to have occupied his throne; and indeed revolutions, depositions, murders, and usurpations seem to have succeeded each other with a frequency unusual even in Asiatic governments."[1]
Here, then, were times that could hardly fail to make a historian of any soldier of fortune, who happened to have a taste for recording the events of his own life. Baber, the first of the Moghuls of India, and our author's cousin, especially answered to this description, and left behind him a picture of his age which is almost, if not quite, unique among the works of Asiatic authors. He has been represented as at once a soldier, a historian, and an autobiographer; and his kinsman, Mirza Haidar, may justly be described in the same way. Baber, however, was a better autobiographer than Mirza Haidar, and he was incomparably a greater soldier, as history proves. But, on the other hand, his cousin may be fairly acknowledged the better historian. While Baber made history incidental to his own memoirs, the reverse was the case with Mirza Haidar. The Mirza wrote the history of his race and family with a definite purpose; and when he came to his own days, he wove in his personal adventures as those of an actor and participator in the events he was recording—making the one illustrate the other; so that it may, with truth, be said that his life belongs to his history.
Though they differed in remote origin, Mirza Haidar was, to all intents and purposes, of the same nation and country as Baber; yet he wrote in Persian, while the latter wrote in the Chaghatai Turki (as the modern name is), current then, as now, all over Central Asia. Baber was a descendant of Amir Timur (or Tamerlane), and was, consequently, on one side of his family, more a Turk than a Moghul, for Timur belonged to the Barlás, a Turki tribe of distinguished lineage. Following the common usage of the day, however, Mirza Haidar would have called Baber a "Chaghatai," while the latter would have spoken of his cousin as a "Moghul." Mirza Haidar came of the Dughlát tribe—a sub-division, or sept, of the true Moghuls of Chaghatai's line—and one that was accounted about equal, in point of nobility, to the Barlás. By the end of the fifteenth century the members of all the Moghul and Chaghatai ruling families had become much scattered, and mixed in blood, through frequent intermarriages with aliens. Many of them had, for several generations, lived in Turki countries, where they had become
- ↑ Cathay and the Way Thither, p. 523.
