Who were Mughals

Kings and rulers in the drawings from that period don't look anything Mongolian. They look more like what people in today Iran and Turkey look like. If they were Mongolian they must been very mixed

The Mughal or Mogul or Moghul or (there are a number of alternate spellings) eventually ruled much of south Asia. Beginning around 1500, the ancestors of the Mogul rulers came out of what is today called Afghanistan.  Babur, founder of the Mogul dynasty, crossed the Hindu Kush in 1526 leading a Muslim army which quickly conquered the Delhi Sultanate (according to some sources - Babur lead twelve thousand horsemen against Delhi's army of a hundred thousand.)

The Mogul's ruled from 1526 through 1857 - their empire at its height reached across India from Baluchistan to Bengal and from the Himilayas to the Deccan, up through the Punjab and Kashmir and included areas as far away as Kabul and Kandahar.

Babur claimed - without any documentation or family tree - to be a direct descendant of Timur and Genghis.  His conquests were consolidated by his son Humayun and especially by his grandson Akbar (r. 1556 - 1605).  Akbar (also called The Great) - was followed by a succession of strong rulers - but a group whose trademark was parricide and fratricide.  His son Jahangir (r. 1605 - 1627) fought a civil war with his sons for his throne and was supplanted by his third son Khurram - who took the name Shah Jahan.  Shah Jahan had disposed of all of his close relatives in order to get to the throne, ruled from 1628 - 1658 and was in turn imprisoned and replaced by his third son Aurangzeb following another civil war in which Aurangzeb killed off all of his rivals to the throne.  The pattern of murder and intrigue followed the dynasty until 1857 when they finally surrendered to the British.

There is a strong Persian influence in the entire Mogul culture.  Their art, literature, music, all of their culture borrowed heavily from the Persian.  Both Jahangir and Sha Jahan married Persian princesses, and many Mogul nobles followed this fashion.

The Moguls most lasting - and certainly most famous monument is the Taj Mahal - built as a funerary monument and tomb for himself and his beloved late wife Mumtaz Mahal, the mother of Aurangzeb.   A testament to the depth of antipathy that ran between father and son - when Jahan was imprisoned by his son - his confinement allowed him only a limited view out over the Jumna river - a view that included his wife's tomb and the place where he would in turn be interred.

A good, well researched and well written study of the empire at its height is Waldemar's Hansen's "The Peacock Throne".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mogul_Empire

http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/mogul/

http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0834335.html

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Mogul-Empire

Hi Jazz -

Do you have a source for the story that Shah Jahan was blinded by his son?

I have run into the story often but cannot find a source - was it Bernier, Manucci or one of the other Europeans who reported it - or was it perhaps in one of the court chronicles?