Introduction

In 1526 Ẓahīr al-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur (888–937/1483–1530) successfully invaded north India and founded the Mughal empire (932–c. 1152/1526–c. 1739) (see Map 6). Bābur, as he is generally known from his personal name – meaning leopard or tiger – was a Turco-Mongol, Ḥanaf ī Sunnī Muslim native of western Central Asia. He was descended from two Central Asian conquerors. These were the Barlas Turk Temür (736–807/1336–1405), known in Persian as Tīmr-i leng, ‘Tmr the lame’, or in European parlance Tamerlane, and Chinggis Qan (c. 563–625/c. 1167–1227), or in Persian spelling Chingiz Khan. As a patrilineal descendant of Temür he thought of himself in ethnic, social and dynastic terms as a Turk and a Timurid, but he also revered his matrilineal Mongol connections traced through Chinggis Khan’s second son Chaghadai. Raised as an observant Sunn Muslim in the lush Farghāna valley east-south-east of Tashkent, Bābur was also born into the Naqshbandī Sufi order, a doctrinally conservative but politically active devotional order long connected with Temür’s descendants. Bābur both wrote and spoke Turkī, the language common to most contemporary Turks and Mongols, but like many other well-educated men of the region he also knew Persian, the lingua franca and dominant literary language of the Iranian plateau and the cities of Central Asia and north India in the early modern era.