The World полностью

Although he was illiterate, possibly dyslexic, he patronized intellectuals, led by his vakil and ideologist Abul-Fazl and his brother the poet Faizi, luminaries of his Nine Jewels.

Akbar believed he was a sacred emperor, and incorporated not only Islamic and Persianate traditions but also their Turkic and Rajput counterparts. He appeased Hindus, abolishing the jizyah tax and the slaughter of cows, questioned Islam itself and envisioned an eclectic religious hybrid Din-i Ilahi, Divine Faith, that encompassed Islam, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism. As the Islamic millennium got closer, he called himself the Mahdi or Renewer of the Second Millennium. In 1585, he minted coins that read ‘Allahu akbar jalla jalaluhu’, which would usually mean ‘God is great’ but could also mean ‘Akbar is God’, as he toyed with substituting himself for Muhammad. He pulled back from his own apotheosis, but projected the sanctity of Mughal monarchy, promoting himself as Tamerlanian padishah, Islamic saintly ruler and Hindu chakravartin. He adopted the Hindu tradition of appearing daily at sunrise on the balcony of the Agra Fort: this jharokha darshan, watched by crowds, became an essential rite of Mughal kingship.

As energetic sexually as in all things, he insisted on having the wives of his amirs if he fancied them, and his demands for new girls were ‘a great terror … in the city’. Like all the steppe monarchs, however, he consulted wise women in the family, particularly his senior wife and first cousin, Ruqaiya.

Amid all this success lurked stress: Akbar suffered ‘melancholy’. ‘My heart is oppressed by this outward pomp,’ he said. ‘I experienced an internal bitterness, my soul was seized with exceeding sorrow.’ In 1573, when he was thirty-one, drunkenly discussing the courage of Rajput heroes who rushed at spears until pierced through, he suddenly fixed his blade to the wall and rushed at it, only stopped when he was tackled by his Rajput brother-in-law Man Singh.

Like Genghis’s khans, the Tamerlanians were prone to alcoholism: two sons died of drink; his heir Salim (later Emperor Jahangir) was addicted to opium, wine and arrak. Understandably the girls in the zenana were avid consumers of these intoxicants and became so addicted that Akbar had visitors searched. Sometimes Akbar fell asleep during discussions with the Jesuits while drinking post, opium water. Later, he enjoyed tobacco, brought by Portuguese visitors. Nicotine was not the only American commodity pouring into India: American gold and silver enriched Akbar’s kingdom. He promoted trade: as Abul-Fazl put it, ‘By wise regulations, revenue is preserved.’ Thanks to growing cities, good harvests, rising wages and the success of home workshops specializing in weaving (powered by female artisans who could combine raising families with their skilled work), India – with a population of 150 million, of whom Akbar ruled 110 million – produced a quarter of the world’s textiles, as well as pepper, coffee, opium, tea, spices, ivory and saltpetre. Akbar encouraged Portuguese and later English traders because they paid in gold and silver, which made Tamerlanian India rival Ming China as the richest kingdom on earth.

Yet all these steppe monarchies had a fatal flaw: family. The tournament of sons designed to select the most able also ensured murderous bouts of family contention that could bring down an empire. As Akbar tried to manage his sons, the exhausted Christian padishah, Charles V, the source of all that gold and silver, delivered a masterclass on how to handle a succession.

Charles was having a breakdown: he ‘occupies himself day and night adjusting and synchronizing his clocks; he often wakes his valets to help him dismantle and reassemble them’. Craving order amid chaos, he wanted them to tick together.

Yet in the midst of his breakdown, Charles fixed Philip’s next marriage. Henry VIII had died, leaving a puny son, Edward VI, who, despite his youth, was a masterful Protestant. Dying at fifteen of TB, it was he personally who diverted the succession from his Catholic half-sister Mary to his first cousin once removed Jane Grey, Protestant daughter of the duke of Suffolk and great-granddaughter of Henry VII. Queen Jane, sixteen years old, became England’s first queen regnant: after thirteen days, she was overwhelmed by support for Mary, daughter of a formidable king and a popular Spanish queen. Mary executed Edward’s minister, swung England back towards Rome and was delighted with the prospect of marrying the dashing Philip, now king of Naples and Sicily.^* The Catholic marriage – designed to echo Ferdinand and Isabella’s in 1469 – was popular in England. But Mary and her ministers used an anti-Catholic plot as a pretext to behead her rival, ex-queen Jane.