MIRZA ZU-L-QARNAIN, A CHRISTIAN GRANDEE. 161 



rupees with which to cover his expenses. Mirza refused, on the plea that he had no 

 leave from his father Janguir, to whom he had to give an account of all the money 

 and revenues of the lands under him. Xajan took occasion of this to recall him 

 from that place. 1 Mirza came away to Agra, where he possessed a very fine house 

 along the River. * Mirza' s enemies represented to the King that, though he had given 

 a good account of himself and paid whatever belonged to the King's crown, he had 

 brought with him his profits amounting to many leques of rupees. The King's officers 

 went to his house and dug in many parts of it and of his garden, to find out whether he 

 had hidden any money, Mirza left his house (se sahio de sua corte), and came to our 

 College of Agra, whither the King's officers followed to dig with the same diligence our 

 garden and cloisters (? enclosure, crastas). Finding nothing, they went away. Mirza 

 was many years in disfavour with the King. Nevertheless, he accompanied him wher- 

 ever he went, to the hunt or any other enterprise ; and, as King Xajan had been as a 

 child brought up in the Palace with Mirza, his suspicions vanished, and, in the year 

 1649, when I was at Agra, the King reinstated Mirza in the government of Sambar, 

 on condition that he [Mirza] should pay him every year six leques of rupees from the 

 salt- revenues. Mirza went back, taking with him, as always, Fr. Francisco Morando. 

 He remained there two years, at the end of which Mirza told King Xajan that, as he 

 was now old 3 and had no longer the strength to conduct the management of those 

 revenues, he must, [| if he wished to enhance them, appoint in his place some one more Pol. 4^. 

 able than himself. The King did as requested. He called Mirza to his Court, 

 assigned a hundred rupees a day as his salary, and dispensed him, as a privilege, from 

 going with him when he travelled. As to Mirza's two sons, the King gave one seven 

 rupees a day, and to the younger five. 4 Even in the poverty to which he now found 

 himself reduced, and though the pay he now received from the King was so small 

 compared with what it used to be, he kept fifty horsemen in his service to accompany 

 him when he went outside. And as he was so devoted to poetry, he composed at 

 every step verses in the King's honour; and, first calling the King's singers to his 

 house, he taught them and sent them to the Palace to sing that night what he. had 

 composed. On one occasion, as the King had come from Laor, Prince Dara. Xecut 6 

 called Mirza, with whom he was very friendly, and told him : 'Merebhay , merebhay , i.e., 

 my brother, my brother, my father has just come from L,aor ; make a Tor pet* i.e., a 



1 During the first five years of Shah Jahan's reign Zu-1-Qarnain was in favour. Shah Jahan may have raked up in 

 1632 the grievance here mentioned by Fr. Botelho. 



i If the M rza's house was close to the river, how could it have been near the house of the Jesuit Fathers, as Taver- 

 nier says ? Would not this show that Tavernier {supra, pp. 144-145) is mixing up Zu-1-Oarnain's story with that of another 

 Armenian ? The distance to the river is not, however, very great, and Zu-1-Qarnain's garden may have come close to 

 the Fathers' property. 



•5 He was only sixty. The above passage gives an answer to a remark my friend Mr. H. Beveridge made in one of 

 his letters. He could not, he said, find in the Muhammadan authors any allusion to the Mirza's having been re-employed. 



* Was his youngest, son, Mirza Daniel, born in or before 1638 (Cf. infra, p 164 n. 6), too young in Fr. Botelho's time 

 (1648-54) to take service under the King? It is. said further that Zu-1-Qarnain saw his (three?) sons and daughter 

 honourably married in his lifetime, and that the youngest, Daniel, survived his father. Cf. pp. 164-165. 



S Prince Dara Shikoh, Shah Jahan's eldest son. Possibly, Fr, Bote'ho refers to a song composed by the Mirza, at 

 Dara Shikoh's suggestions in 165 1, when Shah Jahan returned from Kashmir to Lahore. Cf. infra, p. 164; 164 n. 6. 



8 Dhurpad: a kind of song in the Hindi or Braj bhasha dialect {Forbes}. " The Dhurpad (Dhruva-pada) consists of 

 four rhythmical lines without any definite length of words or syllables." Ain, Jarrett's transl. Ill, p. 251 and 251 n. 2. 



