Daddy of the Mughal emperor was script away from the coin of the company in 1835
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Answer:You can tell a lot about an emperor from the loose change rattling about in the royal treasury. Was he cautious or a risk-taker? Devout or subversive? Powerful or simply a ‘puppet’? Much can be guessed from the face of the coins minted during his reign. Over the period from 1526 to 1857, as the fortunes of the Mughal empire went from shaky to glorious and then withered to decay, its currency too reflected these shifting sands.
Broadly, the coinage of the Mughals can be sorted into four phases: the wandering or regional phase lasted from 1526 to 1556 with emperors Babur and Humayun; the classical phase (1556-1707) saw leaders like Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb; the decadent phase (1707-1720) began with Shah Alam I, ended with the start of Muhammad Shah’s reign and had as many as seven occupants of the throne who got there by massacring or blinding rivals; and finally, the quasi-Mughal phase (1720-1835) saw the issuing of ‘Mughal’ coins by regional powers in Awadh, Hyderabad and Rohilkhand, as well as enemies of the empire, like the Marathas, Sikhs, Rajputs, the French and the English. These coins carried the nominal consent of the ruling Mughal emperor and were issued in his name.
While the sun may have finally set on the empire only with the end of Uprising of 1857, the decline had begun in 1720. During Muhammad Shah’s three-decade effete rule the influence of the Emperor shrunk rapidly and local powers, both Mughal and non-Mughal, rushed in to claim imperial authority.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start at the very beginning with…
BABUR, THE TRADITIONALIST
A Brief History of the Mughal Empire Through Its Coins - Mughal Coins
Silver Shahrukhi issued by Babur from the Badakshan mint
The Mughal empire was founded by the Timurid adventurer, Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur with the defeat of Ibrahim Lodhi on the dusty battlegrounds of Panipat on 21 April 1526, which gave the victor control over Agra and Delhi. Twenty-two years before that, driven by the humiliating loss of his ancestral kingdom of Ferghana in Central Asia to his Uzbeki rivals, Babur had conquered Kabul. Like a consummate politician, Babur chose to move to greener pastures south of the Hindu Kush and claim Hindustan as a legacy of his great ancestor, Timur Lang, the great Turco-Mongol conquistador of the fourteenth century. The trials and tribulations of his career gave our first Mughal emperor very little time for administrative matters and thus despite the drastic relocation of his kingdom, he continued to issue the staple Timurid currency coins known as the ‘Shahrukhi’. Named after Shahrukh Mirza, Timur’s eldest son, the Shahrukhis were essentially thin broad-flanned coins imprinted with the Sunni Kalima or
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