46 INFLUENCE OF POLITICS IN EUROPE AND ASIA

skill of Babar, a Chagatai Tartar, who, with an army of twelve thousand men, overthrew the dominion of the Pathan kings at Delhi and subdued all the northern provinces of India. It had been consolidated and raised to its full height of splendour and power by Akbar, a contemporary of Queen Elizabeth. Four successive em- perors reigned one hundred and fifty-one years, from Akbar 's accession in 1556 to Aurangzib's death in 1707; and as in Asia a long reign is always a strong reign, for a century and a half the Moghul was fairly India's master. The dynasty was foreign by descent and habits; the strength of the government was sustained by constant importation of fresh blood from abroad; the military and civil chiefs were mainly vigorous recruits from Central Asia who took service under the Indian sov- ereigns of their own race and religion. Akbar and his two successors were politic rulers who allied themselves with the princely families of the Hindus, respected up to a certain point the prejudices of the population, and kept both civil and religious despotism within reason- able bounds. The Emperors Jahangir and Shah Jahan were both sons of Hindu mothers; but Aurangzib, the son of Shah Jahan, and the fourth in descent from Akbar, was a Mohammedan by full parentage, and an ardent Islamite by temperament; and after his triumph in the great civil war that broke out among the sons of Shah Jahan, he launched out into a career of perse- cution and ambitious territorial aggrandizement. In the writings of Francois Bernier, a Frenchman who was