The dominance of the Mongols was based on the discipline of an army of freemen who were intelligent enough willingly to render absolute obedience to their officers as the well-tested condition of certain success. With the break-up of the vast Mongol Empire, the lands now in Russian Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Persia lapsed toward the horde organization of nomad Tatars, but became more and more modified by Moslem feudalism. Under such conditions, Timur, high-born and adventurous, chivalrous and literary, fanatical and cruel, achieved an empire that was large and splendid, but personal to himself, and destined to vanish almost with its founder. Yet he presaged a time when in Asia and Europe alike there should come, after the disintegrating individualism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a period of the gathering together of lands and peoples into large units under strong personal governments. Baber, descendant of Timur in the sixth generation, descendant also of Genghis Khan, came at the beginning of the new era. Less ruthless than either of his great ancestors, less legal than the “Inflexible One,” less Moslem than the “Scourge of Asia,” but possessed of much of the leadership and military genius of both, he stands forth, by reason of his memoirs, as one of the best known conquerors of history. His love of carousing, his family affection, his literary bent, his toleration of heretics and infidels, his bold leadership, his liberality in dividing spoil, presented qualities and suggested modes of activity which were to characterize all his descendants down to the puritanical Aurangzeb.