ABSTRACT
DURING the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the only Sunni monarchs who could rival the Ottoman Sultans in wealth and extent of territory were the Mughal emperors in India. After the manner of their ancestors in Transoxiana, they commonly assumed the title of Khalifah, and from the reign of Akbar onwards they called their capital dar ul-khilafat (the abode of the Caliphate). Akbar's famous gold coin bore the inscription 'The great Sultan, the exalted Khalifah'.1 It certainly never formed any part of the policy of the Mughals to acknowledge the overlordship of the Ottoman Sultan; their own wealth and power made them independent of outside assistance, even if any could have been rendered by an empire so far removed from their own, nor did the current theory of the Caliphate suggest submission to some central Muslim authority. But this attitude of independence did not stand in the way of such complimentary interchange of titles, as has already been noted in the correspondence between Mul}.ammad I and Shah Rukh (p. 133), and between Mul}.ammad II and Ozun ~asan (p. 135), or Sultan ~usayn of Khura,san (p. 118). Correspondence was opened in the name of Akbar in 1557 with Sultan Sulayman, when Akbar was only a boy of fourteen years of age; advantage was
house that ruled over India and had ' thrown the collar of obedience on the necks of all the Sultans on the surface of the earth'. The writer then goes on to enumerate the various territories under Mughal rule, so vast that travellers marching on every day could not reach to the end of them in the course of a year or even more. Before the letter closes, a word of praise and congratulation is added for the victories of the ' Khalifah of the (four) rightly directed Khalifahs' (by which unusual appellation was apparently meant the late Sultan Murad IV), who had uplifted the banners of Islam and strengthened the religion of the Prophet. 3 This elicited a courteous reply from the Grand Wazir, expressing regret for the misunderstanding and a wish for the establishment of friendly relations. But opportunity is taken to emphasize the greatness of the Sultan, on the basis of the very claim that fired the imagination of Salim I, namely, that in his dominions are comprised the House of God (in Mecca), the grave of the Prophet (in Medina), the holy house (in Jerusalem), and the resting-places of illustrious Apostles and Prophets; and many of the same phrases are employed by the Wazir to extol his master as were in use two centuries before in the reign of Salim's grandfather (p. 136), such as ' the light of the pupil of the eye of the Caliphate, the light of the garden of the Sultanate, ... the Shadow of God upon earth, the Sultan of the two continents, the Khaqan of the two seas, the servant
