sons, twins, neither of whom had lived, he goes on
to say that Shaikh Salim Chisti, who resided at Sikri, twenty-two
miles to the south-west of Agra, had promised him a son who should
survive. Full of the hope of the fulfilment of this promise, Akbar,
after his return from Ranthambor, had paid the saint several visits,
remaining there ten to twenty days on each {107} occasion; eventually
he built a palace there on the summit of a rising ground; whilst the
saint commenced a new monastery and a fine mosque, near the royal
mansion. The nobles of the court, fired by these examples, began then
to build houses for themselves.

Whilst his own palace was building one of his wives became pregnant,
and Akbar conveyed her to the dwelling of the holy man. When,
somewhat later, he had conquered Gujarat he gave to the favoured town
the prefix 'Fatehpur' (City of victory). The place has since been
known in history by the joint names of Fatehpur-Sikri. Towards the
end of the year his wife, whom he had sent to reside at Sikri, gave
birth to a son at the house of the saint, who is known in history as
the Emperor Jahangir, though called after the saint by the name of
Salim. His mother was a Rajput princess of Jodhpur. To commemorate
this event Akbar made of Fatehpur-Sikri a permanent royal abode;
built a stone fortification round it, and erected some splendid
edifices. He then made another pilgrimage on foot to the mausoleum of
the saint on the Ajmere hill. Having paid his devotions he proceeded
to Delhi.

Early the following year Akbar marched into Rajputana and halted at
Nagaur, in Jodhpur. There he received the homage of the son of the
Raja of that principality, then the most powerful in Rajputana, and
that of the Raja of Bikaner and his son. As a tribute of his
appreciation of the loyalty of the latter, Akbar took the Raja's
daughter in marriage. He {108} amused himself for some time at Nagaur
in hunting the wild asses which at that time there abounded, and then
proceeded to Dipalpur in the Punjab. There he held a magnificent
durbar, and then, with the dawn of the new year, proceeded to Lahore.
After settling the affairs of the Punjab, he returned to
Fatehpur-Sikri with the intention of devoting the coming year to the
conquest of Gujarat.

The province of Gujarat in Western India included, in the time of
Akbar, the territories and districts of Surat, Broach, Kaira,
Ahmadabad, a great part of what is now Baroda, the territories no