ABSTRACT
The European imagination of the powerful realm of the Great Mughals had been manifested in the records of contemporary travellers or compilers. In 1667 Athanasius Kircher told his readers in his China Illustrata the following: ‘The most powerful monarch to arise from the family of Tamerlane, (. . .), resides in that vast Mughal Empire.’1 Olfert Dapper’s description from 1672 is more detailed. He knew enough to tell that
the kingdom of the Great Mughal, which, because of its size and the power of its tributary kings, deserves the name of empire, is situated between the river Indus in the West and the Ganges in the East, is bordered partly by the Ocean and partly by the kingdom of ‘Kunkan’ or ‘Visiapour’ in the south, in the north by ‘Usbek’, the mountains of ‘Tibeth’, the kingdoms of ‘Srinagar, Kaparangue en Radok’, and finally in the East by the kingdom of ‘Nekbal’.2
