ABSTRACT
For though Mughals, Ottomans and Habsburgs were rivals who possessed certain characteristics in common, they were also quite different from one another, both in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and in terms of the longer-term trajectories for political institutions that they produced. Besides, within the Muslim world, the more or less unchallenged supremacy that the Ottomans had enjoyed since the reign in the 1510s of Yavuz Sultan Selim was now under challenge. During the half-century reign of Sultan Süleyman, ‘the Lawgiver’, the Ottomans were seen as the lords of the holy cities of the Hijaz (as well as Jerusalem), the only great Muslim power with a true maritime reach, and also boasted periodically that they alone possessed territories in all of the ‘seven climes’ of traditional Islamic geography. Mughals and Ottomans appear quite similar in respect of some institutions but dissimilar in respect of others.
