'Babur, the Tiger;: First of the great Moguls' by Harold Lamb
<b>Babur, the Tiger;: First of the great Moguls</b>
Author: Harold Lamb
Publisher: Doubleday
ASIN: B0007DPKWS
Publication date: 1961
Number of pages: 336
Format / Quality: PDF
Size: 19.4 Mb
Language: English
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FOREWORD
Babur was born in the year 1483 of the Christian calen- dar, in an obscure upland valley of central Asia. Except for that valley, his family possessed nothing but a twofold tradition of power. For, on his mother's side, the boy was descended remotely from Genghis Khan, master of the Mongol Ulus, and for a brief space of most of the known world On his father's side he was descended more directly from Timur-i-lang, the Iron Limper, known to Europeans as Tamerlane, the Turkish conqueror. In his blood there was, accordingly, a tincture of the sagacious savagery of the Mongol race, and, much more forcibly, the energy of the Turks. This dual Turko-Mongol heritage derived, however, from a still more remote way of life that of the nomads. For uncounted ages the nomadic tribes of north-central Asia had sustained themselves by their animal herds, aided by their peculiar skill at hunting en masse. Their roads had been the thin watercourses; their land tenure, the good pasturages in the deserts; their refuge, the forested mountains. They had migrated over snow passes with all their pos- sessions of sheep, horses, and collapsible, felt-covered yurts, seeking such refuge or better pasturages. At times, under an Inspired leader, these moving clans federated to form a destructive army of all able-bodied mm mounted on the enduring steppe ponies, armed chiefly with the double curved saddle bows,with chain mail or quilted leather jackets for protection. At times these nomad hosts would be driven out o their desert limbos by drought, by the pres- sure of stronger tribal entities, or simply by lust for the wealth of the outlying town-dwelling civilizations. This emergence of the predatory nomads occurred with something of the regularity of a natural law. In isolated western Europe the appearance of waves of Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Turks, and Mongols had been accepted as the visitation of the anger of God, or the breakout of the pent-up tribes of "Gog and Magog."
[spoiler]In Babur's case this ancestral way of life was much more
than a memory. The nomadic instinct might be vestigial in
him, yet living nomads became his lifelong enemies.
For these migrants of central Asia had developed peculiar
abilities. Their unceasing struggle against a hard climate
on bleak lands developed hardihood and initiative in
meeting dangers; the necessity of protecting weaklings of
the families, and the habitations and herds, at all times
made them skilled organizers. It is no more than a clich6
to say that often in war the hardened horse bowman of mid-
Asia proved to be the master of the softened city dweller.
It is seldom observed that this mastery came from a sharp-
ened intelligence and adaptability to circumstances. One
of the earliest missionaries from Rome remarked that in war
the "Tartars*' were less barbaric than the men-at-arms of
Christian Europe. Hardly more than a generation before
Babur, the far-wandering Othmanli Turks had captured
almost impregnable Constantinople less by physical hardi-
hood than by superior strategy in bridging the waters of the
Bosporus, in fortifying their bridgeheads, and using superior
siege artillery.
Nor is it easily realized that the early victorious khans
and sultans of central Asia proved to be highly effective
organizers of their conquests. Within two generations of
the vast outward sweep under Genghis Khan, the demoli-
tion of the outer cities gave way to rebuilding. In China,
which the Mongols called the Great Yurt, Kubilai Khan,
its ruler, hardly decreed a "stately pleasure dome/' but he did
build a residence within a hunting preserve, and restore
the trade routes, as Messer Marco Polo testified. Skilled
organizers, the Mongol khans had a sense of world respon-
sibility. Their Yuan dynasty in China headed an expanding
empire; the ilkhans in Persia governed lands hitherto highly
disorganized, by scientific measures, from their progressive
city center of Tabriz. Later on, the Othmanlis established
a solid dominion the "Ottoman Empirescentered upon
Constantinople, which had stagnated before their coining.
At the same time Kambalu and Tabriz and Constantinople,
which had been isolated from each other in the previous
age, gained touch in trade as well as diplomacy. The ensiling
peace, sometimes called the Mongol peace, was the result
of able government more than increased military power.
So had been the pax Romana a thousand years before the
coming of the Mongols.*
While the iron rule of Rome had been based on a rigid
system of laws, the rule of the Mongol khans had at first
only the law of the Yasa, or nomad code, articulated by
Genghis Khan. The great conqueror envisioned the suprem-
acy of his nomad aristocracy "all those who dwell in felt
yurts" over the subjected agricultural populations. The
force of this aristocracy of the steppe dwellers would lie,
as he conceived, in the invincible army of the ordus, or
hordes; the control would reside in his own descendants,
the ALtyn Uruk. The sole advisers of this ruling Golden Clan
would be the noyons, the batde-wis,e commanders. But the
great conqueror had not foreseen that his descendants
would become educated by the outer world.
* The rise of the Mongols has been narrated in the author's Genghis Khan
and The Earth Shakers.
Within two generations many o them had made their
last migration to the outer cities of wealth. It is aptly said
that before Kubilai Khan, his grandson, had finally con-
quered China of the degenerating Sung Dynasty, China
had conquered Kubilai, Religion also played a part in the
cleavage of the Golden Clan, At the time of their conquests,
the Turko-Mongols had been pagans, tolerant of, or indif-
ferent to, the religions of the outer world. By degrees the
Yuan monarchs became converted to Buddhism and the
ilkhans of Persia to Islam. In fact, by Babur's day the strict
Law of Islam had replaced the Yasa throughout the vast
region from the icebound plateau of Tibet to the far waters
of the Volga. There the commandment of Muhammad had
defeated the rule of Genghis Khan.
So in the outer civilizations the heirs of the conqueror
became isolated from each other, and the steppe aristocracy
of Mongol noyons and Turkish tarkhans slowly disinte-
grated within the cultured society of settled landowners,
merchants, and their philosophers and religious mentors.
Again the natural law of conflict of surviving nomads against
agricultural societies resumed its course. Because two of the
areas of Eurasia given as appanages by Genghis Khan to
his sons remained nomadic, holding more or less to the Yasa.
For the sweep of Turko-Mongol conquests had wrought
great changes in the outer kingdoms, even as far as the
cities of Kievan Russia, and the borderland of feudal Po-
land-Lithuania to the waters of the Danube. But it brought
about little change within the Turko-Mongol homelands.
There the inhabitants remained nomadic, destroying town
settlements but not the caravan cities and resuming the
endemic conflict of one tribal group against another for
mastery.
Far to the northwest of Babur's valley, the desolate
steppes from the Ural River to the Irtish had been the
appanage of Juchi, eldest and most errant of the conqueror's
sons. Under Batu, son of Juchi, this remote ordu had become
known to Europeans as the Golden Horde, perhaps from
the splendor of its pavilions in the encampment moving
along the east bank of the Volga, when Chaucer wrote:
At Sana, in the Londe of Tartarie
There dwelt a King that werried Russie.
Its khans of the House of Juchi remained isolated from the
other khanates, remote from outer civilizations except that
of the tude Russian stockaded towns. Islamization of these
dark steppes proceeded only slowly. When the Gqlden Horde
broke apart in centrifugal strife, portions retreated east
from the Volga, becoming known as the Kipchak, or desert
folk. Aboitf the time the Othmanlis took Constantinople,
however, a new hard core formed among the Kipchak peo-
ple, calling itself the Uzbek, an old Turkish word signifying
Self -Chieftains. The word is somewhat obscure. But the host
of the Uzbek mounted bowmen pressed hard upon the
lands of the House of Chagatai.
Chagatai had bem the second son of Genghis Khan. His
appanage had been the heart of central Asia, above the
Tibetan plateau. It consisted of steppe and deserts rising
to the spine of Asia, where the Thlan Chan joined the
Hindu Kush at the cloudy Pamirs. And it had remained
virtually as nomadic as the steppes of the Uzbeks. Yet islets
of culture endured where the continental trade routes met,
especially around shrines, whether Nestorian Christian or
Islamic. Town centers like Kashgar, Almalyk, and Bishbalik
(The Five Cities), overrun during the first Mongol con-
quest, were being reoccupied by the descendants of
Chagatai. By so doing they went against the ancestral rale
of the Yasa. While they guarded their personal treasures in
the walled cities, they still migrated with their J^ibes from
winter grazing along the rivers to summer jiasturage on
the mountains. These surviving Chagataian khans formed a
rude nobility, ruling more from horseback than from any
throne. They moved in a deep obscurity, having no litera-
ture of their own. They became locked in mutual conflict.
To the east of the great mountain spine, their chief city
was Kashgar, now within the sphere of Chinese influence.
There the country was known as Moghulistan Land of the
Mongols who, in the estimation of the Chinese, were no
better than bandits.
To the west of the barrier mountains, the khans held
themselves to be the true descendants of Chagatai; they
had their citadel in walled Tashkent, the Stone City, out
in the rolling prairies over which the caravans followed the
Great North Road to China where the silk came from. They
held their grazing lands with difficulty against the intru-
sion of pagan Kirghiz and nomadic Kazaks, and they were
fairly in the path of the great Uzbek move to the south.
From this branch of the House of Chagatai, Babur de-
scended through the hardy grandsire, who although mas-
ter of the Stone City, could not pronounce Babur's given
name.
Now, the southwest corner of the appanage of Chagatai
differed in startling fashion from the rest of it. Here fertile
upland valleys dipped to the great plain between two rivers
that flowed into the Aral Sea. And here two ancient cities
formed islands of culture against the nomadic inundation.
Bokhara was renowned for its shrines and academies of
Islam; Samarkand, for its palatial splendor and trade.
Around them an agricultural society survived on irrigated
fields. Along this valley chain between the rivers Amu and
Syr, the Law of Islam had almost replaced the Yasa. And
precisely here the single brilliant Turk, Timur-i-lang, had
arisen at the end of the fourteenth century. Timur had
made Samarkand his citadel and enriched it with the spoils
of his campaigns. This Iron Limper, raising high the stand-
ards of Islam, had led his counterattack against the nomad
forces, scattering the remnants of the Golden Horde of Batu,
and the Chagataian Idians with those of Moghulistan. In his
last years Timur had made Samarkand illustrious, had
scourged the plain of northern India, crushed the victorious
army of the Othmanli sultans, and made the name of
^Tamerlane * dreaded in far-off Europe, He died in 1403
on his way to invade China, where the Yuan Dynasty had
yielded to the glory of the Ming.
Although centered in Samarkand, his brief state had heen
based on the culture of the Persian plateau to the west.
Persian artisans had laid the tiles of its palaces among
gardens, and Persian writers had immortalized the great
conqueror who took no greater title than Amir, or Lord. Nor
was Timur a true descendant of Genghis Khan, whose
name was carved on his tombstone merely to add to his
repute.
After the wars of Timur came the century-long Timurid
renaissance, the most glorious age in the arts of central
Asia. Under a son in Samarkand and a grandson in Herat,
within Khorasan, the brightness held, and artists labored
as in Florence in the west. For nearly forty years of uneasy
peace the Timurid heirs held to the heart of the political
dominion. As late as 1465 a Timurid ruler, Abu Sayyid,
claimed sovereignty from the foothills of the Caucasus to
Kashgar, beyond the mountains. By then the Uzbeks, heirs
of the House of Juchi, had risen to their power as revenants
holding to the Yasa, which the enlightened heirs of Timur
had discarded.
After 1465 the rule of the Timurids disintegrated in strife
among contenders, and the holder of Samarkand, with its
throne, strove weakly to keep a truce between himself and
his brothers. To the southwest, one brother occupied Herat,
where the artists thronged; to the southeast, another brother
held the highlands by the Hindu Kush whence sprang the
great rivers Amu and Syr; to the south, a third brother
seized Kabul in the Afghan lands beyond the barrier of
the Hindu Kush. To the east, a fourth brother, the most
feckless of all, held the farthest valley, Farghana. He was
Babur's father.
It seiemed as if fate, in this downfall of the Timurid
princes, had dealt most unkindly with Babur in that remote
valley, beneath the snow of the great ranges, yet easily
approached from the Stone City, the abode of the heir of
the Mongol Chagatais. Fairly snowed in for most of the
year, th
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