Storia do Mogor 15.1.3

15.1.3

As an historian Manucci presents us with a somewhat mingled yarn. His supposed extracts from the Mogul official chronicles are for the reigns preceding that of Shahjahan a tissue of absurdities. These fables were, no doubt, current among the people, but they are distortions of the facts, as such folks' talk always is. What is told about Jahangir, whether true or not, is at any rate characteristic, and might be true. With the reign of Shahjahan things alter, and certainly for the later years of that reign and for the fifty years of Aurangzeb Manucci is a writer whose statements cannot be ignored. I will not assert that what he says must always be believed. He was at times misinformed; he was prejudiced; he wrote in the decline of life, thirty to forty years after many of the events had happened. I do not think he was intentionally unveracious; he is, indeed, quite honest and specific, as a rule, about the sources of his information. No doubt he had a penchant for the personal side of history — in fact, he has been called a 'backstairs gossip,' — but I do not think this condemns him as unworthy of credit. Oriental history, as tricked out by venal and fulsome pens, tells us little or nothing of the real character of the actors in it, or of the inner causes of events; and a writer like Manucci supplies us with the necessary corrective of lifelike, if at times sordid, detail.