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Europe–Mughal India–Muslim Asia: Circulation of Political Ideas and Instruments in Early Modern Times. Part 1

Corinne Lefe`vre

1 Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to consider Mughal state-building and ideology in a wider geopolitical context than has generally been the case. By wider geopolitical context, I mean not only Europe, but also what I would call the Asian-Islamicate ecumene—a region that stretched from Istanbul to Aceh and housed a number of powerful polities in early modern times—for it is my contention that the processes of political and cultural transfer that took place between Asia and Europe in the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries should be examined side by side with those transfers that took place within Asia and within Europe, in order to provide a fuller and more balanced picture of the issue. From the restricted point of view of the Mughal empire, which is my area of expertise, this means tackling a number of questions, such as: what was the political horizon of the Mughals, what did they know about the political experiments that were carried out in early modern Europe and Muslim Asia, and what were the elements of these experiments, if any, that were deemed adaptable in the Indian context? Conversely: what were the perceptions of the Mughal polity in early modern Europe and Asia, and to what extent and to which states did it act as a model or, on the contrary, as a foil? Because of space limitations, I will focus here on the first set of questions.

These first questions are all the more interesting because they point to a signifi cant and lasting feature of the historiography of the Mughal state, i.e. its presenta tion as an exclusively Indian phenomenon. Contrary to what this “Indocentric” view suggests, the empire founded by Ba¯bur (ruled 1526–1530) cannot be reduced to an extractive machine feeding itself with agrarian surplus and working in quasi complete isolation from the rest of the early modern world. Quite the opposite: the seventeenth century whose beginning roughly coincided with the accession to the throne of Jaha¯ngı¯r (ruled 1605–1627), witnessed the development and diversifica tion of the European presence in the subcontinent on an unprecedented scale, as well as a significant increase in exchanges with the West. Concurrently, and as may be seen, for instance, from the multi-ethnic composition of the Mughal nobility, the empire attracted elites in search of employment from all over the Asian-Islamicate ecumene. And yet, the impact of those multi-directional exchanges on the political genesis and evolution of the Mughal state has not, until now, received the attention it deserves.

This holds particularly true for the question of the political-cum-cultural impact of the European presence on the Mughal elite, most authors concentrating on the economic changes brought by the Western trade companies (Das Gupta 1979; Prakash 1985) or on Said-inspired analyses of European writings on Mughal India (Teltscher 1995). The reason often advanced for this cursory treatment is the scarcity of Indo-Persian texts dealing with Europeans—this very scarcity being usually interpreted as “the” sign of the Mughals’ lack of interest for things Western (Pearson 1987: 53). While Mughal writings on the West can hardly be compared in quantity to the massive European production documenting the encounter with the empire, there are nevertheless—as pointed out more recently by a number of historians and art historians (see below for references)—a number of texts, as well as iconographic materials that shed some light on the politico-cultural impact of the European presence and on some interesting cases of circulation and transfer in this domain.

Even though the relation between pre-colonial India and European powers is a research topic that is today far from being exhausted and needs to be pursued, the great importance it has been given since colonial times has led to the neglect of the relations connecting the Mughals with another set of polities geographically and culturally far closer to them (Ottomans, Safavids, Uzbeks, sultans of Aceh). As a matter of fact, the historiography dealing with these relations has been largely confined to diplomatic studies of traditional workmanship (Islam 1970; Farooqi 1989), and to a handful of structuralist comparisons informed by the old orientalist paradigm (Ali 1992; Moosvi 2002). Besides, on the margins of Mughal historiography proper, a number of scholars have dealt with the circulation of elites and analysed their role in the transmission of political ideas within the Asian-Islamicate ecumene (Subrahmanyam 1992; Wormser 2009). Finally, the last two decades have seen the publication of quite a few essays examining jointly the ideological discourses produced by different dynasties of Muslim Asia (Dale 1998; Necipog˘lu 1993; Moin 2010).

As shown by this brief survey, research connecting the political and cultural history of the Mughal empire with that of the contemporary states of Europe and Muslim Asia has, until quite recently, remained largely fragmentary. And yet, as advocated by the editors of this volume and a number of other scholars, the histories of the various components of the early modern world have a lot to learn from each other, the early modern times being a period of increased contact between the four parts of the world, as well as a moment of intense political rivalry both within Europe and Muslim Asia and between them. In this highly competitive context, the solutions worked out by a dynasty in such important fields as taxation, relations between ruler and nobility, or management of religious plurality came to constitute as many models, which could possibly influence the choices made by one or more of its rivals. However, not every route that ran across the political space of early modern Europe and Muslim Asia was equally busy: as this essay will demonstrate, some of them proved dead ends, while others developed into highways.

2 European Political Culture and History in Mughal India

I will start, then, with a re-examination of contemporary primary sources (mostly from the seventeenth century) documenting Mughal interest for things Western in the politico-cultural sphere. If one turns first to the European writings and records of the time, one comes across a series of passages showing Mughal monarchs and amı¯rs enquiring about the political situation of one or more European countries. One of the most interesting comes from the pen of Edward Terry, chaplain to Sir Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador sent to the Mughal court in the mid 1610s. In the course of his Voyage to East-India, Terry describes the reaction of Jaha¯ngı¯r to Mercator’s Atlas in the following way: “The Mogul feeds and feasts himself with this conceit, that he is Conqueror of the World; and therefore I conceive that he was troubled upon a time, when my Lord Ambassador presented him with Mercator’s great book of Cosmography that described the four parts of the world. The Mogul at first seemed very much taken with it, desiring presently to see his own territories, which were immediately shown to him; and then [...], finding no more to fall to his share, [...] seemed to be a little troubled, yet civilly told the Ambassador, that neither himself, nor any of his people, did understand the language in which that book was written, and therefore returned it unto him again” (Terry 1777: 350–351).

These few lines are particularly interesting because they clearly associate geo graphical knowledge with political power. Following this is the idea that the monarch’s limited interest in the Atlas, i.e. in the world beyond his kingdom, derived from a denial of the supposed objective geographical reality it depicted: in other words, Jaha¯ngı¯r sent the Atlas back because he refused to be confronted with the relativity of his power and to revise his claims accordingly. Although the bias underlying such an explanation is quite obvious, these lines, as well as Roe’s account of the same event, have often been used by modern scholars as a proof of Mughal indifference to the wide world in general, and to Europe more specifically. However, as argued by Ahsan Qaisar three decades ago (Qaisar 1982: 148–149), Roe and Terry may be contrasted on this subject with other contemporary European writings showing that geographical artefacts such as globes, maps and atlases were actually in demand at the Mughal court. Pointing towards the same direction is the existence of a mid-seventeenth century atlas (Habib 1980), as well as the specific role terrestrial globes of European inspiration came to play in imperial allegorical painting.

Reference here is to the works of Ebba Koch and Sumathi Ramaswamy who have shown how, starting with Jaha¯ngı¯r, the terrestrial globe penetrated the allegorical portraits of the monarch, where it came to stand as an exclusive imperial attribute and a symbol of world domination (Koch 1997: 139–141; 2009: 330–333; Ramaswamy 2007). This was not, however, a case of straightforward adoption: having fully grasped the potentialities of this imported cartographic language, the Mughal artists deployed the globe-form in support of the agenda of their patron, subverting at the same time the Europe-centred mapping of the Earth that originally underlay it. As a matter of fact, a remarkable feature of these Mughalised globes is that they centred on India, which also assumed larger dimensions than in their European counterparts. The specific example of the globe points more generally to an area where the European impact on Mughal political culture can hardly be denied, i.e. the visual propaganda in the service of the empire. As shown by a number of art historians such as Gauvin Bailey and Ebba Koch (Bailey 1998; Koch 2001), Mughal borrowings were particularly important in this domain, ranging from the appropriation of a whole visual language (the allegorical manner) to that of isolated motifs (putti, portraits of Jesus and Mary, etc.). As in the case of the globe, however, the European-Christian elements were extracted from their original context of production and given a new garb or meaning that best fitted their redeployment as instruments of the Mughals’ legitimacy. While the Mughals were themselves heirs to a Tı¯mu¯rid tradition that particularly valued the visual representations of power, the European visual strategies they encountered signifi cantly influenced the political vocabulary they elaborated to depict themselves and their achievements.


In contrast to the evidence of transmission provided by the pictorial records of the imperial atelier stands the relative dearth of actual references to Europe, particularly to its political history and culture, in the Indo-Persian writings pro duced before the mid-eighteenth century. In the last decade, however, two publications by Simon Digby and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have qualified this scar city through the analysis of texts that had so far escaped the attention of historians, possibly because of their too-heavy reliance on official court chronicles (Digby 1999; Subrahmanyam 2005). However, the conclusions they draw from these materials differ rather substantially. Digby focuses, for his part, on two texts in which Europe is seen either through the lens of older and obsolete Arabo-Persian geographical lore or as a reservoir of exotic marvels—the two perspectives some times coexisting, as in the case of the Maʿlu¯ma¯t-ul-a¯fa¯q (Knowledge of the horizons) written by the Mughal official Amı¯n-ud-dı¯n Kha¯n in the second half of the seventeenth century. This leads Digby to conclude that Mughal elites generally had no curiosity about the outside world and were unable to grasp contemporary information about it in the few geographical works they produced. Whilst acknowledging the existence of fanciful accounts of Europe such as those presented by Digby, Subrahmanyam underlines the fact that these partook of a shared early modern attraction to wonders—referred to as ʿaja¯ ʾib-u-ghara¯ ʾib in Persian and as mirabilia in Latin, an attraction which surfaces as well in contemporary accounts of the East and West Indies. Furthermore, “just as is the case with the Europeans, the presence of a register of “wonders” in the Indo-Persian corpus does not in fact preclude the simultaneous accumulation of political, economic and other materials in a far more matter-of-fact tone” (Subrahmanyam 2005: 80). As an illustration of this point, he calls attention to a little-known work completed in 1606 by another Mughal official by the name of T˙a¯hir Muh˙ammad. Entitled Rauz.at-ut.-t.a¯hirı¯n (The garden of the immaculate), the text is a general history of the oriental Muslim world and has a chapter devoted to “the wonders and curiosities of the ports and islands” surrounding Bengal, in which may be found a description of Portugal. True to the general title of the section, wondrous tales are well represented in the account, but they appear side by side with much more reliable information about contemporary events which, the author writes, he had gathered during his mission to Goa at the end of the 1570s. Among such information, pride of place is given to the fateful campaign of the Portuguese monarch Dom Sebastia˜o (ruled 1557–1578) against the kingdom of Morocco, the account of which, notwithstanding some inaccuracies and an underlying Muslim bias, perfectly matches the criteria of political report, and clearly does not belong to the repertoire of wonders.

The corpus brought to light by Digby and Subrahmanyam certainly gives a better idea of the dual regime (wondrous/factual) that underlay the recording of the Mughal perceptions of Europe; yet, it does not say much about the central question raised at the beginning of this essay. In this perspective, I would like to draw attention to a couple of works composed by two eminent figures who flourished during the reigns of Akbar (ruled 1556–1605) and Jaha¯ngı¯r. The first and best known of them is the Jesuit Spaniard Jero´nimo Xavier (d. 1617), who headed the third Jesuit mission to the Mughal court from 1595 to 1615; the second is the Mughal courtier and scholar ʿAbd-us-Satta¯r ibn Qa¯sim La¯haurı¯ (d. after 1619). Under the instructions of emperor Akbar, the two men came to constitute some kind of a translation team whose task was to familiarise the Mughal elite with the Greco Roman and Christian foundations of contemporary European culture. This implied an intensive linguistic training, to which both men submitted: in their writings, they indicate how they respectively learnt how to read and write Persian (for Xavier) and Latin (for Satta¯r).

The best known results of this collaboration are a series of catechistic works written in Persian and including Lives of Jesus (Mirʾa¯t-ul-quds or Mirror of Holiness, 1602) and of the Apostles (Da¯sta¯n-i ah. wa¯l-i hawa¯riyya¯n or Account of the Life Episodes of the Apostles, 1605–1607). While these texts have long been objects of interest for specialists of Jesuit studies (Maclagan 1932; Camps 1957), the recent publication of a hitherto unknown chronicle by Satta¯r—the Maja¯lis-i Jaha¯ngı¯rı¯ (1608–1611), which, among other things, documents the Mughal view point on the religious debates held at court (ʿAbd-us-Satta¯r 2006)—has led to a reconsideration of contemporary Muslim-Christian discussions, as well as of the exact nature of the collaboration between Satta¯r and Xavier (Alam and Subrahmanyam 2009). Much more relevant for the present purpose is, however, the production of two other works whose ambition was much more secular in nature. Completed in 1603 by Satta¯r, the earliest one is a history of the great kings and philosophers of Antiquity entitled Samarat-ul-fala¯sifa (The fruit of philosophers); the second—the A¯da¯b-us-salt.anat (The duties of kingship)—is a mirror for princes dedicated by Xavier to Jaha¯ngı¯r in 1609. Neither of these texts has been edited so far, and the following analysis is based on a preliminary survey of two manuscript copies preserved in London.1

In the preface to their respective works, both authors underscore the originality, within the Indian context, of the information they are about to reveal to their readers, highlighting by the same token their own role as cultural brokers. In the first pages of the Samarat-ul-fala¯sifa, Satta¯r thus writes that he was ordered by Akbar “to learn the European language (zaba¯n-i firangı¯), to inquire the secrets of this people and the affairs of the sultans of this group as well as to render into Persian what Greek and Latin philosophers (h. ukama¯-yi yu¯na¯n-zamı¯n wa latin) had said in their books, in order to reveal what had so far remained hidden because of the foreignness of the language, the unavailability of a translator and the distance [between Europe and India]” (BL, MS. Or. 5893: 5).

He then goes on to explain how he learnt Latin in six months with the help of Jero´nimo Xavier. In his own preface, the latter similarly underlines the scarcity of Western books in India and the difficulty of accessing them for the Persian speaking community; this is in contrast to his own knowledge of both Western literature and the Persian language, which allows him to present Jaha¯ngı¯r with the gist of European political wisdom (SOAS, MS. 7030, 4r-v). While Xavier openly boasts here of his achievement and implicitly compares it to the advice offered by Aristotle to Alexander or by Seneca to Nero (ibid.: 3v), the preface to his Mirʾa¯t-ul quds shows that he was actually aware that his was only a contribution to the much more ambitious project of cultural “translation” undertaken by the Mughals (ʿAbd us-Satta¯r 2006: xl)—a project that also included the rendition in Persian of Sanskrit texts such as the Maha¯bha¯rata, and whose universal scope was equally noted by Satta¯r, who mentioned Akbar’s urge to know “the secrets of the religions and the affairs of the monarchs of every country” (BL, MS. 5893: 4). The results of both these enterprises of knowledge transfer from Europe to Mughal India are, as could be expected, texts endowed with a fair degree of hybridity when language, form and contents are considered together. This comes out rather clearly when one examines their general structure or the diversity of the traditions they drew upon.

The Samarat-ul-fala¯sifa is structured along both chronological and biographical lines. It has three main parts which successively deal with the Roman kingdom (753–509 B.C.), Ancient Greece until the reign of Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.), and the time period surrounding the birth of Jesus; this general progression is, however, broken at several points by temporal or spatial leaps, an example of which will be examined below. Within each of the chapters are included biographi cal accounts of the great men of the age (legislators, philosophers, poets, etc.) along with some of their sayings. This is in perfect consonance with Satta¯r’s main source for his work, which he mentions in the preface (BL, MS. 5893: 7): the chronicles or Summa Historialis of Saint Antoninus of Florence (1389–1459), of which Akbar actually owned a copy (Bailey 2000: 385). In this respect, the Dominican archbishop was himself following the model initiated by his coreligionist Vincent of Beauvais (approx. 1190–1264), who was the first universal chronicler of medieval Europe to mix historical discourse with bio-hagiographies and anthologies in his Speculum Historiale (Walker 1933: 107–108; Paulmier-Foucart 2004: 84–92). The adoption by Satta¯r of such a structure must have been all the more easy since it echoed that of many Indo-Persian chronicles which bore the simultaneous imprint of the two classical genres of ta¯rı¯kh (history) and tazkira (biography). The general organization of the Samarat calls for two further remarks. One is about the quasi-complete absence of the high Roman Empire, which is only touched upon in relation to the events surrounding the birth of the Christ. The other concerns the organisation and contents of the second part: while its title promises the reader all the truth about Greece (Krisiyya), the chapter actually proceeds with an account of the Achaemenid empire, starting with its founder Cyrus the Great (approx. 559–529 B.C.) and ending with Artaxerxes III (approx. 425–338 B.C.), at which point Alexander—and, beyond him, Greece—becomes the focus of the story. This is not to say that the second part does not deal with Greece at all, since each sub-heading contains biographical notices of men such as Thales, Solon, Democritus, or Aristotle, which, in the latter’s case, actually constitutes almost the whole of the account of Artaxerxes. Even though the choice by Satta¯r of the Achaemenid prism certainly derives from his adherence to the Western scheme of the succession of empires as exemplified in the Summa Historialis,2it takes on an additional dimension when one considers the identity of his patron, for whom the Achaemenids clearly constituted an imperial model.

If one now turns to the general structure of the A¯da¯b-us-salt.anat, what is most striking at first glance is its outward resemblance to that of Tı¯mu¯rid and contempo rary Mughal mirrors for princes. It typically opens with a chapter in praise of God, the Lord of all, and on the importance of divine worship (“on the respect due to God”)—a chapter whose length is, however, greater than is usually the case (SOAS, MS. 7030: 9v–61a). This is followed by two chapters devoted to “the reformation of the emperor (is.la¯h.-i ba¯dsha¯h)” and to “the guidance and instruction of officers (hida¯yat wa tarbiyat-i ʿuhdada¯ra¯n)”. This successive focus on the person of the emperor and his relations with the political elite is also traditional, and may be found only a couple of years later in the Mauʿiz˙a-i Jaha¯ngı¯rı¯ or Admonition to Jaha¯ngı¯r. Dedicated to the monarch by the Iranian e´migre´ Ba¯qir Kha¯n in 1611, the text is composed of two parts dealing with “the exhortation of the emperors” and “the admonition of subordinates and peers” (Ba¯qir Kha¯n 1989). Finally, the central topic of the fourth and last chapter of the A¯da¯b-us-salt.anat—the love and protection due to the subjects—echoes another common preoccupation of the Indo-Persian authors of mirrors for princes. Its best known symbol is probably the “circle of justice”, according to which the prosperity of the king and the kingdom ultimately derives from the prosperity of the subjects. If the structure of Xavier’s mirror is then very much akin to that of Mughal treatises of government, the origin and nature of the numerous anecdotes the Jesuit uses to illustrate his general principles differ to a great extent from what is usually found in the latter texts. Whereas the repertoire of Indo-Persian authors traditionally included stories taken from Sassanid and classi cal Islamic history and, less frequently, from the more recent Indo-Muslim past, Xavier’s anecdotes derive for the most part from Biblical and Classical history—a point that leads me to the more general question of the sources used by Satta¯r and Xavier in their works.

Satta¯r is probably the most explicit in this regard: besides the Summa Historialis of Antoninus already mentioned, he refers in his preface to his use of the Bible (injı¯l) and other books without, unfortunately, providing further details about them. Although Xavier does not specify the materials on which he relied for his work, they most certainly included the ones indicated by Satta¯r. Moreover, as he himself points out, he benefited from the knowledge acquired during a life dedicated to “the study of the books of prophets and scholars of the past (mut.a¯laʿa-i s.uh. uf-i paigha¯mbara¯n wa da¯nishwa¯ra¯n-i pishı¯n)”. There is a hint here of the extensive scholastic culture every Jesuit was supposed to possess and of which the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas (approx. 1225–1274)—who is referred to in the same folio (SOAS, MS. 7030: 4r)—was one of the masterpieces. Finally, there is one part of the A¯da¯b for which Xavier explicitly indicates his source: the conclusion of the book, he writes at different points in the text (ibid.: 9r, 274v, 275v, 286r), is an abridgement of the advice given by Maecenas (70–8 B.C.) to the first emperor of Rome, Caesar Augustus (ruled 27 B.C.–14 A.D.). Although no author’s name or title is given, the reference is clearly to the 52nd book of Cassius Dio’s (d. after 229) Roman History, which is almost entirely taken up by the aforementioned advice.

If both the Samarat-ul-fala¯sifa and the A¯da¯b-us-salt.anat were, then, mostly the result of the transmission of multilayered Western lore into Mughal India, there is interesting evidence in the former work that this process of translation was not carried out without raising a number of questions on the receiving side. This is evident from the few pages Satta¯r devotes to some episodes of the history of Spain (BL, MS. 5893: 48–56), which is here not referred to as such, but as “the peninsula of al-Andalus (jazira-i u¯ndalus)”. Perhaps prompted by a discussion with Xavier about his homeland, the Spanish digression is inserted at the beginning of the section on Greece and may be divided into two parts. Relying mostly on medieval Arab geographers,3the first starts with the Greek colonisation of the peninsula under Alexander the Great and ends with the Muslim conquest of Toledo at the time of the Visigothic (wisiq) king Roderic, in 711; the crux of the story here is Roderic’s seizure of the famous Table of Solomon, whose power had until then protected the kingdom from foreign invaders.4 At this point in the account, Satta¯r stops and writes that the European priest (pa¯drı¯-yi firang, i.e. Jero´nimo Xavier) gave him another version of the story, which constitutes the second part of the Spanish digression. In contrast to the first, this provides dates according to the Christian rather than to the Hijri calendar, as well as transliterations of the exact names of the European protagonists. It starts with the traditional explanation of the loss of Toledo as recorded in Western medieval sources: as Xavier himself explains in his A¯da¯b (SOAS, MS. 7030: 140v–141v), it was all because of the treason of Julian, count of Ceuta, who avenged himself for Roderic’s insult (he had seduced Julian’s daughter) by giving the Muslims considerable help. The account that follows of the eleventh century reconquista of Toledo at the hands of Alphonse VI of Leo´n and Castile (1085) similarly derives from European materials. It is Satta¯r, however, who has the last word: since this time, he laments, not a single Muslim may be found in the country. Satta¯r’s Spanish digression is particularly interesting for two reasons. First, in contrast to the “translation” logic that lay at the root of the Samarat, he here juxtaposes side by side Arabo-Muslim and European-Christian versions of the same event, while refraining from openly favouring one over the other (probably because both put the blame on Roderic, although for different reasons). Second, these pages constitute one of the very few glimpses the Samarat gives its reader into more recent Western history. The only other one is situated at the end of the preface where Satta¯r provides a very brief geopolitical sketch of contemporary Europe: Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Castile are mentioned in turn without, however, further details (BL, MS. 5893: 9).

This brings me to the more general question of the presence and role of contemporary Europe in the two works under analysis. As has just been mentioned, it was minimal in the case of the Samarat, where contemporary Europe was first and foremost a reservoir to be tapped for information on Western ancient history and lore—the actual focus of the work. Still one may wonder why, so far as is known, the Mughals’ universal curiosity did not prompt them to commission some kind of continuation to the Samarat, or why the Jesuits did not think it necessary for them to have one. A closer look at the A¯da¯b-us-salt.anat, and more specifically at the anecdotes it includes, certainly helps to clarify the last point to some extent. In this perspective, the brief piece of advice Xavier gives to the reader in the final lines of the preface is particularly illuminating: because the people mentioned in his book do not hail from India, he writes, he decided to remove their names from the body of the text (matn) in order to facilitate the comprehension of its general principles, and to indicate them instead in the margin (h. a¯shiya) so that the credibility of their words might not be doubted (SOAS, MS. 7030: 9r-v). In other words, the true objective of the A¯da¯b seems to have been primarily to arouse Jaha¯ngı¯r’s interest in the moral principles of Christianity as applied to politics, and secondarily only to inform him about contemporary Europe.

For all that, it is nonetheless significant that among the great men mentioned by Xavier as exempla, figures from Biblical and Classical history are far better represented than personalities of late medieval or early modern times. While the possible reliance of the Jesuit on the Summa Historialis of Antoninus may partly account for this imbalance, his own Navarrean origins and his close relationship with Goa explain to a large extent the Iberian identity of the vast majority of the most recent political figures he refers to. Taking the sixteenth century as an example, the only exception to this scheme is the French Valois king Francis I (ruled 1515–1547), Philip II of Spain (ruled 1556–1598) being by far the most often mentioned. Because Philip II is also the European monarch with whom the Mughals had, by that time, established the closest relations, it is worth pausing for a while on the aspects of his personality and policy Xavier thought fit to publicise in the eyes of his Indian audience.

So far, I have been able to identify six anecdotes relating to the dispensation of the Habsburg who, in the Persian text, is generally referred to as “the emperor of Spain” (ba¯dsha¯h-i ispa¯niyya). These anecdotes are unequally distributed across the A¯da¯b, all of them being found in the third and fourth chapters (SOAS, MS. 7030: 198v–199r, 204v, 229v, 248r-v, 259r, 265v–266r). All in all they illustrate two characteristics of Philip II’s government as seen by Xavier. First, the ability of the monarch to gather information on every possible individual: such knowledge endows him with the necessary foresight to pick up the right men for advice and administration as well as to anticipate his enemies’ moves. Second, Philip II is portrayed as a ruler deeply devoted to the well-being of his subjects: magnanimous and just, he constantly favours peaceful solutions over war. Moving from the universal principles of good government illustrated by these anecdotes to what may be called their historical “traceability”, the analysis takes an interesting turn. In this respect, it should first be noted that only two of these anecdotes name historical characters other than the Habsburg. Interestingly enough, both of them pertain to the Iberian union that followed the death of the Portuguese cardinal-king Dom Henrique (ruled 1578–1580) in 1580.

The shortest one narrates how Philip II gained sovereignty over Portugal through the decision of an assembly (arish)—probably a reference to the Cortes of Tomar of 1581—and how, fearing resistance from his new subjects, he entrusted the Duke of Alba (d. 1587) with taking over the kingdom. To such a request, the latter replied that if he could easily bring the kingdom and its inhabitants to submission, the conquest of their hearts was beyond his capacity, and eventually rested with the monarch himself. His words met with Philip II’s approbation who, after the effective conquest of Portugal, decided to visit his new possessions personally: there, he quickly won the affection of his subjects through his benevolence. While the distortion of historical events is here minimal—the Cortes of Tomar did not precede but follow the Spanish demonstration of force—it grows out of proportion in the second anecdote referring to the Iberian union. This focuses on Martim Gonc¸alves da Caˆmara (1539–1613) who receives here unconditional praise as the faithful minister of two successive Portuguese monarchs, as well as Philip II of Spain after Portugal had come into his possession. Although neither of the Portu guese kings is named, the identity of who Xavier had in mind leaves little doubt. The first, after whose death a very young monarch is said to have ascended the throne, can only be Dom Joa˜o III (ruled 1521–1557). As to his heir, it is of course the ill-fated Dom Sebastia˜o whose personal reign and demise are duly but very briefly mentioned. Nothing, however, is said of his successor Dom Henrique, Xavier jumping directly to Philip II. Like his Portuguese predecessors, the latter decided to entrust Martim Gonc¸alves with the affairs of the kingdom, but only after a thorough investigation had convinced him of the man’s exceptional qualities and probity.

Such a narrative raises, however, a number of issues when compared to what is known otherwise of the figure of Martim Gonc¸alves da Caˆmara, for, if he did indeed wield enormous power and influence during the first part of Dom Sebastia˜o’s reign, he was disgraced by that same monarch in 1576. In addition, he is not known to have played any significant political role under Dom Joa˜o III nor under Philip II. On the contrary: dated April 1580, a letter by Cristo´va˜o de Moura (1538–1613), Philip’s agent in Portugal, describes him as one of the king of Spain’s worst enemies (Paiva 2006: 14–15). One is therefore left to wonder why Xavier chose to inflate Martim Gonc¸alves’s profile to the point of making it necessary to revise the latter’s career so extensively. True, Martim was himself a secular priest closely connected with the Jesuit milieu (on his brother Luı´s Gonc¸alves, a Jesuit who served Dom Sebastia˜o as tutor and confessor, see Alden 1996: 81–84) but, as this piece of information surfaces nowhere in the A¯da¯b, it is hard to believe that Xavier’s distortion was meant to highlight the Jesuits’ qualities as kingly advisers. Be that as it may, the treatment Martim Gonc¸alves received at the hands of Xavier is very instructive where the transmission of Western political history to the Mughal court is concerned. Indeed, it shows that the transformations entailed by such a process did not solely derive from the requirements of translation but may have followed a different logic that is sometimes difficult to grasp.

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