The three so-called early modern Islamic empires formed in regions where the pre-Islamic Byzantine, Achaemenid and Sasanian and Mauryan and Delhi Sultanate states had originally been centered: the Bosphorous and Anatolia, the Iranian Plateau and the South Asian subcontinent. The boundaries of the Muslim-ruled Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal states were determined to a considerable degree by fixed geographic and economic realities, despite the explicit or implied universalistic pretensions of their dynasties. Individual rulers may have harbored grand ambitions, but none of these empires ever sought to destroy their imperial neighbors, but instead attempted only to occupy the marchlands between them. Thus the boundaries between the Ottomans and Safavids and the Safavids and Mughals remained largely static, even while the Ottomans occupied the Balkans, the Fertile Crescent, Egypt and North Africa, the Safavids subdued Georgia and overran western Afghanistan and the Mughals retained Kabul and eastern Afghanistan, while they bludgeoned the Deccan Sultanates into submission.

There exists an uncritical assumption within the framework of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 that the broad dissemination of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) principles, coupled with an associated general training regime, will invariably facilitate greater operational compliance with IHL by military forces. Such a perspective has been correctly characterised as a necessary, but perhaps not sufficient, basis for confidence in the capacity to enhance meaningful norm compliance. The difficulty lies in the broad nature of the discretion afforded to nations when undertaking training and education in IHL. Much rides on the character and quality of the training to be dispensed and not all training is the same.

‘Hindustan is vast, populous and productive.’ With this sentence Babur introduces the Hindustan Gazetteer section of the Vaqayi‘. Like Babur's earlier gazetteer of the Kabul region, this gazetteer prefaces the political and military narrative of the following years. It introduces his Turki-speaking readers to the kingdom he had just seized from Ibrahim before he resumes the narrative by describing the distribution of the Ludi treasury in Agra. Yet, the two gazetteers are substantially different. His survey of the Kabul region of eastern Afghanistan reflects the detailed knowledge of its tumans or districts he acquired over two decades. It is not only vastly more detailed and precise than his survey of Hindustan, but in the gazetteer and the subsequent narrative of his Afghan decades, Babur also reveals his love for the region, where he later asked to be buried.

In contrast, Babur's account of Hindustan, where he lived for only 4 years, is much briefer – his appreciative survey of its exotic flora and fauna constitutes the greatest part of the section. Otherwise, it is distinguished by his largely dismissive critique of the environment and society of the Hindustan he had, in his own words, so long desired. Later, he translates this critique into deeply emotional verses of regret that he wrote in India after the conquest. In part, he reacted as a homesick Timurid in both the critique and verse. He and his compatriots found Hindustan to be both strange and also deeply repugnant in many different respects. Compared with ‘our countries’, he writes in Turki and presumably alluding to Mawarannahr, it is an ‘extraordinary country,’ gharib mamlekati. Babur further writes that everything about it is different: ‘its mountains, rivers, jungles and deserts, its people and their tongues, its rains and its winds are all different… Once the water of Sind [Indus] is crossed, everything is in the Hindustan way: land, water, tree, rock, people and horde, opinion and custom’. Nor was he alone in experiencing northern India as a profoundly foreign country. Some of his most loyal and long-serving begs abandoned him within months of the Panipat victory to return to Afghanistan.

Babur may not have cared for the Hindustan he had so long desired, but following his victory at Panipat in April 1526 he set about trying to realise his ambition of subjugating a country he did not control.

In his history of the Mongol Khans, Haidar Mirza Dughlat Kürägän (d. 1551) included what amounted to an obituary of Babur, who, Haidar Mirza gratefully reports, treated him like a son after he took refuge with Babur in Kabul in 1509. Writing in Persian, he says of his older Timurid cousin:

Later in the century Abu'l Fazl ‘Allami (1551–1602), Akbar's chronicler, produced a more elaborate memorial to Babur. Using the florid style beloved of literate Persian-speaking intellectuals, such as Shaikh Zain Khwafi, the chronicler of the Battle of Kanwah, Abu'l Fazl, wrote:

In 1488, the 5-year-old Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur – the future founder of the Timurid-Mughal Empire of India – travelled more than 300 miles from his home in the Ferghanah Valley westward to the ancient Central Asian city of Samarqand, which was formerly the capital of the Turco-Mongol conqueror Temür (1336–1405). Babur, the eldest son of ‘Umar Shaikh Mirza (d. 1494), a fourth-generation descendant of Temür, very likely left on his journey from his father's base at Akhsı. It was a Ferghanah town and citadel located high on the north bank of the Syr Darya River. He was probably escorted on his trip by his mother Qutluq Nigar Khanım (d. 1505) – the second daughter of Yunas Khan (d. 1487), the recently deceased Khan of the Chaghatai Mongols and a direct descendant of Chinggis Khan (1162–1227). Babur was taken to Samarqand to be betrothed to his equally young first cousin ‘Ayisha Sultan Begim – the daughter of his paternal uncle Ahmad Mirza (d. 1494), the ruler of Samarqand. He consummated the marriage eleven years later in 1500, noting the event with a single laconic sentence in his autobiography. ‘Sultan Ahmad Mirza's daughter, named ‘Ayisha Sultan Begim, whom my father and hers affianced to me, came to Khujand and I married her in the month of Sha‘ban.’

By his descent from both Temür and Chinggis Khan, Babur inherited an impeccable Central Asian, Turco-Mongol legitimacy. Since he was a patrilineal descendant of Temür, Babur was a Timurid, and the dynastic identity doubled by the marriage to his young cousin. He and his male relations derived their imperial ambitions from Temür, an Islamised member of the Barlas tribe – a Turkicised Mongol tribe – whose homeland was located near Kish, 48 miles south of Samarqand. While not a descendant of Chinggis Khan, Temür married into the Chinggisid line taking the title Gurkan or son-in-law, and he assumed the title Temür Gurkan. Gurkanian became the official dynastic name of the Timurids of Central Asia as well as their Indian descendants. Babur does not, however, use this term to refer to his own political lineage. He once alludes to himself as one of the Timuriyeh Salatını, ‘Timurid Sultans’, but more commonly, he refers to Temür's descendants, including himself, simply as Turks.

Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483–1530) was an individual of major political and literary importance in the early modern era and beyond. Politically, he was a pivotal figure in the history of both Central Asia and India. Thus, by successfully conquering the north Indian heartland between 1526 and 1530, he initiated a Timurid Renaissance, revitalising the dynastic history of Temür's descendants by founding what has come to be known erroneously as the Mughal or Mongol Empire. In literature, he wrote the world's single most vital, revealing and engaging dynastic autobiography, an incomparable work of humanistic interest that also contains unique information about Central Asian life and politics and Indian society in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Babur once wrote to a kinsman, upbraiding him for failing to join the coalition fighting the Uzbeks – the Timurids’ implacable enemies, by reminding him: ‘a person's acts outlive him… Wise men have called an illustrious name a second life’. Doubly illustrious as a conqueror and writer, he has enjoyed a considerable second life, although not as fully or meaningfully as he deserves considering his achievements. This biography represents an effort to ensure that his first life is better understood in order that his second might be more widely and sympathetically acknowledged.

Babur, as he is simply and usually known, was a fifth-generation patrilineal descendant of the Central Asian conqueror Temür, also known as Tîmur-i lang, ‘Timur the Lame’ or Tamerlane (1336–1405). He traced his descent through Temür's son Miran Shah (1366–1408), once a governor of parts of Afghanistan and Iran. On his mother's side, he was a fifteenth-generation matrilineal descendant of Chinggis Khan (1162–1227) through Chinggis Khan's son Chaghatai Khan (1226–42), who had ruled Mongol territories in Central Asia. In dynastic terms, Babur referred to himself either as a Turk, or a Timurid, and like other patrilineal descendants of Temür, he inherited the title mirza – an Arabic-Persian contraction of the phrase amir zadeh, son of an amir, a prince or noble. His Chaghatai Mongol male kins were known as khans, after their patrilineal descent from Chinggis Khan. Babur never thought of himself as a Mongol, but his dual descent justifies calling his Indian conquests the Timurid-Mughal Empire.

Babur's third and last attempt to reclaim Samarqand for himself and the Timurids was made possible by Shah Isma‘il when on 2 December 1510, the founder of the new Safavid state defeated and killed Shaibani Khan Uzbek near Merv. This city in modern Turkmenistan was approximately 150 miles northeast of the Iranian city of Mashhad. Babur learned of Shaibani Khan's death when his Miranshahi Timurid cousin, Wais Mirza, sent a messenger with the news also telling him that 20,000 Mongols – previously subjugated by the Uzbeks – had arrived in Qunduz. According to Haidar Mirza, Babur, always ‘the Padshah’ in his text, immediately left Kabul for Qunduz, taking the route with no high passes because it was winter. He reached Bamian and celebrated Ramadan on 1 January. He arrived at Qunduz in late January, where Wais Mirza and the Mughul troops greeted him.

In 1507, Wais Mirza had earlier gone to Badakhshan with Shah Begim – Babur's maternal or Mughul grandmother – when Shaibani Khan Uzbek seemed poised to march on Kabul from Qandahar. He had been living, what Haidar Mirza describes as a ‘miserable life’ in the isolated Badakhshan fortress of Zafar, harassed by Uzbek marauders and surrounded by hostile Badakhshan natives. After he heard about Shaibani Khan's death and sent his messenger to Babur, Wais Mirza went to Qunduz. He apparently hoped to assemble a joint anti-Uzbek campaign with Babur that might improve his own political fortunes and those of his displaced relatives, who had suffered badly after the Uzbek triumph in Mawarannahr.

It is impossible to say how many loyal troops Babur brought with him from Kabul. He had earlier commanded about 2,000 when he marched on Qandahar, but he had suppressed the recent revolt in Kabul with only 500 men. Whatever his force, sometime later that winter, Babur, Wais Mirza and some of the recently arrived Mongols crossed the Amu Darya, intending to attack the two Uzbek governors of Hisar. Yet, when they prepared to stage an attack on the camp of one of the Uzbeks, Hamza Sultan, they discovered that he had already fled.

Babur's account of his 22 years in Afghanistan, which breaks off in 1508 and resumes in 1519, first of all shows a man recently transformed from a refugee to a ruler by the power of legitimacy, struggling to survive in the face of further Uzbek assaults in an impoverished Kabul province, which was populated by a contentious maelstrom of Afghan tribes. Gradually, he achieved a measure of control and stability in Kabul and the city's immediate hinterlands, and despite the many alarms and excursions of the following years, he came to love the city and its mountainous environs. The irony of his Afghan life is that, while he ruled in Kabul for more than two decades, he always viewed his occupation of the city as a temporary necessity. During the first decade, he hoped to use it as a base to return north and restore Timurid rule in Samarqand. When that attempt failed in 1511, he gradually turned his gaze to the southeast, and after 1514, Kabul became a staging ground for the probing attacks on India that culminated in his invasion and victory over the Ludi Afghans at the Battle of Panipat in April 1526.

Yet, not only did Babur mature in Kabul, where he enjoyed a considerable degree of stability for the first time in his young life, but these were his years of great personal and intellectual accomplishment. While ruling the city, he fathered eighteen children with four wives, wrote a considerable body of Turki poetry, composed an ambitious verse treatise on Islamic law, and finally, abandoned his childhood abstinence. It was also during these two decades that he created a congenial life for himself, revelling in alcohol-fuelled suhbatlar, the convivial gatherings of friends, poets, artists and musicians, that came to represent for him the good life, a life lived as much as possible in the aesthetically pleasing context of the formal Persianate garden. It was the civilised norm he had hoped to enjoy in Samarqand and briefly experienced in Herat when he visited the great Timurid city in 1506. He longed to experience this life again after his victorious campaigns in India, but once there, he failed to find respite and longed to return north, to what had become for him his Afghan home.

In December 1528, not only did Babur celebrate the foundation of the Timurid Empire of Hindustan, on 27th of the month, he also completed a second collection of his verse, now known as the Rampur Diwan, named after the Indian town where the manuscript was discovered. The collection includes a copy of his versified translation of Khwajah ‘Ubaidullah Ahrar's text, a masnavi, a ghazal, several ruba‘iyat and other verse fragments. Babur's ruba‘iyat contains psychologically revealing lines about his state of mind during the preceding two and half years. They express and magnify the degree of unease or actual depression he sometimes felt during this period of intense activity, and which he hints at in the few long verses he includes in the Vaqayi’ for 1528.

Having desired Hindustan, as he insists, since taking Kabul in 1504, he increasingly reveals himself to be deeply conflicted by his exile or ghurbat, from what he had come to regard as a richer life in a poorer but better place – the Afghan capital. He had already expressed a degree of remorse in his verse reply to Khwajah Kalan's parting poetic shot, which his friend had left on the wall of his house in Agra in 1526. The sense of loss he hints at in that poem and the depression he alludes to after translating and versifying Khwajah Ahrar's verse, Babur expresses poignantly in several of the poems of the Rampur Diwan. He also reiterates his feelings in a letter he sends to Khwajah Kalan on 10 February 1529. Nonetheless, he, quite literally, ‘soldiered on’ during the next 2 years as he fought to replenish his depleted treasury and expand the perimeter of the Timurid state. All the while he struggled to retain control over his imperfectly subjugated home territories: the Punjab, and the Delhi-Agra Duab and then, there were the illnesses.

A Darkening Mood

In the first Turki ruba‘i listed in the Rampur collection, written apparently just after Babur had celebrated becoming a ghazi, and not a shahid, at the Battle of Kanwah, he openly reveals the emotional regret he felt after finally obtaining what he earlier claimed was his long sought goal – Hindustan.