Page:Akbar and the Rise of the Mughal Empire.djvu/19

 CHAPTER II

The Family and Early Days of Bábar

On the 9th of April, 1336, there was born to the chief of the Firbás, a tribe of the purest Mughal origin, at Shehr-Sebz, thirty miles to the north of Samarkand, a son, the oldest of his family. This boy, who was called Taimur, and who was descended in the female line from Chengiz Khán, was gifted by nature with the qualities which enable a man to control his fellow men. Fortune gave him the chance to employ those qualities to the bost advantage. The successors of Chengiz Khán in the male line had gradually sunk into feebleness and sloth, and, in 1370, the family in that line had died out. Taimur, then thirty-four, seized the vacated seat, gained, after many vicissitudes of fortune, the complete upper hand, and established himself at Samarkand the undisputed ruler of all the country between the Oxus and the Jaxartes. Then he entered upon that career of con- quest which terminated only with his life. He established his authority in Mughalistán, or the country between the Tibet mountains, the Indus and Mekrán, to the south, and Siberia to the north; in Kipchak, the country lying north of the lower