Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/39

 12 may be said to have begun about this time. For the ensuing nineteen years, during which Sultan Said's reign lasted, the Mirza served him in various capacities, but chiefly as a soldier; and it was only after the Khan’s death, which occurred while returning from an expedition against Ladak in 1533, that he abandoned Kashghar and transferred his services to the Chaghatais in India. He not only took part in Sultan Said's wars against the Kirghiz and Uzbegs in Moghulistan, and against other tribal enemies, but was entrusted with important commands on distant expeditions. The first of these was an invasion of the hill country, then known as Bilur, or Bolor, in 1527. The expedition was nominally under the command of the Khan's eldest son, Rashid Sultan, but seeing that our author acted as a sort of tutor, or governor, to this young prince, it seems that he had much to do with the conduct of the campaign. Bolor may be described, roughly, as all the small hill states lying south of the Hindu Kush, between Baltistan on the east and Afghanistan on the west—as the limits of these countries are now accepted. Thus it included Hunza, Gilgit, Chitral, and probably most of the petty states sometimes known as "Yághistan." There appears to have been no cause for the invasion, other than that the inhabitants were not Musulmans; but considerations of this kind did not weigh with the Central Asian Khans, and Sultan Said, as the author tells us, had always been ambitious of gaining glory by waging wars against "infidels." The Bolor states were accordingly overrun and plundered during a whole winter, and the expedition returned to Kashghar in the following spring.

In 1529–30 the Khan undertook, in person, a campaign against Badakhshán, but sent Mirza Haidar in advance to begin operations. The Mirza records that he laid waste the environs of the chief town, Kila Zafar, and when the Khan arrived, his men had only to carry off what little had been left. The object of this expedition was to gain possession of the districts on the Upper Oxus—Wakhán, Shighnán, etc.—which had been conquered by the late Mirza Abá Bakr, and which Sultan Said, in consequence, considered himself the heir to. But the chief of Badakhshán was a relation and nominee of Baber, who took a view of the matter entirely opposed to that of Sultan Said, and threatened to support the chief. As Baber had now recovered, in India, the influence he had lost in Transoxiana, a letter from him to the aggressive Sultan Said, seems to have been sufficient