Chapter 24 Asia in the Era of the Gunpowder Empires

 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

o Ottoman Government
o Non-Muslims Under Ottoman Rule
o The Zenith of the Ottoman Empire: Suleiman and After

 THE MUSLIM EMPIRES IN PERSIA AND INDIA

 The Safavid Realm The Mughal Empire

 AT THE TIME WHEN Europe slowly began finding its way out of centuries of feudal
disintegration to early statehood and East Asian governments experienced challenges
from both external and internal rivals, Islamic empires in Asia and Africa were
experiencing seemingly endless upheavals.

 The Islamic world did not have a middle age of governmental evolution and
consolidation.

 Instead, destructive wars that set Muslims against Muslims wracked the world of
Islam and contributed much to its slow decline after 1600.
 In Chapters 15 and 16, we looked at how Islam expanded rapidly in the tropical zone
between Spain and India.

 Within remarkably few decades, Arab Bedouin armies carried the message of
Muhammad the Prophet from Mecca in all directions on the blades of their conquering
swords.

 The civilization that sprang from this message and conquest was a mixture of Arab,
Greek, Persian, Egyptian, Spanish, African, and Southeast Asian—the most
cosmopolitan civilization in world history.

 In the thirteenth century, the capital city of the Abbasid caliphs remained at Baghdad,
but by then the Islamic world had become severely fractured into dozens of
competing, quarreling states and sects.

 More devastating still, in that century, the Mongols swept into the Islamic heartland in
central and western Asia, destroying every sign of settled life in their path and
establishing brief rule over half the world (see Chapter 18).

 After their disappearance, the Ottoman Turks gave Islam a new forward thrust.

 By the 1500s, the Ottomans had succeeded in capturing Constantinople and reigned
over enormous territories reaching from Gibraltar to Iraq.

 Farther east and somewhat later, the Safavids in Persia and the Mughals in India
established Muslim dynasties that endured into the early modern age.
 The Ottoman Empire

 The Mongols had smashed the Persian center of Islam in the 1250s, conquered
Baghdad in 1258, and left the caliph as one of the corpses of those who had dared
oppose them.

 At that time, the all-conquering intruders intended to wipe out the rest of the Islamic
states that reached as far as Spain.

 One of these was the Ottoman principality in what is now Turkey, which took full
advantage of the Mongols’ defeat at Ain Jalut to maintain its independence.

 The arrival of the Ottoman Dynasty in Asia Minor and its subsequent rise to the status
of most powerful state in the Islamic world was the partial consequence of two
developments that had preceded it.

 The first of these was the Turkification of the caliphate that had begun as early as the
ninth century CE.

 The nomadic Turkish tribes began migrating from their homelands in the steppes of
central Asia early in that century, and soon, large numbers of them inhabited the
eastern lands of the Abbasid caliphate.

 Faced with increasing challenges to their authority from Kharijites (KAH-ri-jites) and
Shi’ites (SHEE-ites), the Abbasid caliphs were forced to rely on the skills of these
fearsome fighters to help quell revolts.

 Soon, Turkish troops under Turkish commanders were largely staffing the armies of
the caliphate, but the real power resided in Baghdad under the Seljuk sultans (see
Chapter 16).

 Once in power in Baghdad, the Seljuks resumed the Muslim off ensive against the
rejuvenated Byzantine Empire in the eleventh century.
 In 1071, a crucial Seljuk victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert gave
the Turks direct access to Asia Minor for the first time.

 They established the Rum sultanate in eastern Asia Minor and continued their jihad
against the Christian enemies to the west.

 The second important development was the growing importance of the dervish, or
Sufi(SOO-fee), orders in Islam.

 As explained in Chapter 16, many Muslims embraced mystical forms of Islam after the
death of al- Ghazzali (al-gah-ZAH-lee) in 1111 CE.

 Many dervishes/ sufis formed religious associations or brotherhoods (tariqas: tah-

REE-kahs).

 In most cases, these were organized around a central religious figure, or shaykh
(shake), whom the dervishes believed possessed extraordinary spiritual authority and
who was responsible for the spiritual and intellectual direction of his followers.

 Typically, too, the dervish order was organized into grades, much like a secret society
(like the Masons in western Europe), and initiates graduated into higher levels of the
order as they were allowed access to secret knowledge known only to members of
these higher levels.

 The Ottoman Empire began around 1250, when a Turkish chieftain named Osman
(AHS-man)—after whom the dynasty was named—and his group of followers entered
into the service of the Rum sultans of eastern Asia Minor.

 Osman was given a small fiefdom in western Asia Minor to wage jihad against the
Byzantines.

 Thus, the empire began as a ghazi state—that is, one made up of ghazis (GAH-
zees), or frontier warriors, whose express purpose was waging holy war against the
Christians.
 Osman’s tiny state was initially organized around two dervish orders, and besides
being a warlord, the authority of Osman and his early successors appears to have
come from their positions as shaykhs of one or both of these dervish orders.

 Osman succeeded in becoming independent when the Mongols destroyed the Rum
sultanate soon after it overran Baghdad.

 By the time he died, Osman had established a core Ottoman state that included most
of western Asia Minor through continual warfare against both his Muslim and non-
Muslim neighbors.

 His son and successor, Orhan (ruling 1326–1359), continued this policy of expansion,
and he began the conquest of what remained of the Byzantine Empire on the Balkan
Peninsula.

 More important, as the Ottoman ghazi state continued to grow, Orhan reorganized it
along feudal lines.

 Landed estates were parceled out among the commanders of the mounted army.

 Orhan was also noted for creating the system by which the growing numbers of
various nationalities and religious groups were absorbed into the burgeoning Ottoman
Empire.

 Each group was organized as a millet—that is, as a separate minority under the
leadership of an appointed shaykh, who answered directly to the sultan and his
officials.

 Each millet was allowed a degree of self-regulation under its shaykh, and its rights
were protected.

 By the 1450s, the empire had grown to include all of Asia Minor and most of the
Balkans south of modernday Hungary.
 Of the Byzantine Empire, only the great capital of Constantinople remained.

 After several failed attempts to capture the great fortress city of the Christians on the
western side of the narrow waterway separating Europe from Asia, Sultan Mehmed
the Conqueror (ruling 1451–1481) succeeded in taking this prize.

 A long siege weakened the Christians’ resistance, and the sultan’s new bronze
cannon destroyed the walls.

 In 1453, the city finally surrendered.

 Under the new name of Istanbul, it became the capital of the Ottoman Empire from
that time forward.

 By the reign of Suleiman (SOO-lay-man) the Magnificent (r.1520–1566), Hungary,

Romania, southern Poland, and southern Russia had been added to the sultan’s
domain, while in North Africa and the Middle East, all of the Islamic states from
Morocco to Persia had accepted his overlordship (see Map 24.

 At this stage, Ottoman military power was unmatched in the world.

Ottoman Government

 Ottoman glory reached its apex during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, a
sultan whose resources and abilities certainly matched any of his fellow rulers in an
age of formidable women and men (Elizabeth I of England, Akbar the Great in India,
and Ivan the Terrible in Russia).

 The government he presided over was divided into a secular bureaucracy, a religious
bureaucracy, and a chancery called the Sublime Porte—after the gate in the sultan’s
palace near where it was located.
 At the head of all three stood the sultan.

 The officials of the Sublime Porte were what we would call the civil government, and it
was composed of many levels of officials from the grand vizier (vih-ZEER; prime
minister) down to the lowliest copyists.

 Most members of the secular bureaucracy originally were non-Muslims who had
converted to the Muslim faith.

 The religious bureaucracy was parallel to the secular one.

 Its members were collectively the ulama (oo-la-MAH), or learned scholars of the law,
the Sharia, which was derived from the holy book of Islam, the Qur’an.

 The sultan appointed a high official, called the Shaykh al-Islam, as the head of this
vast bureaucracy.

 The religious bureaucracy lent its great moral authority to the work of the Sublime
Porte; it was, in eff ect, a junior partner of the government.

 In the ordinary course of events, conflict between the two was unthinkable.

 The army was an arm of the secular bureaucracy.

 The Ottoman army was far superior to European militaries by virtue of its
professionalism and discipline.

 At its heart were the well-trained and well-armed Janissaries, an elite infantry corps.

 The Ottomans used a system called the devshirme (duv-SHEER-muh) to staff the
Janissary units of the army and other high positions within the sultan’s administration.
 Essentially this system was based on seizing Balkan Christian boys at a tender age,
converting them to Islam, and giving them unlimited chances to advance themselves
in both army and government.

 The system was designed to create new units for the army and the Sultan’s palace,
staff ed by servants whose only loyalty was to the sultan.

 Some of the most brilliant leaders of the Ottoman state in the sixteenth through
eighteenth centuries were these willing slaves of the sultan (as they proudly termed
themselves), recruited from the infidels.

 Th rough the devshirme, the Ottoman state for many years successfully avoided the
weakening of the central authority that was inevitable with the kind of feudal system
Orhan had created in the fourteenth century.

 Instead, by the time of Mehmed and Suleiman, the bulk of the standing army was a
mobile, permanent corps that could be shifted about throughout the huge empire
controlled by Istanbul.

 Therefore, aside from the cavalry corps, most soldiers came to depend on salaries
paid directly to them by the central government.

 The Janissaries and other new infantry corpsmen remained loyal to the central
government alone because of their lack of local connections and the fact that they
rarely remained in one place very long.

 As long as the Janissaries conformed to this ideal, the Ottoman governmental system
operated smoothly and effectively.

 The provincial authorities obeyed the central government or were soon replaced and
punished.

 But after about 1650, when the professional army was able to obtain land and
develop the connections to purely local aff airs that landholding entailed, a lengthy
period of decline commenced.
 Non-Muslims Under Ottoman Rule

 The treatment of non-Muslims varied over time.

 In the early centuries of Ottoman rule (1300–1600), official treatment of Christians

and Jews was generally fair.

 These “People of the Book” were distinctly limited in what we would call civil rights,
could not hold office, could not proselytize for converts or bear arms, and suff ered
many other disadvantages, but they were not forced to convert to Islam and could run
their own civil and cultural aff airs on the local and even provincial level.

 They were taxed, but not excessively.

 Until the seventeenth century, the public lives of minorities within the millet system
seem to have assured them more security than most Jews or Muslims living under
Christian rule could expect.

 On the other hand, the brutality with which the Ottomans treated defeated opponents
and the forceful application of the devshirme proved the limits of Ottoman tolerance
for the rights of subject populations.

 The majority of the Balkan population was Orthodox Christian.

 Under Turkish rule, the Balkan peasants were almost always decently treated until the
seventeenth century.

 They were allowed to elect their own headmen in their villages; go to Christian
services; and otherwise baptize, marry, and bury their dead according to their
traditions.

 Like other non-Muslims, they were more heavily taxed than Muslims, but they were
allowed to own land and businesses and to move about freely.
 In the course of the seventeenth century, however, the condition of the Balkan
Christians deteriorated badly for several reasons, including the central government’s
increasing need for tax funds, the increasing hostility toward all infidels at Istanbul,
and a moral breakdown in provincial and local government.

 “The fish stinks from the head,” says an old Turkish proverb, and the bad example of
the harem government in the capital was having effects in the villages.

 During the eighteenth century, the condition of the Balkan Christians had become
sufficiently oppressive that they began looking for liberation by their independent
neighbors, Austria and Russia.

 From now on, the Ottomans had to treat their Christian subjects as potential or actual
traitors, which made the tensions between the sultan’s government and his Christian
subjects still worse.

 By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the treatment of Christian minorities—such

as the Greeks, Armenians, and others—at times was about as bad in the Islamic Near
East as any people have ever had to endure.

 Unfortunately for the Balkan states today, these old hatreds that Ottoman rule brought
to the region remain the primary source of the ethnic and religious confl icts that
continue to plague it.
 The Zenith of the Ottoman Empire: Suleiman and After

 The Ottoman Empire reached its peak during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent in
the sixteenth century.

 Many consider Suleiman to have been the empire’s greatest ruler.

 Even in a dynasty that had many long-reigning sultans, the length of Suleiman’s rule
was remarkably long—from 1520 to 1566.

 His was an outstandingly stable rule in which it seemed that everything the sultan
attempted to accomplish succeeded.

 Immediately, when Suleiman came to the throne at 26 years of age, he was

successful in extending control over all of North Africa.

 For many years, the Spanish and the Portuguese had attacked and occupied the port
cities of Morocco and Algeria.

 To deal with them, Suleiman formed an alliance with a corsair by the name of Khair
ad- Din Barbarossa.

 The attacks that followed by the combined fl eets of Khair ad-Din and the well-armed
Ottomans were eff ective in pushing the Iberians out of Tunis and Algiers.

 Suleiman also seized the island of Rhodes, which the Christian Knights of St.

 John hitherto had defended successfully against the Ottomans for centuries.

 With these victories, Suleiman came close to rivaling ancient Rome in lands
conquered by winning complete control over the entire Mediterranean Sea region.
 In southeastern Europe, the sultan’s huge army seized the cities of Belgrade and
Budapest.

 Suleiman’s next—and boldest—move was against the capital of the Austrian Empire,
Vienna.

 After a siege that lasted through the summer in 1529, autumn and colder weather
finally obliged Suleiman to make an orderly withdrawal.

 Although the attack failed, it marked the crest of a long wave of Ottoman expansion in
Europe.

 As they had stacked conquest on top of conquest, the Ottoman sultans increasingly
had come to be regarded by Muslims all over the world as the new caliphs of the
Muslim Umma (see Chapter 15).

 With the golden age of the Abbasids long past, Muslims needed a powerful ruler who
could assume the responsibilities of religious leadership that were essential to Islam.

 Ottomans such as Mehmed and Suleiman filled that need admirably.

 Besides his attacks on Christian Europe, for example, Suleiman defeated a powerful
Safavid Shi’ite state in Iran (see following section) and managed to occupy Iraq.

 He also took charge of making the crucial arrangements for the annual pilgrimages to
Mecca.

 In addition, he remodeled the Tomb of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina and the
famous Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem.

 Despite the continued conquests and the unprecedented levels of prestige and infl
uence achieved by the sultanate under this monarch, harbingers of future problems
were already surfacing during Suleiman’s reign.
 He introduced new practices that were followed by the sultans who came after him, all
of which ultimately proved disadvantageous to the empire.

 For example, after the demoralizing losses of his favorite grand vizier and his son,
Mustapha, to harem intrigues (see Evidence of the Past box), Suleiman showed less
and less interest in the day-to-day details of governing than had been the case
beforehand.

 He withdrew from daily meetings of his divan, or royal council, allowing his new grand
viziers to assume power, if not actual responsibility.

 The annual jihads and conquests continued, but Suleiman and his successors again
deferred to their viziers and other military officials (who were given the title of pasha)
for their execution.

 The remainder of the sixteenth century and most of the seventeenth amounted to a
stalemate between the Islamic East and the Christian West.

 This period saw growing difficulties for the Ottomans and the other great Muslim
empires—especially in their dealings with the West.

 Yet there was little or no actual loss of territory.

 In 1683, the Ottomans even managed to again muster sufficient resources for a
second attack on Vienna.

 Th is assault failed, but unlike the failure of the first one in 1529, this one was followed
by a disastrous defeat at the hands of a Habsburg army led by Eugen (OY-gun) of
Savoy.

 Finally, in 1699, the Ottomans were forced to sign the Treaty of Karlowitz, a
momentous document that, after centuries of continuous expansion, forced the
Ottoman sultan for the first time to cede territory to his European opponents.
 The Muslim Empires in Persia and India

 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Sufiand Shi’ite divisions, which had
existed within the theology of Islam for many centuries, became noticeably stronger.

 The Sufimystics sought a diff erent path to God than orthodox Muslims (see Chapter
15).

 Some of the sufis of central Asia adopted the historical views of the Shi’ites, who
reject all of Muhammad’s successors who were not related directly to him by blood or
marriage.

 In the eighth century, as we saw in Chapter 16, this belief resulted in a major split
between the Shi’ite minority and the Sunni majority, who believed that the caliph (or
successor to the Prophet) could be anyone qualified by nobility of purpose and
abilities.

 From that original dispute over succession gradually emerged a series of doctrinal
differences.

 Much of Islamic history can be visualized best within the framework of the rivalry
between the Shi’ite and Sunni factions.

The Safavid Realm

 Within the Islamic world, the greatest rival of the Ottoman Empire after the sixteenth
century was the Safavid Empire of Persia.

 Therefore, it is ironic that they shared similar origins.

 The embryonic Safavid state began in the region of Tabriz, west of the Caspian Sea,
and, like the Ottoman ghazi state, it was organized around a Turkish Sufiassociation.
 This brotherhood took its name from its founder, Safiad-Din (shortened as “Safavid”),
who claimed to be a descendant of Muhammad.

 By the fifteenth century, however, the Safavid state came to diff er from the Ottoman
orders in one important aspect: It converted to Shi’ite Islam.

 The Safavids became a major threat to the Ottomans when they evolved a militant
theology that advocated the supremacy of Shi’ism through the force of arms.

 Spreading their views through propaganda, they converted many Turkish tribes in
Iran, Syria, and eastern Asia Minor.

 These Shi’ites took over much of the Persian Muslim state, and from that base, they
waged frequent wars on their Sunni competitors to the west.

 In the early 1500s, a leader named Ismail, claiming to be a representative of the

hidden Shi’a Imam, succeeded in capturing much of Persia and Iraq—including
Baghdad—and made himself shah (king).

 With these successes, Ismail proclaimed Shi’ism to be the official cult of the Safavid
state.

 Thus was founded the Safavid Empire, which lasted for two centuries and was a
strong competitor to the Ottomans, who were Sunni Muslims (see Map 24.

 This doctrinal opposition to Sunni Islam and political rivalry with the Ottoman Empire
became especially sharp by the early seventeenth century, and it reached its height
during the reign of Shah Abbas the Great (ruling 1587–1629), the greatest of the
Safavid rulers.

 The European opponents of the Turks—who were then still established deep in
central Europe—aided Shah Abbas in his confl icts with Istanbul.
 Several foreigners occupied high positions in his government, as Abbas strove to
avoid favoring any one group within his multiethnic realm.

 His beautifully planned new capital at Isfahan was a center of exquisite art and crafts
production, notably in textiles, rugs, ceramics, and paintings.

 The Safavid period is considered the cultural high point of the long history of Persia
and the Iranian people.

 Also, just as in the case of Suleiman the Magnificent, the reign of Abbas represented
the high point of Safavid rule in Persia.

 Following his reign, a gradual decline resulted from encroachments by highly

independent Turco-Iranian tribesman.

 Making things even more complicated were the gradual and caustic infl uences of
European imperialists.

 The empire slowly lost vigor and collapsed altogether in the 1720s under Turkish and
Afghani attacks.

 It is worth noting that, like the European Christians, the various subdivisions within
Islam fought as much against each other as against the infidels.

 A common religion is rarely able to counter the claims of territorial, economic, or

military advantage in the choice between war and peace.
 The Mughal Empire
 When we last looked at the Indian subcontinent in Chapter 12, we commented on the
gradual revival of Hindu culture under the Gupta Dynasty in the fourth and fifth
centuries CE and the golden age that ensued.

 Very early in Islam’s history, during the late 600s, Arabs and Persians had moved into
the Indus Valley and seized the province of Sind at its lower extremity.

 This was the beginning of a long, ongoing struggle between Hindus and Muslims in
the northwest borderlands.

 Out of this struggle, 800 years after the province of Sind was captured, a branch of
the Turks known as the Mughals (MOO-guls) created in northern India one of the
most impressive Muslim empires in world history.

 The word Mughal is a corruption of the name Mongol, to whom the Turks were
distantly related.

 Muslims from central Asia had raided and attempted to invade northern India since
the 900s but had been repulsed by the dominant Hindus.

 As was seen in Chapter 12, in the early 1200s, the Delhi sultanate was established by
a Turkish slave army operating from their base at Ghazni in Afghanistan.

 Within a century, the sultanate controlled much of the Indian subcontinent, reaching
down into the Deccan.

 Divorced from their Hindu subjects by every aspect of culture, language, and religion,
the sultans and their courts attempted at first to convert the Hindus and then, failing
that, to humiliate and exploit them.
 The original dynasty was soon overthrown, but other Central Asian Muslims
succeeded it, all of whom fought among themselves for mastery even as they
extended their rule southward.

 Aided by continuing disunity among their Hindu opponents, Mongols, Turks, Persians,
and Afghanis fought for control of the entire width of the Indian subcontinent from the
Indus to the Ganges.

 At last, a leader, Babur, who was able to persuade his fellow princes to follow him,
arose from the Afghan base.

 Brilliantly successful battle tactics allowed him to conquer much of the territory once
ruled by the Delhi sultans.

 By the time of his death in 1530, he had established the Mughal Muslim Indian
Dynasty.

 This man’s grandson and successor was Akbar the Great (ruling 1556–1605).

 Akbar was the most distinguished Indian ruler since Ashoka in the third century BCE.

 He was perhaps the greatest statesman Asia has ever produced.

 Akbar earned his title “the Great” in several different ways.

 He splendidly fulfilled the usual demands made on a warrior-king to crush his

enemies and enlarge his kingdom.

 Under his guidance and generalship, the Mughal Empire came to control most of the
subcontinent—the first time a central government had accomplished this feat since
the days of the Mauryan kings.
 Second, despite his own youthful illiteracy, he completely reorganized the central
government, developed an efficient multinational bureaucracy to run it, and introduced
many innovative reforms in society.

 Th ird and most strikingly, Akbar practiced a policy of religious and social toleration
that was most unusual in the sixteenth century.

 He was at least formally a Muslim, ruling a Muslim-dominated empire, but he allowed

all faiths—including Christianity—to fl ourish and to compete for converts in his lands.

 Because most of his subjects were Hindus, Akbar thought it particularly important to
heal the breach between them and the Muslim minority.

 His initiatives toward creating an ethnically equal society were remarkable.

 He married a Hindu princess, and Jahangir, one of his sons by a Hindu woman,
eventually succeeded him.

 Hindus were given equal opportunities to obtain all but the highest government posts,
and members of the Hindu warrior caste called Rajputs became his willing allies in
governance.

 By repealing the odious poll tax (jizya) on non-Muslims, Akbar earned the lasting
gratitude of most of his subjects.

 The sorrow that existed among both Muslims and non-Muslims at Akbar’s death was
the most sincere tribute to his character.

 Midway in his long reign, around 1580, Akbar decided to build an entirely new capital
at Fatehpur Sikri (FAH-tay-poor SIHK-ree), some distance from the traditional royal
cities of Delhi and Agra.
 This palace-city was soon abandoned and is now a ruin, but its beauty and
magnificence were famous throughout the Muslim world.

 The court library reputedly possessed more than 24,000 volumes, making it easily the
largest collection of books in the world at this time.

 Akbar’s love of learning encouraged sages of all religions and all parts of the Asian
world to come to his court at his expense as teachers and students.

 His cultivation of the official Persian language brought new dimensions to Indian
literature.

 The ties with Persian culture enabled by the language contributed substantially to the
revival of a sense of national unity among Hindus, which they had lacked since the
Gupta era.

Society and Culture.

 India under the Mughals remained a hodgepodge of diff erent peoples, as well as diff
erent religions and languages.

 Besides those under Mughal rule, there were still many tribal groups, especially in the
rain forest regions of the eastern coast, whom neither Hindus nor Muslims considered
fully human and often enslaved.

 The caste system continued to be refined in constant subdivisions among Hindus.

 Although the Muslims never acknowledged the caste system, it did serve as a useful
wall to minimize frictions between subject and ruler.

 Despite extensive business and administrative dealings between the two religious
communities, social intercourse was unusual at any level.
 Even among the majority Hindus, culturally based barriers existed that had nothing to
do with caste.

 A new religion, derived from the doctrines of both Hindu and Muslim, arose in the Far
North during the seventeenth century.

 At first dedicated to finding a middle ground between the two dominant faiths, it
eventually became a separate creed, called the religion of the Sikhs (seeks).

 Generally closer to Hindu belief, the Sikhs fought the last Mughal rulers and
dominated the northwestern Punjab province.

 (They currently represent perhaps 5 percent of the total population of India and still
strive for full autonomy on either side of the India-Pakistan border.)

 After Emperor Aurangzeb (OR-ahng-zehb; r.1668– 1707), the governing class was
almost entirely Muslim again, and aspiring Hindus sometimes imitated their habits of
dress and manner.

 Many foreigners—especially from the Middle East—came into the country to make
their fortunes, often at the luxurious and free-spending courts not only of the emperor
but also of subsidiary officials.

 Prevented by imperial decrees from accumulating heritable land and office, the
Muslim upper class took much pride in funding institutions of learning and supporting
artists of all types.

 In the fine arts, the Mughal rulers made a conscious and successful effort to introduce
the great traditions of Persian culture into India, where they blended with the native
forms in literature, drama, and architecture.
 The quatrains of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat (roo-BUY-yat), which have long been
famous throughout the world, held a special appeal for Mughal poets, who attempted
to imitate them (see the Patterns of Belief box for an excerpt from the Rubaiyat).

 The Taj Mahal (tahj mah-HAAL), tomb of the muchloved wife of the seventeenth-
century emperor Shah Jahan (jah-HAHN), is the most famous example of a Persian-
Indian architectural style.

 But it is only one of many, as exemplified by the ruins of Fatehpur Sikri, the equally
imposing Red Fort at Agra, and a whole series of mosques.

 Much painting of every type and format, from book miniatures to frescos, also
survives from this era and shows traces of Arab and Chinese, as well as Persian,
influence.

 By this time, Muslim artists were ignoring the ancient religious prohibition against
reproducing the human form.

 The wonderful variety of portraits, court scenes, gardens, and townscapes is

exceeded only by the precision and color sense of the artists.

 The Muslims had an extensive system of religious schools (madrasa), while the local
Brahmins took care of the minimal needs for literacy in the Hindu villages by acting as
open-air schoolmasters.

 Increasingly, the Muslims used the newly created Urdu language (now the offi- cial
language in Pakistan) rather than the Sanskrit of the Hindus.

 Like the Safavid Persians to their west, the Mughals were an exceptionally
cosmopolitan dynasty, well aware of cultural aff airs in and outside of their own
country and anxious to make a good impression in foreign eyes.

 They welcomed European travelers.

 Like Marco Polo’s reports about Kubilai Khan’s China, sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century tales of visitors to the Great Mughal were only belatedly and grudgingly
believed.

 Such cultivation and display of luxury were still beyond Europeans’ experience.

The Mughal Economy.

 The existing agrarian system was but slightly disturbed by the substitution of Muslim
for Hindu authority.

 Beginning with the Delhi sultans, courtiers and officials were awarded a parcel of land
apposite to their dignity and sufficient taxes to allow them to maintain a specified
number of fighting men and their equipment.

 This system of rewarding individuals who rendered either civil or military service to the
state was called the mansabdari (mahn-SAHB-dah-ree).

 Some mansabdars maintained small armies of 5,000 or even 10,000 men.

 When the sultanate weakened, they established themselves as petty kings, joining
the universal fray in northern India for territory and prestige.

 This system was carried over into the Mughal period.

 Perhaps half of the mansabdars under Akbar were Hindus, creating a loyalty to the
imperial government that continued even under Aurangzeb’s determined Islamic
regime.

 The peasants on the mansabdar’s domain were somewhat better off than their
contemporary counterparts in Europe or China.
 Most of them were tenants rather than outright proprietors, but they were not yet
haunted by the shortage of agrarian land that would arrive, as it did in China, during
the later eighteenth century.

 Village tradition, the caste system, and government tax collectors restricted their
freedoms.

 The latter were generally no worse than in other places, and their demand for onethird
to one-half of the crop was bearable if the harvest was productive.

SUMMARY
 THE THREE PRINCIPAL MUSLIM EMPIRES that occupied most of the Asian
continent between 1250 and 1800 were able to hold their own militarily and culturally
with their Chinese, Hindu, and Christian competitors.

 Often warring among themselves, they were still able to maintain their borders and
prestige for 200 to 600 years.

 After the terrible destruction rendered by the Mongols, the Muslims of the Middle East
absorbed their invaders and rebuilt their cities.

 Chief and most enduring among their states were those of the Ottoman Turks and the
Indian Mughals.

 The Ottomans profited from the Mongol destruction of Baghdad and the Rum
sultanate by erecting their own powerful ghazi state and even eventually took
Constantinople (Istanbul) for their capital.

 Under a series of warrior-sultans, the Ottoman leaders extended their power to the
gates of Vienna before internal weakness drove them back in the 1700s.
 By the nineteenth century, the Ottomans had become so weak that they were
sustained only by the rivalry of the major European powers.

 Thus, the dreaded sixteenth-century empire of Suleiman had been degraded to “the
sick man” of Europe—so called by a British statesman.

 For two centuries, the Shi’ite dynasty of the Safavids reclaimed grandeur for Persia
and Iraq, where they ruled until they were brought down by the superior power of their
Sunni rivals in Istanbul.

 The Mughals descended on Hindu India in the early sixteenth century and set up one
of the few regimes in Indian history that successfully managed to rule most of this
intensely varied subcontinent.

 Under the extraordinary Akbar the Great, the regime reached its apex, only to decline
slowly during the following century.