When Baber first rode down through the grim gates of India’s northwest mountain-wall, the accession of Suleiman lay but a year in the future; the Mogul won the battle of Panipat but four months before the Turk was victorious at Mohacs. Thus the founding of the Mogul Empire nearly coincided with the meridian splendor of the Ottoman power, and its decisive battle of establishment with the victory which led to the last great extension of Ottoman authority into Europe. Not Baber or even Akbar, Suleiman’s contemporaries, but Aurangzeb, whose reign began a century after Suleiman’s death, affords the closest comparison with the Turkish monarch; yet the third battle of Panipat in 1761 marked the virtual destruction of the Mogul Empire, whereas the second battle of Mohacs in 1687 meant but the first noteworthy step of the Ottoman retreat. The house of Timur has disappeared from history, while the house of Osman still reigns over wide territories; less than two and a half centuries of genuine sovereign rule were enjoyed by the Moguls, while six centuries have not sufficed to measure the independent existence of the Ottomans. The Mogul emperors perhaps never ruled so large a territory as the Ottoman sultans, but their lands were far more productive; moreover, having from five to ten times as many subjects as their Western cousins and an income in proportion, they could surpass even the Magnificent Suleiman in display and largesse. The inferior persistence of their dominion, therefore, suggests inferior strength and stability in their institutions, a suggestion to which even a limited investigation lends much support. The Moguls shared with the Ottomans their relation to the ideas of the Mongol and Turkish Tatars of the steppe lands, and to those of the Persians and the Arabs. They were more directly and vitally influenced by the Tatars and Persians, and less directly by the Arabs. Farther than this their relations were not to the comparatively organized and energetic civilization of the Mediterranean but to the more speculative and passive culture of India. Over the lands into which they entered as conquerors lay the shadow not of sternly practical Roman legalism, but of Hindu and Buddhist contempt for things mundane. They founded a despotism, but one that was never, even under Aurangzeb, so closely related to the Sacred Law of Mohammed as was the government of Suleiman. They ruled a variety of lands in a variety of relationships, but never with the stern control exercised by the _Kaisar-i-Rûm_ (Roman emperor), the name which they gave to the Turkish ruler at Constantinople. They enforced the obedience of many peoples, who spoke many languages and practised many forms of religion; yet they never held these peoples under any such iron system of subjection as that which dominated the Christian subjects of the sultan, even to the seizure of their children for tribute.