.

It was a time when a man might well set his house in order. A period of anarchy, worse even than the disorders of the late reign, was at hand. Ahmad Mirzá had been followed at Samarkand by his brother Mahmud, and the change was immediately felt. The new king was a cruel tyrant, the murderer of his own kin, an unbeliever, and a shameless debauchee. Ahmad’s jovial indiscretions were forgotten in face of the frantic orgies of the new court, where buffoons played obscene pranks in the public gaze, and acted in mimicry the disgusting scenes which were too literally enacted in private. The whole city became corrupt; no child was safe; the army was a hotbed of profligacy, and decency was openly defied. Fortunately the new king died in six months; but if morals were relieved, anarchy still rioted in the struggles of his sons and kindred for the throne. Every one sought to grasp whatever he could reach. In 1495 Samarkand was threatened by four separate invasions. Sultan Husain of Herat crossed over from Persia; one son of Mahmud advanced in force from Hisar; another hurried up from Bukhara; and Babar, not to be left out of the race, recovered Asfará and Khojend, and set his face towards the capital. Nothing came of it that year, beyond an agreement which recalls the treaty of Tilsit. Babar and his cousin, Sultan Ali, distrustful of each other, and guarding against surprise, met on horseback in the middle of the river Kohik, and swore to join hands in an attack on Samarkand in the following year.

Accordingly, in May, 1497, Babar marched on Samarkand; his ally did not appear, but this did not discourage him. He pitched his camp near the city, and soon found that the Tájik inhabitants were not indisposed to welcome him. A number of traders and others came from the town, and began buying and betting. One day, about afternoon-prayers, there was suddenly a general hubbub, and the whole of these Muslims were plundered. “Yet such was the discipline of my army that, on my issuing an order that no one should presume to detain any of the things that had been seized, but that the whole should be restored without reserve before the end of the first watch next day, there was not a piece of thread or a broken needle that was not restored to its owner”. Thenceforward Babar had the people on his side. They flocked to his camp, till it rivaled in population the capital itself. But Mahmud’s son Baisanghar made a sturdy defence, and many hot skirmishes took place in the shady Khiyábán beneath the walls. Shaibáni Khan was induced to bring his Uzbegs from Turkistan to relieve the city; but when Babar formed up to receive the attack, the Uzbegs thought better of the adventure and went home. At last Baisanghar, “followed by two or three hundred hungry, naked wretches”, fled from the besieged city, and Babar entered Samarkand in triumph. This was at the end of November, 1497, when Vasco da Gama was finding his way towards Calicut.

The young conqueror rode to the  Garden Palace where the three estates, the nobles, the divines, and the people, paid him homage. He had his heart’s desire; he sat in the throne of Timur, in the seat of Alexander “of the two Horns”. Samarkand, the dream of his life, was his. He must “mark well her bulwarks”, take stock of her treasures; he paced the spreading ramparts himself, and found them 10,600 paces in circuit; he wandered from palace to palace, from pleasaunce to pleasaunce. The whole land, as far as Bukhara, seemed one great garden, full of fruits and crops, and teeming with busy workers. The Kohik watered the north side of the city, that fertilizing stream which is now well named Zar-afshán, “gold-diffusing”; on the south ran the Darghám; frequent canals joined the two. In the demesnes watered by these many streams the Kings of Samarkand had built pleasure-houses, and often they would camp in the fine weather on some soft rich meadow, which they screened from public gaze, and converted for the time into a royal pleasance. East of the city were “Perfect Garden” and “Heart’s Delight”—the Trianon of Tamerlane, adorned with paintings of his Indian wars. In the citadel stood the “Blue Palace” where every sovereign was enthroned, and where deposed kings were sent to their doom; so that “to visit the Guksarái” became an ominous metaphor.

Timur’s mosque stood hard by the Iron Gate; skilled masons and sculptors from Hindustan and Persia and Asia Minor had set their hands to the building, and the colossal inscription from the Koran over the gate testified to the orthodoxy of the “Scourge of God”. Near the stone fort is a college, and here lie the bones of Timur and his descendants, the Kings of Samarkand. Ulugh Beg’s observatory, three stories high, full of the astronomical instruments of the age, overlooked the city from the Hill of Kohik, and in the “Garden of the Alameida” at the foot of this hill, rose the tower of the Forty Pillars, Chihil Sitún, with its hall and open galleries, raised on twisted and fluted columns. In another garden the China House was lined with tiles from Cathay, and the “Echo Mosque” perpetually stirred the wonder of the holiday folk, who could not fathom its mysterious reverberations. The gardens of Samarkand, with their wealth of melons, apples, pomegranates, and above all the Sáhibi grapes, were famed far and wide; and the industries of its populace were exported to all lands. Each trade had its own bazar, and the best paper in the world and the finest crimson stuns were to be found in its warehouses.

For just a hundred days Babar reveled in the delights of his beautiful city, and then he lost it. His troops had counted on a handsome booty, but they found a starving town. “Samarkand”, he wrote, “had been taken after a hard and trying siege of seven months. On its capture, indeed, the soldiers took plenty of spoil; but the rest of the country had joined me or Sultan Ali of its own accord, and of course had not been given over to plunder... Samarkand was in so distressed a state when we took it that we had to supply the inhabitants with seed-corn and food to help them to carry on till the harvest. How could one levy taxes from so exhausted a land? My troops were thus brought to much distress, and I had nothing to give them. They began to think of home; they deserted one by one... All the Mongols deserted; and at last Ahmad Tambal himself [a leading Beg, who had been highly honored and rewarded] took himself off and left me”. Babar found himself almost alone, with but a thousand followers; to add to his misfortunes he fell ill. For four days he was speechless, and took no nourishment; only his attendants moistened his tongue with a piece of wet cotton. Meanwhile Tambal and the other deserters had openly revolted and set up Prince Jahángir on the throne of Farghana. Letter after letter was brought to Samarkand entreating Babar to come to the rescue of Andiján, where his mother and grandmother were closely besieged by the rebels. At last he was sufficiently recovered to set out; but he had barely reached Khojend when he heard that the governor of Andiján, believing his sovereign dead, had surrendered the city. A messenger, who had been incautiously admitted to Babar’s room at Samarkand during his illness, had found him speechless, and returning to Andiján, had naturally reported mm to be in the very article of death. Deprived, as they thought, of their king, the garrison made terms with the enemy. They had even signalized their pact by hanging Babar’s envoy, the holy Khwája Kázi, over the gate of the citadel. It was an act of sacrilege, the martyrdom of a saint :

“I have no doubt” says Babar, “that Khwája Kázi was a saint. What better proof could be had than the single fact that in a short time of all who were concerned in his murder not a trace or vestige remained?. They were absolutely extirpated. He was a wonderfully brave man—which is no mean proof of saintship. Other men, brave as they may be, have some little nervousness or trepidation in them : the Khwája had not a particle of either”.

Not was this the worst; as soon as Babar had left Samarkand, Sultan Ali occupied it. His kingdom had vanished at both ends. “For the sake of Andiján  I had lost Samarkand, and I found I had lost the one without saving the other”.

He made many attempts to recover both, but at first utterly in vain. He induced his uncle, Mahmud Khan (who had an eye on Farghana for himself), to march at the head of his Mongols to his support. The Khan, a poor soldier and worse general, but ever ready to do something, however futile, arrived before Akhsi, where he came to an understanding with the rebels, and turned back again. It was Babar’s last hope, and now he saw his own small army melting away. The Begs, captains, and troopers, many of them, had wives and children at Andiján; they saw no chance of our regaining it; and great and small, gentle and simple, to the number of seven or eight hundred men, left me altogether... Only two hundred or so of all ranks, good and bad, stuck to me, choosing voluntarily a life of exile and hardship. After the brief triumph at Samarkand the contrast was too bitter even for his buoyant nature: I became a prey to melancholy and vexation” he writes; “I was now reduced to a sore distressed state, and wept much”.

He was now no king at all. His only possession was the little town of Khojend; all the rest was in the hands of his enemies. Happily they had spared his family, and his mother and his brave old grand­mother now rejoined him. It was not in him to give way to despair: “Filled as I was by the ambition of conquest and broad sway, one or two reverses could not make me sit down and do nothing” 

                What though the field he lost,

All is not lost—the unconquerable will,

And courage never to submit or yield.

He went to Táshkend and borrowed Mongol troops from the Khan, with which he surprised and captured Nasúkh, some forty miles from his little capital. In his worst troubles he was never so sad that he found no comfort in the gifts of nature, and with one of those naive touches which make his Memoirs so real, he notes that when he took Nasúkh “it was the season when the melons were ripe”, those delicious Ismail Shaikhi melons, with a “yellow skin, mottled like shagreen” —“a wonderful delicate and toothsome melon” he adds. His force was too small to hold his conquest, and he was obliged regretfully to abandon it, but still the success cheered him, and he returned to Khojend in better heart. It soon became clear, however, that he could not go on living there. The town was too small to support even his two hundred followers; a mere Beg, he says, would not think it enough to maintain his retinue. To burden the inhabitants with himself and his small army was out of the question. His first plan was to borrow a village from the Dughlát ruler of Uratipa, and from that center to subdue some of the mountain strongholds, half-way between Khojend and Samarkand. But this was on his cousin Sultan Ali’s land, and he soon received peremptory notice to quit. So he buried among the Ailák hills, not knowing where to lay his head.

It may seem strange that with so many kinsmen he should have had no refuge to turn to; but, as the Turkish proverb has it, “Kingship knows no kinship” and his relations perceived in him a rival more distinctly than a distressed cousin. On the north he had tried his uncle, the Khan, and found him wanting. Sultan Ali had forgotten his cousinship in the satisfaction of possessing Samarkand, which Babar had won for him. To the east and south the cities were held by the man whom he abhorred above all mankind. This was Khusrau Sháh, a Kipchák Turk, who had been Mahmud Mirzá’s chief minister, and after his master’s death did as he pleased with the eastern part of the kingdom, about Hisar and Kunduz, up to the Hindu Kush. Other men found Khusrau liberal and generous, but Babar had an invincible dislike to him. “Though he prayed regularly”, he writes, “and abstained from forbidden foods, he was of a black heart and vicious, of mean understanding and slender abilities, a perjured traitor. For the sake of the brief and fleeting pomp of this vain world, he blinded one and murdered another of his benefactor’s sons, and made himself accursed of God, abhorred of men, and meet for shame and execration till the day of final retribution”. Khusrau had put out the eyes of Masud, the son of his old master Mahmud, and after proclaiming another son, Baisanghar (the same whom Babar had driven out of Samarkand), king at Hisar, he murdered him; though he had known both the youths from their infancy. “Everyday” thundered Babar, “every day to the day of judgment, may a hundred thousand curses light on the head of the man who plans or does treachery so black; let all who hear of this deed of Khusrau Shah pour out curses on him; for he who hears of such work and curses not is himself accursed”. Yet, like most tyrants, Khusrau was a coward: Babar despised him with his whole soul. “In spite”, he says, “of his many and populous dominions, in spite of his army of five thousand men and his ample materials of war, he had not the pluck to face a barn-door fowl”. Shaibáni Khan used to say he could frighten Khusrau away with a wave of his hand, “like a fly from a platter”

To go to Khusrau was manifestly impossible, and there was no one else left. So Babar devoured his melancholy among the Ailák shepherds. Whilst he was meditating one day, “perplexed and distracted with the hopeless state of his affairs” a holy man, a friend of happier days, but now an exile and wanderer like himself, came and prayed and wept with him. That very afternoon a horseman appeared at the bottom of the valley. He came with a message that brought the prince to his feet in a moment. Ali Dost, who had surrendered Andiján to the rebels, and had been rewarded with the government of the important city of Marghinán, sent to pray his sovereign’s forgiveness, and offered to deliver up to him the city he governed, and to serve him faithfully till death. His conscience pricked him, and like many another he loved his young king when self-interest did not tempt him too much.

Babar did not hesitate an instant; no man was more prompt in his decision than tins boy of fifteen. It was already sunset, but he started at once. All night and next day till noon he rode without drawing rein; half a day’s rest for the horses, and then they were off again at midnight, riding all day till dark; and next morning Marghinán was seen about four miles on. Then for the first time it occurred to him that he had no warranty for Ali Dost’s good faith : the man “had stickled at no crime” and might easily play him false. It was like Babar to run his head into such a difficulty; he acted first, and thought afterwards. But it was now too late to weigh risks:—— “We had passed three days and three nights without rest, and had come a hundred miles without a stop— a pardonable exaggeration—neither man nor horse had any strength left; there was no possibility of retreat, nor any refuge to retreat to; having come so far, on we must go. Nothing happens but by God’s will”. So on they went, and were rewarded by a loyal welcome from the repentant governor. Babar and his two hundred and forty men were once more within strong walls. It was all he needed, whence to move the whole kingdom.

The governor of Marghinán was indeed but the index to a general revulsion of feeling throughout Farghana. The country was groaning under the tyranny of the rebel Begs, and longed for a prince of the old stock. Even the enemy’s soldiers began to desert to Babar; the hill tribes mustered to his ox­tails; Akhsi itself opened its gates to his officers. In vain the rebels sent a relieving party to hold the citadel of Akhsi. They missed the landing-place in the dusk, and were cut to pieces by the royalists, who stripped their mounts and, plunging bare-back into the river, made short work of the boats. The citadel new the white flag. On this Andiján also declared for Babar, in June, 1499; Kasan followed:—Farghana once more obeyed its lawful king.

The rebellion was scotched, however, not strangled. Babar had hardly recovered his kingdom when he did as foolish a thing as a restored exile could devise. Among his supporters were some thousands of Mongols, deserters from Tambal, and these men were a constant thorn in his side. They looted the villages, murdered and outraged the peaceful inhabitants, and gave trouble in every way. The people implored the king to deliver them from these scoundrels, and, moved by one of his imprudent impulses, he gave orders that the Mongols should make restitution. The measure would have been practicable only in a settled country with a strong army; but in Farghana these Mongols were themselves the army, and to coerce them was at that time impossible. The immediate consequence was that four thousand Mongols mutinied and went over to the rebels. Babar repented too late. “It was a senseless thing”, he wrote afterwards, “to exasperate so many men with arms in their hands. In war and statecraft a thing may seem reasonable at first sight, but it should be weighed and considered in a hundred lights before it is finally decided. This ill-judged order of mine was in fact the ultimate cause of my second expulsion from Andiján”

Reinforced by these Mongols, Tambal, the rebel leader, took the offensive. Babar scoured the country to beat up recruits, and collected vast quantities of siege materials, scaling-ladders, túras (ot siege shields), picks and spades. Tambal twice attacked Andiján, and was beaten off; the king went out in search of him towards Uzkend, and took the fort of Mádu on the way. After this the two armies lay facing each other for a month or more. Babar made an entrenched camp, protected by a zariba of brushwood, and posted his vedettes carefully. There were frequent skirmishes, and at last Tambal was forced to give battle. It was the young king’s first set field, and he won a slight victory, pursuing and looting the enemy. It could not have been a serious defeat for Tambal, since we find the two forces constantly skirmishing all through the winter. Babar hutted his troops in cantonments near Núsh-áb, and the excitements of war alternated with the pleasures of the chase. It was “capital hunting-ground” he says, “and good cover for game. Near the river Ilámish, in the jungle, are mountain goats, buck, and wild pig in abundance. In the smaller jungle, scattered in clumps, we found plenty of jungle-fowl and hares. The foxes here are swifter than anywhere else. Whilst in these winter quarters I hunted every two or three days. First we beat up the larger forests for mountain goat and buck, which we chased, and then we hawked in the small jungle for jungle-fowl, or shot them with forked arrows”.

The war, such as it was, grew more and more languid. The king gained no important advantage; his troops grew weary, and insisted on returning home. He had to beat a retreat to Andiján, where no was forced by his officers to accept terms. The kingdom was divided: Babar was to keep the Andiján bank of the Sir, including Uzkend; and his brother Jahángir, the tool of Tambal, was to hold the Akhsi bank. Prisoners were exchanged, and each retired to his capital.

The fifteenth century had ended disastrously for Babar. He had lost Samarkand, had been driven into exile, harassed. by a powerful rebellion, opposed by his brother, deserted by an army, hampered by discontented officers, and had after all only recovered a part of his kingdom, to hold it at the pleasure of his too powerful nobles. The treaty of the spring of 1500 marks low water in his fortunes; but he had not yet sounded the lowest depths.

CHAPTER IV.

SECOND CONQUEST OF SAMARKAND

1500-1501