It was not that he liked India – ‘A country of few charms, its people have no good looks … no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, no musk melons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or cooked food in bazaars, no hot baths,’ and there was ‘remarkable dislike between its people and mine’. But it had been prize enough for Tamerlane – and glory was what he wanted: ‘Give me but fame and if I die, I am content.’ Babur summoned Mongol and Turkic grandees. ‘God’s given us sovereignty in Hindustan,’ he declared, sounding very like those other predators – the Portuguese and Spanish – granted empire by God.*
Babur decided to try Indian food, keeping the cooks of the late sultan, which almost proved a fatal mistake. The mother of the late sultan suborned the cooks to poison Babur’s food. ‘I vomited a lot,’ he wrote to his son Humayoun. ‘I never vomit after meals, not even after drinking. A cloud of suspicion came over my mind.’ Four cooks were tortured and confessed. ‘I ordered the taster to be hacked to pieces, the cook to be skinned alive; one of the women I had thrown under elephants’ feet and another I had shot.’ The sultan’s mother was killed quietly, while Babur understood that ‘He who reaches the point of death appreciates life.’
Babur was challenged by Rana Sanga, a Rajput,* whose 200,000 men marched on Agra, keen to expel House Tamerlane. Babur temporarily renounced booze, pouring out carafes of wine in front of the army. ‘Noblemen and soldiers,’ he said, ‘whosoever sits down to the feast of life must before it’s over drink the cup of death, but how much better to die with honour than live with infamy!’ As they joined battle at Khanua, the soldiers gripped their Qurans. ‘The plan was perfect, it worked admirably,’ noted Babur, whose Ottoman artillery ‘broke the ranks of pagans with matchlock and cannon’ as the soldiers ‘fought with delight’. He celebrated by building towers of skulls like Tamerlane before carving up India with his Turk, Mongol and Afghan henchmen in return for military service. Then he wrote his memoirs, built gardens, smoked opium, quaffed wine (quoting the verse ‘I am drunk, officer. Punish me when I am sober’) and caroused with two Georgian slaves sent by the shah of Persia – ‘dancers with rosy cheeks’. As Babur declined, Humayoun who ruled Kabul fell ill. Babur was heartbroken.
‘You’re a king and have other sons, I sorrow because I have only this one,’ his empress Maham admonished him from the prince’s bedside.
‘Maham,’ he replied, ‘although I have other sons, I love none as I love your Humayoun.’ Babur offered his own life in exchange for his son’s. In December 1530, the twenty-three-year-old Humayoun recovered – as Babur sickened. Babur’s last advice was: ‘Do nothing against your brothers even if they deserve it.’*
Humayoun was ‘brave in battle, ingenious and lively, full of wit’, but he ‘contracted bad habits, such as the excessive use of opium’, and preferred to spend his time in chatter and pleasure, lacking killer grit: his worst insult was just to say ‘You stupid!’ Immediately, he was challenged in all directions, by his brothers, by the Gujaratis, by the Portuguese and more seriously by one of his father’s Afghan generals, who advanced on Agra. In 1541, Humayoun fled westwards into Sind (Pakistan).
On the way he met a half-Persian teenaged girl called Hamida who resisted his courtship, possibly because his prospects were so disastrous, but finally he married her and then with forty retainers they escaped across the blistering Thar Desert. At Umarkot, Hamida gave birth to Humayoun’s first son, who was born on a camel. Humayoun was forced to leave the baby in Kandahar with his aunt Khanzada. She thought the baby looked just like Babur: he would grow up to be Akbar the Great. Humayoun fled to Persia. It looked as if the rule of this conquest dynasty would be no more than a flash in the pan of his arquebusiers. Indeed their victories had been had won thanks to their artillery, a present from the Ottoman sultan, Selim the Grim, who now changed the entire balance of Eurasia.
SELIM – SUNKEN DEEP IN BLOOD
In March 1517, Selim galloped into Cairo, having destroyed the Mamluk sultanate and conquered the entire Arab world, increasing his empire by 70 per cent and giving it, for the first time, an Islamic majority. Grandson of Mehmed the Conqueror, third son of Sultan Bayezid, Selim was lithe, lean and cadaverous, clear-sighted and paranoid, impatient and implacable. His success was founded on his arquebusiers, who could be trained in two weeks; it took a lifetime to master bow and horse. Arquebuses, fired from the shoulder using a crossbow stock, lit by a matchlock and detonated with a new invention, the trigger, were becoming muskets.
