REBIRTH 191and lane, orchard and vineyard; I showed civility neither to friend nor
stranger, took no care for myself or others .... "^7 Thus does the future em-
peror expose his vulnerable adolescent passions to us-and yet this is the
fellow who has, twice already, conquered and lost Samarqand.
In the course of his wandering, Babur and his band came over a rise in
the hills and saw a charming city tucked into a crack of a valley below.
Babur fell in love again, this time with Kabul. And Kabul, he tells us, re-
turned his affection: the citizens hated their own ruler and begged Babur
to be their king instead. Does this sound like a conqueror's implausible
propaganda? Maybe so, but I can tell you that Kabul's affection for Babur
lingers to this day. The public gardens he built overlooking the city remain
a favorite park, and his grave up there is still a beloved shrine.
Babur was crowned king of Kabul in 1504, and now he had a base. He
considered and rejected another attempt on Samarqand. He and his advis-
ers decided to head south, instead, as so many other Turko-Mongol con-
querors had done before. Babur entered India with ten thousand men and
the sultan of Delhi met him on the plains of Panipat with one hundred
thousand. Ten to one odds-the stuff of legends! What's more, the sultan
had a thousand elephants, but Babur had an advantage too: firearms. The
new technology trumped the old biology as Babur routed the sultan and
took possession of Delhi. Like the Ottomans and the Safavids, the
Moghuls overwhelmed their enemies because they were fighting spears and
arrows with bullets and cannonballs. The third of the three great Muslim
"gunpowder" empires was now on the map.
The Moghuls, even more than the Safavids, benefited from a series of
long-lived and brilliant rulers. Just six men saw the empire through its first
two hundred years. Most were passionate, romantic, and artistic. At least
three were military geniuses. One was a poor administrator, but his wife
Nur Jahan ruled from behind the throne, and she was the fiery equal of the
best Moghuls-a savvy businesswoman, a poet and patron of the arts, an
extraordinary sportswoman, and one of the most cunning politicians of
her age.
Only one of the six was a dud, and that was Babur's son. It took this
drunkard ten years to lose the entire empire his father had built. While he
was on the run through the mountains of Afghanistan, however, his
beloved wife gave birth to a boy who would become Akbar the Great, the