The Bābur-nāma in English (Memoirs of Bābur). Emperor of Hindustan Babur
of Khujand, its siege and its capture by Shaibānī. This capture will have occurred considerably more than a month before the defeat of The Khāns (Sh. N. p. 230).
It is not easy to decide in what month of 908 AH. they went into Farghāna or how long their campaign lasted. Bābur chronicles a series of occurrences, previous to the march of the army, which must have filled some time. The road over the Kīndīrlīk-pass was taken, one closed in Bābur’s time (f. 1b) though now open through the winter. Looking at the rapidity of his own movements in Farghāna, it seems likely that the pass was crossed after and not before its closed time. If so, the campaign may have covered 4 or 5 months. Muḥ. Ṣāliḥ’s account of Shaibāq’s operations strengthens this view. News that Aḥmad had joined Maḥmūd in Tāshkīnt (f. 102) went to Shaibānī in Khusrau Shāh’s territories; he saw his interests in Samarkand threatened by this combination of the Chaghatāī brothers to restore Bābur in Farghāna, came north therefore in order to help Taṃbal. He then waited a month in Samarkand (Sh. N. p. 230), besieged Jahāngīr, went back and stayed in Samarkand long enough to give his retainers time to equip for a year’s campaigning (l. c. p. 244) then went to Akhsī and so to Archīān.
Bābur’s statement (f. 110b) that The Khāns went from Andijān to the Khujand-crossing over the Sīr attracts attention because this they might have done if they had meant to leave Farghāna by Mīrzā-rabāt̤ but they are next heard of as at Akhsī. Why did they make that great détour? Why not have crossed opposite Akhsī or at Sang? Or if they had thought of retiring, what turned them east again? Did they place Jahāngīr in Khujand? Bābur’s missing pages would have answered these questions no doubt. It was useful for them to encamp where they did, east of Akhsī, because they there had near them a road by which reinforcement could come from Kāshghar or retreat be made. The Akhsī people told Shaibānī that he could easily overcome The Khāns if he went without warning, and if they had not withdrawn by the Kulja road (Sh. N. p. 262). By that road the few men who went with Aḥmad to Tāshkīnt (f. 103) may have been augmented to the force, enumerated as his in the battle by Muḥ. Ṣāliḥ (Sh. N. cap. LIII.).
When The Khāns were captured, Bābur escaped and made ‘for Mughūlistān,’ a vague direction seeming here to mean Tāshkīnt, but, finding his road blocked, in obedience to orders from Shaibāq that he and Abū’l-makāram were to be captured, he turned back and, by unfrequented ways, went into the hill-country of Sūkh and Hushīār. There he spent about a year in great misery (f. 14 and Ḥ. S. ii, 318). Of the wretchedness of the time Ḥaidar also writes. If anything was attempted in Farghāna in the course of those months, record of it has been lost with Bābur’s missing pages. He was not only homeless and poor, but shut in by enemies. Only the loyalty or kindness of the hill-tribes can have saved him and his few followers. His mother was with him; so also were the families of his men. How Qūtlūq-nigār contrived to join him from Tāshkīnt, though historically a small matter, is one he would chronicle. What had happened there after the Mughūl defeat, was that the horde had marched away for Kāshghar while Shāh Begīm remained in charge of her daughters with whom the Aūzbeg chiefs intended to contract alliance. Shaibānī’s orders for her stay and for the general exodus were communicated to her by her son, The Khān, in what Muḥ. Ṣāliḥ, quoting its purport, describes as a right beautiful letter (p. 296).
By some means Qūtlūq-nigār joined Bābur, perhaps helped by the circumstance that her daughter, Khān-zāda was Shaibāq’s wife. She spent at least some part of those hard months with him, when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb. A move becoming imperative, the ragged and destitute company started in mid-June 1504 (Muḥ. 910 AH.) on that perilous mountain journey to which Ḥaidar applies the Prophet’s dictum, ‘Travel is a foretaste of Hell,’ but of which the end was the establishment of a Tīmūrid dynasty in Hindūstān. To look down the years from the destitute Bābur to Akbar, Shāh-jahān and Aurangzīb is to see a great stream of human life flow from its source in his resolve to win upward, his quenchless courage and his abounding vitality. Not yet 22,[Pg 185] [Pg 186] the sport of older men’s intrigues, he had been tempered by failure, privation and dangers.
He left Sūkh intending to go to Sl. Ḥusain Mīrzā in Khurāsān but he changed this plan for one taking him to Kābul where a Tīmūrid might claim to dispossess the Arghūns, then holding it since the death, in 907 AH.of his uncle, Aūlūgh Beg Mīrzā Kābulī.
THE MEMOIRS OF BABUR
SECTION II. KĀBUL666
910 AH.-JUNE 14th 1504 to JUNE 4th 1505 AD.667
(a. Bābur leaves Farghāna.)
In the month of Muḥarram, after leaving the Farghāna countryḤaidarābād
MS. Fol. 120. intending to go to Khurāsān, I dismounted at Aīlāk-yīlāq,668 one of the summer pastures of Ḥiṣār. In this camp I entered my 23rd year, and applied the razor to my face.669 Those who, hoping in me, went with me into exile, were, small and great, between 2 and 300; they were almost all on foot, had walking-staves in their hands, brogues670 on their feet, and long coats671 on their shoulders. So destitute were we that we had but two tents (chādar) amongst us; my own used to be pitched for my mother, and they set an ālāchūq at each stage for me to sit in.672
Though we had started with the intention of going into Khurāsān, yet with things as they were673 something was hoped for from the Ḥiṣār country and Khusrau Shāh’s retainers. Every few days some-one would come in from the country or a tribe or the (Mughūl) horde, whose words made it probable that we had growing ground for hope. Just then Mullā Bābā of Pashāghar came back, who had been our envoy to Khusrau Shāh; from Khusrau Shāh he brought nothing likely to please, but he did from the tribes and the horde.
Fol. 120b.Three or four marches beyond Aīlāk, when halt was made at a place near Ḥiṣār called Khwāja ‘Imād, Muḥibb-‘alī, the Armourer, came to me from Khusrau Shāh. Through Khusrau Shāh’s territories I have twice happened to pass;674 renowned though he was for kindness and liberality, he neither time showed me the humanity he had shown to the meanest of men.
As we were hoping something from the country and the tribes, we made delay at every stage. At this critical point Sherīm T̤aghāī, than whom no man of mine was greater, thought of leaving me because he was not keen to go into Khurāsān. He had sent all his family off and stayed himself unencumbered, when after the defeat at Sar-i-pul (906 AH.) I went back to defend Samarkand; he was a bit of a coward and he did this sort of thing several times over.
(b. Bābur joined by one of Khusrau Shāh’s kinsmen.)
After we reached Qabādīān, a younger brother of Khusrau Shāh, Bāqī Chaghānīānī, whose holdings were Chaghānīān,675 Shahr-i-ṣafā and Tīrmīẕ, sent the khatīb676 of Qarshī to me to express his good wishes and his desire for alliance, and, after we had crossed the Amū at the Aūbāj-ferry, he came himself to wait on me. By his wish we moved down the river to opposite Tīrmīẕ, where, without fear [or, without going over himself],677 he had their families678 and their goods brought across to join us. This done, we set out together for Kāhmard and Bāmīān, then held by his son679 Aḥmad-i-qāsim, the son of Khusrau Shāh’s sister. Our plan was to leave the households (awī-aīl) safe in Fort Ajar of the Kāhmard-valley and to take action whereverFol. 121. action might seem well. At Aībak, Yār-‘alī Balāl,680 who had fled from Khusrau Shāh, joined us with several braves; he had been with me before, and had made good use of his sword several times in my presence, but was parted from me in the recent throneless