In 1494 Babar inherited the kingdom of Farghana from his father, Omar Shaikh, a son of Abu-Said, the great-grandson of the Amir Timur or Tamerlane.

A hundred years had passed since the Barlás Turk, in a series of triumphant campaigns, had made himself master of the western half of Asia, from Káshghar on the edge of the terrible mid-Asian desert, to the cliffs of the Aegean sea. He had driven the Knights of Rhodes out of their castle at Smyrna, and had even marched into India and sacked Delhi. In 1405 he was on his way to subdue China and set all the continent of Asia beneath his feet, when death intervened. Timur’s conquests were too recent, too hasty and imperfect, to permit the organization of a settled empire. They were like a vast conflagration driven before the wind, which destroys the herbage for a while; but when the flame has passed away, the earth grows green again. Many of the princes, who had fled before the blast of Timur’s hurricane, came back to their old seats when the destroyer was departed; and it was only over part of Persia and over the country beyond the Oxus that his descendants maintained their hold when that iron hand was stiff. Even there, a single century witnessed their universal downfall; the fire had only left some embers, which smoldered awhile, but, lacking the kindling and stirring of the great incendiary, finally died out. After that, the sole relic of Timur’s vast dominion was the little kingdom which an exiled prince of his own brave blood set up among the crags and passes of the Afghan hills, whence came the “Great Moghuls” and the glories of Delhi and Agra.

Babar in exile founded a grandiose empire, but Babar in the home of his forefathers was but a little prince among many rivals. Every one of the numerous progeny of Timur was a claimant to some throne. Mawarannahr or Transoxiana—the land of the two great rivers, Oxus and Iaxartes, the Amu and Sir Darya of today—was a cockpit for the jealousy and strife of a multitude of petty princes, who, whether they called themselves Mirzas in Persian, or Khans in Turki, or plain Amirs in Arabic, resembled one another closely in character and ambition. The character was earthly, sensual, devilish; the ambition was to grasp power and wealth, quocunque modo rem, at the sacrifice of kindred, faith, and honor.

Over this crew of scheming adventurers, the King of Samarkand endeavored to maintain some show of authority. This was Sultan Ahmad Mirza, Babar’s uncle, a weak easy-going toper, managed by his Begs or nobles. He represented the central power of Timur’s empire, but he represented a shadow. Further east, from his citadel of Hisar, Ahmad’s brother Mahmud ruled the country of the Upper Oxus, Kunduz, and Badakhshan, up to the icy barrier of the Hindu Kush. A third brother, Ulugh Beg, held Kabul and Ghazni; and a fourth, Babar’s father, Omar Shaikh, was King of Farghana, or as it was afterwards called Khókand. His capital was Andiján, but he was staying at the second city, Akhsi, when happening to visit his pigeons in their house overhanging the cliff, on June 9,1494, by a singular accident the whole building slid down the precipice, and he fell ingloriously to the bottom “with his pigeons and dovecote, and winged his flight to the other world”. Besides these four brothers, Sultan Husain Baikará, a cousin four times removed, ruled at Herat, with much state and magnificence, what was left of the Timurid empire in Khurasán, from Balkh near the Oxus to Astarábád beside the Caspian sea.

These were the leading princes of Timur’s race at the time of Babar’s accession; but they do not exhaust the chief sources of political disturbance. Further east and north the Mongol tribes, still led by descendants of Chingiz Khan, mustered in multitudes in their favorite grazing steppes. Yunus Khan, their chief, who owed his position to Babar’s paternal grand-father, had given three of his daughters in marriage to three of the brothers we have named, and one of them was the mother of Babar. The connection in no degree hampered the Mongols’ natural love of war, and Mahmud Khan, who had succeeded his father Yunus on the white pelt or coronation seat of the tribes, played a conspicuous part in the contests which distracted Babar’s youth. Yet Mahmud Khan, for a Mongol, was a man of sedate and civilized habits, who abhorred the rough life of the tents, and held his court in the populous city of Táshkend, a little north of his nephew’s dominions. His defection sorely galled the Mongol patriots,  but fortunately his younger brother Ahmad Khan had his full share of the national passion for the wastes, and to him was drawn the fealty of the clans who retained their primitive customs in the plains to the east of Farghana. He, too, mixed in the struggles of the time, and like his brother Mahmud fixed his eyes on Samarkand, the stately capital of Timur, whilst both felt the Mongol’s fierce delight in mere fighting.

Besides these chiefs who were entitled, by descent from Chingiz or Timur, to wrangle over their inheritance, there were many minor nobles who had no such title, but, like the Dughlát Amirs of Káshghar and Uratipa—Mongols of blue blood—or the Tarkháns of Samarkand, came of a privileged family, and, if not the rose, were so near it that they often plucked its petals. And beyond these, like a cloud on the horizon, gathered the Uzbeg tribes of Turkistan and Otrár, on the lower Iaxartes—soon to overshadow the heritage of Timur, and under their great leader, Shaibáni Khan, to become the most formidable power on the Oxus,—the one power before which even Babar turned and fled.

In the midst of the confusion and strife of so many jarring interests, the child of eleven suddenly found himself called upon to play the part of king. Of his earlier years hardly anything is known. He was born on the 6th of Muharram, 808, St. Valentine’s ,day, 1483. A courier was at once sent to bear the good news to his mother’s father, Yunus, the Khan of the Mongols, and the grand old chief of seventy years came to Farghana and joined heartily in the rejoicings and feasts with which they celebrated the shaving of Jus grandson’s head. As the ill-educated Mongols could not pronounce his Arabic name—Zahir-ad-dín Muhammad—they dubbed him Babar. At the age of five, the child was taken on a visit to Samarkand, where he was betrothed to his cousin Aisha, the infant daughter of Sultan Ahmad; and during this visit, on the occasion of a great wedding, Babar was sent to pluck the veil from the bride, for good luck. The next six years must have been spent in education, and well spent, for he had little leisure in after years to improve himself, and his remarkable attainments in the two languages he wrote imply steady application. Of this early training we hear nothing, but it is reasonable to suppose that an important part of it was due to the women of his family. The Mongol women retained the virtues of the desert, unspoiled by luxury or by Muhammadanism. They were brave, devoted, and simple; and among the constant references in Babar’s Memoirs to the almost universal habit of drunkenness among the men, we find but one solitary allusion—evidently a reproach— to a woman “who drank wine”. The women of Babar’s Mongol blood clung to him through all his troubles with devoted fortitude, though his Turkish wives deserted him; and their sympathy in later life must have been the result of tender association in childhood. Above them all, his grandmother, Isán-daulat Begum, the widow of Yunus, stood pre-eminent. “Few equaled her in sense and sagacity”, her grandson says; she was wonderfully far-sighted and judicious; many important matters and enterprises were undertaken after her instance. The story told of her when her husband fell into the hands of his enemy reveals a Spartan character. The conqueror had allotted her to one of his officers, though Yunus was living. The Begum, however, offered no objection, but received her new bridegroom affably. The moment he was in her room, she had the doors locked, and made her women servants stab him to death, and throw his body into the street. To the messenger who came from the conqueror to learn the meaning of this, she said: “I am the wife of Yunus Khan. Shaikh Jamal gave me to another man, contrary to law; so I slew him; and the Shaikh may slay me too if he pleases”. Struck by her constancy, Jamal restored her in all honor to her husband, whose prison she shared for a year, till both were freed.

This great lady was a rock of strength to her grandson in the years of his premature kingship. He was at the Pavilion of the Four Gardens at Andiján when the news of his father’s sudden death reached him, in June, 1494. His first thought was to make himself sure of the capital before a brother, an uncle, or some disloyal Beg should take the chance and seize it. He instantly mounted his horse, called a handful of his followers, and rode to the citadel—the vital point to secure. As he drew near, one of his officers caught his rein, and bade him beware of falling into a trap. How could he tell whether the garrison were loyal? He was turning aside to the terrace, to await overtures, when the Begs who held the citadel sent a message of welcome by one of those Khwájas or holy men whose word was as sacred as their influence was profound in the politics of the day. Babar entered the...