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The shah was a master at playing family politics with his neighbours. To the west, he won a fortress and 1.2 million florins from Suleiman. In return he allowed Selim and a team of Tongueless to slip into Persia and strangle Bayezid and his four sons.^* To the east, he was playing a different game, helping the fallen emperor of India, Humayoun, son of Babur, scion of House Tamerlane, to get back his Indian realm – in the hope that he would convert to Shiism and make India a grateful client state. Instead he helped restore the greatest ruler of India since Ashoka.

THE PRUDENT KING AND THREE ENGLISH QUEENS

Humayoun’s son Akbar had been brought up in Kabul by Babur’s sister, but when the shah lent Humayoun a regiment of cavalry to help retake India, the boy joined his father as they galloped towards Delhi. The invasion force of 5,000 Persians and Afghans, led by a tough Afghan paladin, Bairam Shah, was a tiny army to take on a sub-continent. In exile, Humayoun had imbibed the Persianate culture that was to be such an intrinsic part of the Mughal style. An opium-sampling bibliophile like many of the family, he fell from his library ladder and met a book lover’s death. Emperor Akbar appointed Bairam as his vakil – premier – until retiring him in 1562. Increasingly, he consulted his former wet nurse, the loyal and capable Maham Anga, to guide him, overpromoting her teenaged son Adham Khan, who had grown up with Akbar. When his foster brother Adham dared to cross him, Akbar unleashed his inner Tamerlane: in front of his court, he smashed him in the face, shouting ‘You sonofabitch,’ then flung him off a balcony. Adham survived, so Akbar ordered him to be carried upstairs and defenestrated him again, breaking his neck. ‘You did well,’ Adham’s mother said, though the ‘colour had left her face’.

Akbar had taken power with Persian horse archers, but he built the empire with Ottoman muskets and cannon, soon manufacturing his own. Akbar and the House of Tamerlane were now conquerors of India. Akbar’s building of towers of Indian heads was a sign of predatory conquest if ever there was one: a Rajput maharana named Pratap typically called him a ‘vile Turk’ invader. Akbar was at war for twenty years, first approaching enemies in massive hunts, accompanied by a thousand cheetahs and escorted by his armies – ‘hunting another kind of wild elephant’ as his minister put it, a ritual that often brought submission. If that did not work, he deployed his Mongol horse archers, war elephants and the latest artillery. He himself was a crack shot with his favourite gun called Sangram (guns and swords were named). Using his cannon, in 1556 Akbar first retook Delhi and Agra, then Lahore and Punjab and, after 1558, Rajputana, one by one breaking the Rajput grandees, led by the maharana of Mewar, Udai Singh, builder of the exquisite lacustrine city Udaipur. In February 1568, when Udai’s fortress Chittorgarh fell, Akbar slaughtered 30,000 people, displaying heads on the battlements. Most Rajputs submitted: he befriended Man Singh, raja of Amber, appointing him a mansabdar of 7,000,^* calling him farzand (son) and marrying his sister. His Rajput marriages led to a fusion of Tamerlanian and Rajput lineages with Sanskritic and Persian cultures. Thanks to his mastery of imperial powerplays, the conquest dynasty became rooted in India.

Then Akbar swung south-west to seize Gujarat – the coastal sultanate which, via its entrepôt Surat, linked India to European trade – and Ottoman military supplies. He granted the Portuguese, who had arrived in India before Babur, rights to Goa. In 1573, when he stormed the capital Ahmedabad, Akbar celebrated by building more towers of heads. Gujarat trade made the dynasty a global mercantile power. Then the padishah swerved eastwards and northwards, taking Bengal and Kashmir.

Clean-shaven, except for side whiskers, lean, tall, athletic with long eyelashes, Akbar looked like a Mongol, and his black radiant eyes were said to ‘hurt you with their brightness’. He was secretive – he ‘guards over his motives and watches over his emotions’ and ‘never wastes time’, using a water clock to ‘cherish time’, convinced that ‘Idleness is the root of evil.’ He loved to test his fate by riding elephants in musth (their season of heightened aggression), ‘intentionally riding murderous elephants so that if I’ve done something displeasing to God, may that elephant finish us’. He lived dangerously, playing nocturnal polo with specially designed luminous balls and hunting riskily: he was gored in the testicles by an antelope. He was also wounded in the groin fighting in Gujarat, giving him a slight Tamerlanian limp. In 1564, an assassin shot him in the shoulder with an arrow. Security was paramount. Akbar was a consummate deployer of poison, either smeared on the cuffs of a robe presented by the emperor or else offered personally by his own hand in a folded betel leaf.