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The Great Mogul

A Stormy Birth and a Tragic End-Two Centuries of History--Intrigue and Murder--The Afflictions of Shah Jehan--An Honest Cutter--The Great Mogul and the Koh-i-Nur--Eastern Magnificence--A King showing his Jewels to a Visitor--Shape of the Great Mogul and its General Appearance--Its Identity Established--A Usurper's Subterfuge--Shah Jehan's Desire to Destroy all his Gems--The Peacock Throne--Mysterious Disappearance of the Gem at the Fall of Delhi.

BROUGHT to light in the midst of tumults and wars, the Great Mogul Diamond went out with the expiring flames of a mighty rebellion. Its existence covers a remarkable and eventful period of the world's history. At the time of its discovery, Round-heads and Royalists were fighting for supremacy in England; and after many tragic incidents of pestilence and battle, the Deccan had just got its first independent sovereign. Ben Johnson and Phillip Massenger were writing plays, and their countrymen, who carried the commercial flag of the land into strange seas, had just obtained authority to trade with the Portuguese ports in India. The Great Powers were busy with their first important explorations; and the East India Company had newly received the charter of Queen Elizabeth. A meteor among gems, the Great Mogul challenged the wonder and admiration of the world from this period for two hundred years, to go to pieces in the last days of the Indian Mutiny. There is a little uncertainty as to the date when the Gani Mine gave up its precious freight; but only in the matter of a few years, and we are inclined to fix it somewhere between 1630 and 1650, It is impossible to ticket and number a gem such as the Great Mogul as if it were a piece of antiquity, the relic of an ancient palace, the capital of a column, the statute of some classic sculptor. The births of the famous diamonds which scintillate the dark traditions of Eastern Courts are all, as we have said before, more or less shrouded in mystery; but few gems have had a more striking career or a more dramatic denouement than the Great Mogul.

It was at a strange and sanguinary period when the first European saw this remarkable stone, under circumstances which we shall presently quote in the narrator's own words. The year was, November, 1665, a few years before the decease of "the Grand Monarque," Shah Jehan. The scene was the Palace of Agra, formerly the Metropolis of the Empire, but then the prison of the dethroned and stricken Great Mogul. For seven years he had been kept in close durance; Murad, his youngest son, had just been murdered by the usurper, Aurung-zeb, his brother, who had stimulated the lad's ambition, in order accomplish his own designs on the life of both father and son; Dara, the eldest son of the captive Monarch, a man of great parts, brave, handsome, and gifted, had been betrayed by his brother's contrivance. Hurried ignominiously to Delhi, he was led as a captive through that city, cast into prison, and treacherously murdered. His son Soliman had suffered a similar fate. Sujah, the Monarch's second son, whose intellectual and bodily gifts were certainly not inferior to Dara's (and whose beautiful daughter had been passionately wooed by Mohammed, Aurung-zeb's son and heir, but had been rejected by her father), had but recently been murdered; and the bridegroom's father, after contriving to alienate for a time the confidence of the bride in her husband by a groundless invention, actually contrived to kill his own son, and only stopped his murderous course when the bride's untimely death rendered her assassination needless. It is hard to believe that Shah Jehan, whose one redeeming quality was his love for the children of his wife, whom he had named the "Light of the World," and who had been kept informed of the calamities which had befallen his house, should, under the depression of these afflictions have shown a French jeweller his treasures. "These are my jewels," said the classic mother pointing to her children in response to the Princess's exhibition of her gems; and we would like to credit "the Grand Monarque" with equal feelings of affection. But Tavernier, as will be seen, is explicit in his statement, and though it may be that he had some purpose to serve in his elaboration of the scene, there is no reason whatever to doubt his description of the famous stone.

Without further preface, let us now discuss the data upon which rests the "strange eventful history" of the Great Mogul. Excluding the doubtful Braganza, this splendid stone was unquestionably the largest diamond of which there is any distinct record. It takes its name from its owner, Shah Jehan, fifth in succession from Baber, founder of the so-called "Mogul" dynasty in Hindustan. As to its early history, there was never any serious doubt until the Koh-i-Nur was brought to Europe in 1850. Since that time its very identity has been called in question, and, while some authorities continue to regard the two famous stones as distinct, others now hold that they are really one under two different names. There is, however, no real foundation for doubting the individual existence of the two. Evidence to the contrary is as weak as the facts on the other side are strong. The histories of the stones differ in this remarkable respect, that the story of the Koh-i-Nur may be said to have no beginning, while that of the Great Mogul seems, on the other hand, to have no end. The available data, if duly considered, must satisfy all candid inquirers that they are undoubtedly two distinct gems, having little in common beyond their unusual size, and their simultaneous presence for nearly a hundred years in the Khazana or treasure-house of the Mogul emperors. At p. 251 of his translation of Francois Bernier's Travels in the Mogul Empire, Irving Brock observes that "the largest diamond probably ever heard of is one mentioned by Tavernier, who saw it in the possession of Aurung-zeb. It was about as big as a hen's egg, and weighed 900 carats in the rough. This was perhaps the 'unparalleled' diamond which Bernier informs us Emir Jemla presented to Shah Jehan."