Deeply learned, scientifically rigorous, polyglot and fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, and so able to access the learning of India’s Muslim hakims (doctors) as well as that of his own Jewish community, da Orta gathered an unprecedented amount of information about the medical practices and natural sciences of India, and devoted an entire chapter of his work to clarifying the truth about diamonds.19
He begins by exposing ‘many fables concerning diamonds and the working of diamond mines’. It is not true, he says, that you cannot smash a diamond with a hammer: ‘they are easily broken’. Nor is it true, as Marco Polo and the Alexander Romance had alleged, ‘that they are guarded by serpents that may not be extracted, and that people who own the mines throw poisoned meat in a certain place for the serpents to eat, while they in another place extract the diamonds at their will’. Diamonds are not poisonous, he continues, nor can they be used to test a man’s fidelity by placing one beneath a woman’s pillow: ‘when she is asleep she will embrace her husband if he has been faithful, and if contrary avoid him – a thing I am unable to believe’.
After laying out at length the actual properties of diamonds, da Orta goes on to explain where they can be sourced. It is in Vijayanagara, he says, that India’s biggest diamonds were to be found, and the richest deposits are located within its territories: ‘there are two or three rocks which yield much to the King of Vijayanagara’.
The diamonds yield great income to the King of this country. Any stone which has a weight over 30 carats belongs to the King. For this a guard is placed over the diggers, and if any person is found with any, he is taken with all that he has … The Gujaratis buy them and take them for sale in Vijayanagara, where these diamonds fetch a high price, especially those they call naifes, being those which nature has worked; while the Portuguese value those most which have been polished. The Canarese say that just as a virgin is more valuable than a woman who is not one, so this naife diamond is worth more than a cut one.
Da Orta then discusses the issue of unusually large diamonds:
As to what they say, that no diamond is larger than a filbert [hazelnut], neither Pliny nor any other writer is at fault. They only speak of what they have seen. The largest I have seen in this land was 140 carats, another 120, and I have heard that a native of this land had one of 250 carats. I know he had it, and made a large profit, though he denied it. Many years ago I heard from a person worthy of credit that he saw one in Vijayanagara the size of a small hen’s egg.
Is this an early reference to the Koh-i-Noor, and did the great diamond once grace the throne room of the kings of Vijayanagara before finding its way to Delhi? It is quite possible, but, equally, unprovable.
2
The Mughals and the Koh-i-Noor
In April 1526, Zahir-ud-din Babur, a dashing Turco-Mongol poet-prince from Ferghana in Central Asia, descended the Khyber Pass with a small army of handpicked followers. He brought with him some of the first cannon and muskets seen in northern India. With this new military technology, he defeated and killed the Delhi sultan Ibrahim Lodhi, at the battle of Panipat; a year later, he crushed the Rajputs. He then established his capital at Agra, where he began to build a series of irrigated paradise gardens.
This was not Babur’s first conquest. He had spent much of his youth throneless, living with his companions from day to day, rustling sheep and stealing food. Occasionally he would capture a town – he was fourteen when he first took Samarkand and held it for four months. Generally he lived in a tent, a peripatetic existence that, although sanctioned by Timurid tradition, seemed to have little appeal to him. ‘It passed through my mind’, he wrote, ‘that to wander from mountain to mountain, homeless and helpless, has little to recommend it.’1
Babur not only established the Mughal dynasty, which ruled northern India for 330 years, he also wrote one of the most fascinating diaries ever written by a great ruler: the Baburnama. In its pages, he opens his soul with a frankness and lack of inhibition similar to Pepys, comparing the fruits and animals of India and Afghanistan with as much inquisitiveness as he records his impressions of the difference between falling in love with men and with women, or the differing pleasures of opium and wine.2 Here he also makes reference to an extraordinary diamond that was among the wonderful richness of gems he had captured during his conquests.
As he noted in the Baburnama, when his son Humayun captured the family of Bikramjit, the raja of Gwalior, who were in Agra at the time of Ibrahim Lodhi’s defeat, ‘they made him a voluntary offering of a mass of jewels and valuables, amongst which was the famous diamond which [Sultan] Ala’ ud-Din [Khalji] must have brought. Its reputation is that every appraiser has estimated its value at two and half days’ food for the whole world. Apparently it weighs 8 misqals.’3 Another contemporary source, a small treatise on precious stones dedicated to Babur and Humayun, also refers to Babur’s diamond: ‘No private individual has ever seen such a diamond, or heard of it, nor is there any mention of it in any book.’4 These two mentions are often assumed to be early references to the Koh-i-Noor. They may well be – or not: the description is too vague to be certain, and there were clearly several very large diamonds circulating in India at this time.
Either way, Babur’s diamond soon left India. Babur died in 1530, only four years after his arrival in India and before he could consolidate his new conquests. His dreamy and somewhat feckless son, Humayun, shared his father’s poetic and cultural interests, but he had none of his military genius. He continued to build gardens and spent his days rapt in the study of astrology and mysticism, but his father’s conquests crumbled and in 1540, after less than ten years on the throne, Humayun was forced into exile in Persia.
Throughout his diaries, Babur had shown a mixture of pride and extreme irritation with regard to his brave and intelligent but unfocused, unambitious and perennially unpunctual son; even an undertaking as important as the invasion of India was delayed by several weeks by Humayun failing to present himself on time in Kabul. He eventually turned up, three weeks late, which meant the invasion had to take place in the heat of summer. Both in his rule and during his exile Humayun demonstrated the same dreamy and unreliable nature.
Having lost his kingdom, and abandoned even his wives and infant son Akbar in his flight from India, the one asset Humayun kept with him was his glittering booty of gems from Agra. Rumours of this spread, and while passing through Rajasthan the fleeing emperor was approached by an envoy of Raja Maldev of Jodhpur, ‘an officer in the guise of a merchant’, who asked to buy his most valuable diamond. Humayun would have none of it, sending word to ‘remind this purchaser that the likes of this valuable jewel cannot be bought. Either it will fall into his hands by means of glittering sword coupled with sovereign mind, or it will come about through the favour of exalted kings.’5
Yet even when his diamonds were all he had left, Humayun still showed a bewildering absent-mindedness, if not outright negligence, with regard to them. In July 1544, on his way to seek asylum at the court of the Safavid emperor Shah Tahmasp, Humayun was saved from potentially catastrophic inattention by the quick thinking of a boy named Jauhar.
Jauhar himself wrote many years later:
It was customary with his Majesty always to carry his valuable diamonds and rubies in a purse in his pocket. But when he was performing his ablutions, he generally laid them on one side. This time he had done so, and promptly forgot them: it so happened that when the king was gone, and the humble servant Jauhar was about to remount his horse, he saw a green flowered purse lying on the ground, and a pen case by the side of it: he immediately took them up, and as soon as he had overtaken the King, presented them. When his Majesty saw these articles he was amazed and astonished, and said, ‘Oh my boy, you have done me the greatest possible favour; if these had been lost, I should have been subject to the meanness [rezalet] of this Persian monarch: in future please take care of them.’6
In due course, the diamonds saved Humayun. Though the staunchly Shia Shah Tahmasp initially gav
e the Sunni Humayun a cool reception, he was thrilled by the diamonds Humayun presented him with at their meeting. Jauhar recounts:
We remained several days encamped on the hunting grounds, during which time his Majesty ordered his rubies and diamonds to be brought to him; and having selected the largest diamond, placed it in a mother of pearl box; then he added several other diamonds and rubies; and having placed them on a tray, he gave them in the charge of Byram Beg to present to the Persian monarch with the message, ‘that they were brought from Hindustan purposely for his Majesty’. When Shah Tahmasp saw these precious stones he was astonished, and sent for his jewellers to value them. The jewellers declared that they were above all price; on which the Persian signified his acceptance.7
When Humayun eventually returned to India, he did so at the head of a cohort of Shah Tahmasp’s cavalry which enabled him to recover his throne.
For reasons that remain unclear, however, shortly afterwards, in 1547, Shah Tahmasp sent Babur’s diamond to his Indian Shia ally, the sultan of Ahmadnagar, one of the rulers of the Deccan. According to Khur Shah, the ambassador of the rival Sultanate of Golconda to the Persian court, ‘it is notorious that a connoisseur of jewels valued this diamond at two and half days’ subsistence of the whole world. Its weight is 6½ misqals [a slightly lower estimate than that given by Babur himself]. But in the eyes of his Majesty the Shah, it was not of such great value. At last he sent that diamond along with his envoy Mihtar Jamal, as a present to Nizam Shah [of Ahmadnagar], the ruler of the Deccan.’8 It seems, however, that while the envoy delivered the shah’s letter, he failed to deliver the diamond, and the shah subsequently tried – and failed – to have his absconding envoy arrested.9
Babur’s diamond disappears from the record at this point, presumably locked in the treasury of some unknown merchant, noble or ruler in the Deccan: was it, for example, the exceptionally large diamond, ‘the size of a small hen’s egg’, that Garcia da Orta heard had made its way to Vijayanagara? It is impossible to know; indeed it is unclear not only if this much admired and much travelled diamond of Babur is actually the Koh-i-Noor, but also if, when or how it may have re-entered the Mughal treasury.
What is certain is that if it did eventually return to Delhi, it did not do so for at least a generation. Abu’l Fazl, the friend and biographer of the greatest of the Mughal emperors, Akbar, in his 1596 account of the imperial treasury, writes explicitly that the largest diamond in the treasury at that time was a much smaller stone of 180 ratis (1 rati is 0.91 metric carats or 0.004 ounces) – around half the size of Babur’s diamond, which weighed around 320 ratis. It was not until much later that a massive diamond, of very similar weight to Babur’s, returned to Mughal hands.10
The Mughals brought with them from Central Asia a very different set of ideas about gemstones to those then held in India. These ideas derived from the philosophy, aesthetics and literature of the Persianate world. Here it was not diamonds but ‘red stones of light’ that were given pre-eminence.11 In Persian literature such stones were prized as symbols of the divine in metaphysics and of the highest reaches of the sublime in art, evoking the light of dusk – shafaq – that fills the sky immediately after the sun has set.
As Ferdowsi writes in his great Shah-Nama, or Book of Kings:
When the sun gave the world the colour of the spinel,
Dark night set foot on the celestial vault.12
Garcia da Orta is explicit that diamonds were not regarded as the pre-eminent gemstone by the Mughals – something which came as an enormous surprise to Europeans. In his Colloquies, da Orta has his interlocutor, Dr Ruano, remark that diamonds ‘are the king of stones, for [they have] eminence over pearls and emeralds and rubies, if we believe Pliny’. Da Orta, however, corrects him: ‘In this country … they think more of an emerald or of a ruby, which have more value if they are perfect, and size for size, than of a diamond. But as they do not find other stones when perfect and of good water so large as diamonds, it happens that they often fetch a higher price. The value of the stones is no more than the will of buyers and the need for them.’13
Abu’l Fazl also gives pride of place to beautifully coloured and transparent red stones in his description of Akbar’s imperial treasuries at the end of the sixteenth century: ‘The amount of revenues is so great,’ he writes, ‘and the business so multifarious, that twelve treasuries are necessary for storing the money, nine for the different kinds of cash payments, and three for precious stones, gold and inlaid jewellery.’ Rubies and spinels, divided into twelve classes, come first; diamonds – of which there are half the quantity of spinels and rubies – second, and these were kept mixed up with emeralds or blue corundum (sapphires), which the Mughals knew as blue yaquts. Pearls are in the third treasury: ‘If I were to speak of the quantity and quality of precious stones’ possessed by the emperor, he writes, ‘it would take me an age.’14
The Mughals, perhaps more than any other Islamic dynasty, made their love of the arts and their aesthetic principles a central part of their identity as rulers. They consciously used jewellery and jewelled objects as they used their architecture, art, poetry, historiography and the dazzling brilliance of their court ceremonial – to make visible and manifest their imperial ideal, to give it a properly imperial splendour, and even a sheen of divine legitimacy. As Abu’l Fazl put it, ‘Kings are fond of external splendour, because they consider it an image of the Divine glory.’15
Moreover, the Mughals were not just enthusiasts of the arts; by the time Akbar’s reign was at its height, they also had unrivalled resources with which to patronise them. They ruled over five times the population commanded by their only rivals, the Ottomans – some 100 million subjects, by the early seventeenth century controlling almost all of present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as eastern Afghanistan. Their capitals were the megacities of their day. ‘They are second to none either in Asia or in Europe,’ thought the Jesuit Father Antonio Monserrate, ‘with regards either to size, population, or wealth. Their cities are crowded with merchants, who gather there from all over Asia. There is no art or craft which is not practised there.’
For their grubby contemporaries in the West, stumbling around in their codpieces, the silk-clad Mughals, dripping in jewels, were the living embodiment of wealth and power – a meaning that has remained impregnated in the word ‘mogul’ ever since. In a letter from the court of Emperor Jahangir to the future King Charles I, Sir Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to the court of the great Mughal, reported in 1616 that he had entered a world of almost unimaginable splendour. The emperor, he wrote, was:
clothed, or rather laden with diamonds, rubies, pearls, and other precious vanities, so great, so glorious! His head, necke, breast, armes, above the elbowes, at the wrists, his fingers each one with at least two or three rings, are fettered with chaines of dyamonds, rubies as great as walnuts – some greater – and pearles such as mine eyes were amazed at … in jewells, which is one of his felicityes, hee is the treasury of the world, buyeing all that comes, and heaping rich stones as if hee would rather build [with them] than wear them.16
As Roe realised, Jahangir (1569–1627) was an enormously curious and intelligent man: observant of the world around him and a keen collector of its curiosities – from Venetian swords and globes to Safavid silks, jade pebbles and even narwhal teeth. As well as maintaining the empire and commissioning great works of art, he took an active interest in goat and cheetah breeding, medicine and astronomy, and had an insatiable appetite for animal husbandry. But above all his other interests he was obsessed with gemmology and the beauty of precious stones, and he wore them lavishly on all state occasions – almost as if he was consciously turning himself into a bejewelled object. As the Flemish gem-trader Jacques de Coutre put it when he was admitted to an audience: ‘He was seated on a most rich throne, and he had hanging around his neck many precious stones and large spinels, emeralds and all manner of large pearls on his arms, and many large diamonds hanging from his
turban. In sum, he had so many jewels that he appeared like an idol.’17
Many of the pages of Jahangir’s memoirs, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, are devoted to his work admiring and collecting the greatest gemstones of the world. This process reached its climax each New Year, or Nau Roz, which Jahangir turned into an annual feast when all the nobles of the court were expected to shower him with gemstones – and he in turn would be weighed against gold and precious stones, which would then be distributed to the populace. The Nau Roz of 1616 was typical. Jahangir wrote:
On this day the offering of Mir Jamal-ud-Din Husain was laid before me. What he offered was approved and accepted. Among other things was a jewelled dagger which had been made under his superintendence. On its hilt was a yellow ruby, exceedingly clear and bright, in size equal to half a hen’s egg. I had never before seen so large and beautiful a yellow ruby. Along with it were other rubies of approved colour and old emeralds. Brokers valued it at 50,000 rupees. I increased the mansab [rank] of the said Mir by 1,000 horse … Later, I’tmad ud-Daula [the prime minister] presented me with his offering, and I examined it in detail. Much of it was exceedingly rare. Of the jewels, there were two pearls worth 30,000 rupees, one qutbi ruby which had been purchased for 22,000 rupees, with other pearls and rubies. Altogether the value was 110,000 rupees. These had the honour of acceptance … My son Baba Khurram at this blessed hour laid before me a ruby of the purest water and brilliancy, which they pronounced to be of the value of 80,000 rupees.18
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