The imperial army of the south, under his auspices, took many forts, and for a time effected a settlement of the country. But after eight years of viceregal splendor, Aurangzeb, at the age of twenty-five, resolved to quit the world, and to pass the rest of his life in seclusion and prayer. His father angrily put a stop to this project; recalled him to Court, stripped him of his military rank, and deprived him of his personal estate. But next year it was found expedient to employ Aurangzeb in the government of another province; and two years later he received the great military command of Balkh. On his arrival the enemy swarmed like locusts upon his camp. The attempt to beat them off lasted till the hour of evening prayer, when Aurangzeb calmly dismounted from his horse, kneeled down in the midst of the battle, and repeated the sacred ritual. The opposing general, awed by the religious confidence of the prince, called off his troops, saying that "to fight with such a man is to destroy oneself." After about seven years of wars and sieges in Afghanistan, Aurangzeb was again appointed Viceroy of Southern India.

In 1657 his eldest brother, firmly planted in the imperial Court, and watching with impatient eyes the failing health of the Emperor, determined to disarm his brethren. He procured orders to recall his youngest brother Murad from his viceroyalty on the western coast; and to strip Aurangzeb of his power in the south. These mandates found Aurangzeb besieging one of the two heretical Muhammadan capitals of Southern India. Several of the great nobles at once deserted him. He patched up a truce with the beleaguered city, and extorted a large sum of money from its boy-king. He had previously squeezed a great treasure from the other independent Muhammadan kingdom of the south. Thus armed, at the cost of the Shia heretics, with the sinews of war, he marched north to deliver his father, the Emperor, from the evil counsels of the Prince Imperial.

For the Emperor, now sixty-seven years of age, lay stricken with a terrible disease. The poor old palace-builder well knew the two essential conditions for retaining the Mughal throne— namely, to be perfectly pitiless to his kindred, and to be in perfect health himself. [He] had been a rebel prince. He left not one male alive of the house of Timur, so that he and his children might be the sole heirs of the empire. These children were now to prove his perdition. Amid the pangs of his excruciating disease his eldest son, Dara, grasped the central

government; while the next son, Prince Shuja, hurried north from his viceroyalty of Bengal to seize the imperial capital.

Prince Shuja was driven back. But there was a son advancing from the south whose steps could not be stayed. Aurangzeb had been forced by his eldest brother's intrigues to assume the defensive. It seems doubtful whether, at first, he aspired to the throne. His sole desire, he declared, was to rescue his father from evil counselors, and then to retire from the world. This longing for the religious life had led to his public degradation when a young prince: it asserted itself amid the splendors of his subsequent reign. At the present crisis it served him for a mask: as to whether it was genuine, his previous and later life, perhaps, entitle him to the benefit of a doubt. On one point he had firmly made up his mind: that the apostasy of his two elder brothers disqualified them for a Muhammadan throne. He accordingly resolved to join his youngest brother, whose viceroyalty lay on his way north; and who, although a drunkard in private life, was orthodox in his public belief.

A five years' war of succession followed. Each one of the four brethren knew that the stake for which he played was an empire or a grave. The eldest brother, Dara, defeated by Aurangzeb and betrayed into his hands, was condemned by the doctors of the law for his apostasy to Islam, and put to death as a renegade. The second brother, Shuja, was hunted out of his viceroyalty of Bengal into the swamps of Arakan, and outraged by the barbarian king with whom he had sought shelter. The last authentic glimpse we get of him is flying across a mountain into the woods, wounded on the head with a stone, and with only one faithful woman and three followers to share his end. The destiny of the youngest brother, Murad, with whom Aurangzeb had joined his forces, for some time hung in the balance. The tenderness with which Aurangzeb, on a memorable occasion, wiped the sweat and dust from his brother's face, was probably not altogether assumed. But the more Aurangzeb saw of the private habits of the young prince, the less worthy he seemed of the throne.

[He finally had Murad executed.]

Having thus disposed of his three brothers, Aurangzeb got rid of their sons by slow poisoning with laudanum, and shut up his aged father in his palace till he died.

Then was let loose on India that tremendously destructive

force, a puritan Muhammadan monarch. In 1658, in the same summer that witnessed the death of the puritan Protector of England, Aurangzeb, at the age of forty, seated himself on the throne of the Mughals. The narrative of his long reign of half a century is the history of a great reaction against the religious compromises of his predecessors, and against their policy of conciliation towards the native races. He set before himself three tasks: he resolved to reform the morals of the Court; to bring down the Hindus to their proper place as infidels; and to crush the two heretical Muhammadan kingdoms of Southern India.

The luxurious lords soon found that they had got a very different master from the old palace-builder. Aurangzeb was an austere compound of the emperor, the soldier, and the saint; and he imposed a like austerity on all around him. Of a humble, silent demeanor, with a profound resignation to God's will in the height of success as in the depths of disaster, very plainly clothed, never sitting on a raised seat in private, nor using any vessel of silver or gold, he earned his daily food by manual labor. But he doubled the royal charities, and established free eating-houses for the sick and poor. Twice each day he took his seat in court to dispense justice. On Fridays he conducted the prayers of the common people in the great mosque. During the month of fast he spent six to nine hours a night in reading the Kuran to a select assembly of the faithful. He completed, when emperor, the task which he had begun as a boy, of learning the sacred book by heart; and he presented two copies of it to Mecca, beautifully written with his own hand. He maintained a body of learned men to compile a code of the Muhammadan law, at a cost exceeding £20,000 sterling.

The players and minstrels were silenced by royal proclamation. But they were settled on grants of land, if they would turn to a better life. The courtiers suddenly become men of prayer; the ladies of the seraglio took enthusiastically to reciting the Kuran. Only the poor dancers and singers made a struggle. They carried a bier with wailing under the window of the Emperor. On his Majesty's looking out and asking the purport of the funeral procession, they answered, that "Music was dead, and they were bearing forth her corpse." "Pray bury her deeply," replied the Emperor from the balcony, "so that henceforth she may make no more noise."

The measures taken against the Hindus seemed for a time

to promise equal success. Aurangzeb at once stopped the allowance to the Hindu high-priest at Benares. Some of the most sacred Hindu temples he leveled with the ground, erecting magnificent mosques out of their materials on the same sites. He personally took part in the work of proselytism. "His Majesty," says a Persian biographer, "himself teaches the holy confession to numerous infidels, and invests them with dresses of honor and other favors." He finally restored the Muhammadan calendar. He refused to receive offerings at the Hindu festivals, and he sacrificed a large revenue from Hindu shrines. He remitted eighty taxes on trade and religion, at a yearly loss of several millions sterling. The goods of the true believers, indeed, were for some time altogether exempted from duties; and were eventually charged only one half the rate paid by the Hindus.

These remissions of revenue compelled Aurangzeb to resort to new taxation. When his ministers remonstrated against giving up the Hindu pilgrim-tax, he sternly declined to share the profits of idolatry, and proposed a general tax on the infidels instead. That hated impost had been abolished by Akbar in the previous century—as part of his policy of conciliation towards the Hindus. Aurangzeb revived the polltax on infidels, in spite of the clamors of the Hindu population. They rent the air with lamentations under the palace windows. When he went forth in state on Friday, to lead the prayers of the faithful in the great mosque, he found the streets choked with petitioners. The Emperor paused for a moment for the suppliant crowd to open; then he commanded his elephants to advance, trampling the wretched people under foot. The detested impost was unsparingly enforced. If a Hindu of rank, writes a Persian historian, met a menial of the tax-office, "his countenance instantly changed." So low were the native races brought, that a proclamation was issued forbidding any Hindu to ride in a palanquin, or on an Arab horse, without a license from government.

While Aurangzeb dealt thus hardly with the Hindu population, his hand fell heavily on the Hindu princes. He vindictively remembered that the Hindu Rajputs had nearly won the throne for his eldest brother, and that their most distinguished chief had dared to remonstrate with himself. "If your Majesty," wrote the brave Hindu Raja of Jodhpur, "places any faith in books by distinction called divine, you will there be instructed that God is the God of all mankind, not the God of the Mussul

mans alone. In your temples to His name, the voice of prayer is raised; in a house of images, where a bell is shaken, He is still the object of worship." Aurangzeb did not venture to quarrel with this great military prince. He sought his friendship, and employed him in the highest and most dangerous posts. But on his death the Emperor tried to seize his infant sons. The chivalrous blood of the Rajputs boiled over at this outrage on the widow and the orphan. They rose in rebellion; one of Aurangzeb's own sons placed himself at their head, proclaimed himself emperor, and marched against his father with 70,000 men. A bitter war of religion followed. Aurangzeb, whose cause for a time seemed hopeless, spared not the Hindus. He burned their homesteads, cut down their fruit-trees, defiled their temples, and carried away cartloads of their gods to the capital. There he thrust the helpless images, with their faces downwards, below the steps of the great mosque, so that they should be hourly trampled under foot by the faithful. The Rajputs, on their side, despoiled the mosques, burned the Kuran, and insulted the prayer-readers. The war ended in a sullen submission of the Hindus; but the Rajputs became thenceforth the destroyers, instead of the supporters, of the Mughal Empire.

Having thus brought low the infidel Hindus of the north, Aurangzeb turned his strength against the two heretical Muhammadan kingdoms of Southern India. The conquest of the south had been the dream of the Mughal dynasty. During four generations, each emperor had labored, with more or less constancy, at the task. To the austere conscience of Aurangzeb it seemed not only an unalterable part of the imperial policy but an imperative religious duty. It grew into the fixed idea of his life. The best years of his young manhood, from seventeen to forty, he had spent as Viceroy of the South, against the heretic Shia kingdoms and the infidel Marathas. When the Viceroy of the South became Emperor of India, he placed a son in charge of the war. During the first twenty-three years of his reign Aurangzeb directed the operations from his distant northern capital. But at the age of sixty-three he realized that, if he was ever to conquer the south, he must lead his armies in person. Accordingly, in 1681, he set forth, now a white-bearded man, from his capital, never to return. The remaining twenty-six years of his life he spent on the march, or in the camp, until death released him, at the age of nearly ninety, from his long labor.