Kohinoor: The Story of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond

by William Dalrymple

Moreover, the Mughals were not just enthusiasts of the arts; by the height of Akbar’s reign they also had unrivalled resources with which to patronize them. They ruled over five times the population commanded by their only rivals, the Ottomans – some 100 million subjects, controlling almost all of 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 practiced 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 w...