later, his debilitated and indolent subjects were overcome and
passed under the power of a Moslem who, in the earlier part of
the sixteenth century, restored the importance of the province.
Ahmed Shah was his name.
He built a citadel of impregnable strength and imposing architecture
and surrounded it by a city with broad streets and splendid buildings
and called it after himself; for Ahmedabad means the City of Ahmed.
Where his predecessor attracted priests and scholars he brought
artists, clever craftsmen, skilled mechanics and artisans in gold,
silver, brass and clay; weavers of costly fabrics with genius to
design and skill to execute. Architects and engineers were sent
for from all parts of the world, and merchants came from every
country to buy wares. Thus Ahmedabad became a center of trade
and manufacture, with a population of a million inhabitants, and
was the richest and busiest city in the Mogul Empire. Merchants
who had come to buy in its markets spread its reputation over
the world and attracted valuable additions to its trades and
professions. Travelers, scholars and philosophers came to study
the causes of its prosperity, and marvelous stories are told by
them in letters and books they wrote concerning its palaces,
temples and markets. An envoy from the Duke of Holstein gives
us a vivid account of the grandeur of the city and the splendor
of the court, and tells of a wedding, at which the daughter of
Ahmed Shah married the second son of the grand mogul. She carried
to Delhi as her dower twenty elephants, a thousand horses and
six thousand wagons loaded with the richest stuffs of whatever
was rare in the country. The household of the rajah, he says,
consisted of five hundred persons, and cost him five thousand
pounds a month to maintain, "not comprehending the account of his
stables, where he kept five hundred horses and fifty elephants."
When this traveler visited the rajah he was sitting in a pavilion
in his garden, clad in a white vestment, according to the Indian
code, over which he had a cloak of gold "brocade," the ground
color being carnation lined with white satin, and above it was
a collar of sable, whereof the skins were sewed together so that
the tails hung over down his back.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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