LITMIR.BIZ

666

i. e. with Khusrau’s power shaken by Aūzbeg attack, made in the winter of 909 AH. (Shaibānī-nāma cap. lviii).

667

Cf. ff. 81 and 81b. The armourer’s station was low for an envoy to Bābur, the superior in birth of the armourer’s master.

668

var. Chaqānīān and Saghānīān. The name formerly described the whole of the Ḥiṣār territory (Erskine).

669

the preacher by whom the Khut̤ba is read (Erskine).

670

bī bāqī or bī Bāqī; perhaps a play of words with the double meaning expressed in the above translation.

671

Amongst these were widows and children of Bābur’s uncle, Maḥmūd (f. 27b).

672

aūghūl. As being the son of Khusrau’s sister, Aḥmad was nephew to Bāqī; there may be in the text a scribe’s slip from one aūghūl to another, and the real statement be that Aḥmad was the son of Bāqī’s son, Muḥ. Qāsim, which would account for his name Aḥmad-i-qāsim.

673

Cf. f. 67.

674

Bābur’s loss of rule in Farghāna and Samarkand.

675

about 7 miles south of Aībak, on the road to Sar-i-tāgh (mountain-head, Erskine).

676

viz. the respective fathers, Maḥmūd and ‘Umar Shaikh. The arrangement was made in 895 AH. (1490 AD.).

677

Gulistān cap. i, story 3. Part of this quotation is used again on f. 183.

678

Maḥmūd’s sons under whom Bāqī had served.

679

Uncles of all degrees are included as elder brethren, cousins of all degrees, as younger ones.

680

Presumably the ferries; perhaps the one on the main road from the north-east which crosses the river at Fort Murgh-āb.

681

Nine deaths, perhaps where the Amū is split into nine channels at the place where Mīrzā Khān’s son Sulaimān later met his rebel grandson Shāh-rukh (T̤abaqāt-i-akbarī, Elliot & Dowson, v, 392, and A.N. Bib. Ind., 3rd ed., 441). Tūqūz-aūlūm is too far up the river to be Arnold’s “shorn and parcelled Oxus”.

682

Shaibāq himself had gone down from Samarkand in 908 AH. and in 909 AH. and so permanently located his troops as to have sent their families to them. In 909 AH. he drove Khusrau into the mountains of Badakhshān, but did not occupy Qūndūz; thither Khusrau returned and there stayed till now, when Shaibāq again came south (fol. 123). See Sh. N. cap. lviii et seq.

683

From Taṃbal, to put down whom he had quitted his army near Balkh (Sh. N. cap. lix).

684

This, one of the many Red-rivers, flows from near Kāhmard and joins the Andar-āb water near Dūshī.

685

A garī is twenty-four minutes.

686

Qorān, Surat iii, verse 25; Sale’s Qorān, ed. 1825, i, 56.

687

Cf. f. 82.

688

viz. Bāī-sanghar, bowstrung, and Mas‘ūd, blinded.

689

Muḥ. Ṣāliḥ is florid over the rubies of Badakhshān he says Bābur took from Khusrau, but Ḥaidar says Bābur not only had Khusrau’s property, treasure, and horses returned to him, but refused all gifts Khusrau offered. “This is one trait out of a thousand in the Emperor’s character.” Ḥaidar mentions, too, the then lack of necessaries under which Bābur suffered (Sh. N., cap. lxiii, and T.R. p. 176).

690

Cf. T. R. p. 134 n. and 374 n.

691

Jība, so often used to describe the quilted corselet, seems to have here a wider meaning, since the jība-khāna contained both joshan and kūhah, i. e. coats-of-mail and horse-mail with accoutrements. It can have been only from this source that Bābur’s men obtained the horse-mail of f. 127.

692

He succeeded his father, Aūlūgh Beg Kābulī, in 907 AH.; his youth led to the usurpation of his authority by Sherīm Ẕikr, one of his begs; but the other begs put Sherīm to death. During the subsequent confusions Muḥ. Muqīm Arghūn, in 908 AH., got possession of Kābul and married a sister of ‘Abdu’r-razzāq. Things were in this state when Bābur entered the country in 910 AH. (Erskine).

693

var. Ūpīān, a few miles north of Chārikār.

694

Suhail (Canopus) is a most conspicuous star in Afghānistān; it gives its name to the south, which is never called Janūb but Suhail; the rising of Suhail marks one of their seasons (Erskine). The honour attaching to this star is due to its seeming to rise out of Arabia Felix.

695

The lines are in the Preface to the Anwār-i-suhailī (Lights of Canopus).

696

“Die Kirghis-qazzāq drücken die Sonnen-höhe in Pikenaus” (von Schwarz, p. 124).

697

Presumably, dark with shade, as in qarā-yīghāch, the hard-wood elm (f. 47b and note to narwān).

698

i. e. Sayyid Muḥammad ‘Alī, the door-ward. These būlāks seem likely to have been groups of 1,000 fighting-men (Turki Mīng).

699

In-the-water and Water-head.

700

Walī went from his defeat to Khwāst; wrote to Maḥmūd Aūzbeg in Qūndūz to ask protection; was fetched to Qūndūz by Muḥ. Ṣāliḥ, the author of the Shaibānī-nāma, and forwarded from Qūndūz to Samarkand (Sh. N. cap. lxiii). Cf. f. 29b.

701

i. e. where justice was administered, at this time, outside Bābur’s tent.

702

They would pass Ajar and make for the main road over the Dandān-shikan Pass.

703

The clansmen may have obeyed Aḥmad’s orders in thus holding up the families.

704

The name may be from Turkī tāq, a horse-shoe, but I.O. 215 f. 102 writes Persian naqīb, the servant who announces arriving guests.

705

Here, as immediately below, when mentioning the Chār-bāgh and the tomb of Qūtlūq-qadam, Bābur uses names acquired by the places at a subsequent date. In 910 AH. the Taster was alive; the Chār-bāgh was bought by Bābur in 911 AH., and Qūtlūq-qadam fought at Kānwāha in 933 AH.

706

The Kūcha-bāgh is still a garden about 4 miles from Kābul on the north-west and divided from it by a low hill-pass. There is still a bridge on the way (Erskine).

707

Presumably that on which the Bālā-ḥiṣār stood, the glacis of a few lines further.

708

Cf. f. 130.

709

One of Muqīm’s wives was a Tīmūrid, Bābur’s first-cousin, the daughter of Aūlūgh Beg Kābulī; another was Bībī Zarīf Khātūn, the mother of that Māh-chūchūq, whose anger at her marriage to Bābur’s faithful Qāsim Kūkūldāsh has filled some pages of history (Gulbadan’s

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