babur

Babur longed to be a great poet, writing admiringly of the fame of his unfortunate cousin Baysunghur Mirza.

Babur struggled on in Central Asia for a while, but was crushed between Uzbeks, Mongols and Timurid princes.

The only things Babur liked about India were the abundance of gold and silver and the weather after the monsoon.

The lover got the girl, but Babur did not get Samarkand.

Babur was ambitious, and his dominion in Kabul was limited by the Afghans' insubordination.

Mr Dale reckons that merchants provided most of the revenues for Babur's remarkably sophisticated taxation system.

Sultan Ibrahim, understandably, ignored him, so Babur marched south and defeated him at the battle of Panipat.

But Babur's orderly state-building could not solve a problem that has troubled Afghanistan's rulers through the ages: the tribes.

Many similar raids followed, and similar towers were built, to encourage submission to Babur's authority.

And the mountains that protected Babur from foreign invaders also protected the tribes from Babur.

Babur's approach to the problem was not constrained by modern notions of human rights.

It was not just the friends that Babur missed.

At one party Babur saw a very surprising sight: a woman drinking.

Poetry went with another taste Babur developed in Kabul: for wine.

Babur was not much interested in women.

Born far to the north of modern Afghanistan, Babur went to Kabul only because he had failed in Central Asia.

Once Babur was so drunk that he was sick and could not remember riding home the night before.

Babur, who is buried in Kabul, used Afghanistan to launch his conquest of a sizable chunk of India and establish centuries of Muslim rule.

"The Garden of the Eight Paradises" , a recent biography of Babur by Stephen Dale, has done it more than justice;