Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/150

 Rh Khans. He merely speaks of those against whom his hero, Timur, carried on campaigns or had other direct dealings with, but he in no way professes to write the story of the Moghuls for any period. Thus, his narrative ends about a hundred and twenty years before Mirza Haidar was of an age to begin collecting the traditions, which constitute the groundwork of much of the early part of his own book; and for this interval, as well as for the subsequent quarter of a century (about) over which his life extended, it may be said, I think, that he is the sole Musulman authority for the history of the Moghuls. What the Chinese have recorded is brief and incidental only, as we have seen. Where, however, Sharaf-ud-Din occupied himself with Moghulistan and events connected with it in the neighbouring regions, Mirza Haidar has given no account of his own—he trusted entirely to the Yazdi author, and has simply copied his work. The brief period that falls between the opening date of the Tárikh-i-Rashidi, and the point where the Zafar-Náma takes up the narrative, is dealt with to some slight extent by other Musulman authors, though Mirza Haidar gives his own version of it as founded on the traditions of his ancestors.

It may be regarded, therefore, that his history is the only work we have, which deals with the period subsequent to the accounts furnished by the Zafar-Náma—or from the early years of the fifteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth; while for this epoch Mirza Haidar's evidence is unsupported by any European witness, and only very partially attested to by the Chinese annalists. This solitary, individual character of the book may perhaps enhance its value as a history, and render it indispensable as a reference, for the interval where it stands alone; but it must be admitted that it would have had a still higher value had it been illustrated by outside commentary, and had it been connected with Western countries and events by a link of foreign testimony. If, in other words, some European spectator, regarding matters from a different point of view from that of Mirza Haidar, had done for him what Plano Carpini and Rubruk chanced to do for the Jahán Kushat of Juvaini, or Marco Polo for the field covered by authors who treat of the various countries of Asia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the history of the times might have been worked out to better purpose than is the case now, and fewer doubtful points left unelucidated.