Akbar 'the Great'

Akbar ‘the Great’ (reigned 1556-1605), the greatest Mughal emperor of India. The foothold gained by Akbar's grandfather Babur was lost by the latter's son Humayun, and the work of constituting Mughal authority in northern India fell to the 13-year-old Akbar. This he achieved by a prolonged series of military campaigns which unified all northern India under his rule. Firearms were now in general use throughout India, but notable was Akbar's use of individual, mobile gun carriages for his field guns instead of transporting them on carts to the battlefield and unloading them for static use.

A great centralizer, he was concerned to bring into the governmental structure both able Hindus, especially the Rajputs, and the Muslim Turco-Afghan nobility. The mansabdari system provided civil and military officers with ranks in a hierarchy, involving the requirement to maintain a specified number of heavy cavalrymen. The holders of such ranks were supported by land grants, something like the feudal system, and the whole system linked the mansabdars to the throne as the focus of loyalty and advancement. It made the Mughal army supremely powerful and effective for close on 150 years. Akbar was further a great patron of culture and a keen student of the various religious faiths in the subcontinent, while himself remaining a firm Muslim.

Bibliography

• Irvine, William, The Army of the Great Moguls (London, 1903).
• Richards, John F., The New Cambridge History, vol. 1.5. The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, 1993).
• Smith, V. A., Akbar, the Great Mughal (2nd edn. Oxford, 1919)

— C. E. Bosworth