Tokugawa Ieyasu, that master of patient force, had no problem dealing with these traders. In 1598, the would-be conqueror of China, Hideyoshi, died of fever at forty-seven, leaving a council of regents led by Ieyasu to govern for his five-year-old son. Ieyasu soon slaughtered Hideyoshi’s faction, emerging as shogun of a new government at Edo that later became Tokyo and founding a dynasty that ruled Japan until 1868. The Spanish–Portuguese were already trading through Nagasaki; now the Protestants arrived too. The Dutch and English were initially welcomed by the shogun. In 1600 an adventurous Kentish sailor named Will Adams, a veteran of Drake’s raids, was one of the few survivors of the first VOC flotilla to the east. While the Spanish–Portuguese demanded his execution as a pirate, Adams was taken to Osaka Castle. After winning the favour of Ieyasu himself in an all-night interview, Adams joined his court, learned Japanese, trained as a samurai and advised the shogun on European technology, building him his first European warship. Adams worked against the Spanish and Dutch while advancing the interests of the EIC. The Dutch and English were allowed to keep a trading presence, but in 1628 Ieyasu’s son Hidetada, now shogun, turned against Christianity, expelling Catholic priests and burning fifty-five Catholics. For two centuries, under the Tokugawa shoguns, European access to Japan was limited.
Elsewhere, the VOC campaigns continued with maximum force. In 1618, Coen secured Jakarta (renamed Batavia) on Java, rewarded by the Seventeen with the governor-generalship. The Seventeen demanded the seizure of the spice-rich Banda Islands. ‘To adequately deal with this matter,’ wrote Coen, ‘it’s necessary to once again subjugate Banda, and populate it with other people.’ Over 10,000 indigenous people were killed and others were deported, as the VOC secured a monopoly of cloves and nutmeg. They were equally cut-throat with European competitors, waterboarding and beheading twenty-one English merchants at Ambon.
Wherever the Portuguese had a presence, the VOC attacked these Habsburg outposts: in Taiwan, its troops stormed a Portuguese fort in order to develop its China trade. At the same time, it turned to India. In 1608, the VOC attacked the Portuguese in Coromandel, seized Pulicat and negotiated a concession with the maharajas of Vijayanagara, before approaching the greatest monarch of the east, the new Mughal emperor, Jahangir. Here too they were swiftly followed by the English.*
When the VOC and the EIC approached Jahangir, scion of Tamerlane and Babur, they were courting the ruler of the greatest power on earth. Jahangir, then known as Salim, was the opium-addicted son of Akbar the Great: his father at one point locked him up and made him go cold turkey in a bid to cure the addiction. While Salim remained an addict all his life, it did not restrain his ambitions. In the Tamerlane family, sons and grandsons competed for the crown, and those who lost died: ‘Throne or tomb!’ As Akbar aged, the prince had bid for power, assassinating the vizier Abul-Fazl. Akbar struck back by threatening to leave the empire to Jahangir’s own son, Khusrau.
On 3 November 1605, when the great padishah died (the week of the Catholic plot to blow up Parliament in London), Salim took the name World Seizer – Jahangir – as his son Khusrau rebelled and seized Punjab. Jahangir crushed his son, telling his general, ‘Do whatever you must. Kings don’t have families.’ * Khusrau was paraded on an elephant down an avenue of pikes; his supporters were forced to make obeisance before being anally impaled, ‘the most excruciating punishment’, noted Jahangir. Amazingly, after this the boy plotted again and was blinded.
Jahangir displayed flashes of the Tamerlanian temperament, in both expanding the empire and possessing a streak of cruelty, once killing a waiter for dropping a plate and a huntsman for interrupting his aim. But he was fascinated by art, science and architecture, was influenced by European Renaissance art which he regarded as a scientific instrument – a means to study the world. His painter Abu al-Hasan perfected the flamboyant, exquisite Mughal style for an imperial drug addict who increasingly depended on his wife, Nurjahan.
THE EMPRESSES OF AGRA AND CONSTANTINOPLE: LIGHT OF THE PALACE AND BEAUTIFUL MOON
Nurjahan was born Mihr al-Nisa, daughter of one of Akbar’s ministers, an Iranian who had taken service in India. Jahangir had first met her when she was still married to a reckless paladin who had saved Jahangir from a charging tiger. He gave him the name Sher Afgan – Tiger Tosser. Years later, after Tiger Tosser was dead, Jahangir saw her again.
