The Cambridge History of India, Vol. IV: The Mughul Period v4.c16.85

v4.c16.85

The priests, despite the temptation to which the hope of attaining so great an object exposed them, were uncompromising in their statement of what the Church required of a convert, and two, at least, of their demands Akbar could never be persuaded to admit. The first was submission and implicit obedience, and the second was the dismissal of all his wives save one. The priests of each mission, though at first encouraged by his bitter hostility to Islām, soon perceived that his ambition was to become the prophet of a creed of his own compilation, and that submission and obedience were not to be expected of him. His refusal to dismiss his wives they attributed to his incontinence, but here, perhaps, they judged him harshly. He was a man of strong passions, but he might possibly have been persuaded to subdue these. The difficulty in complying with the demand of the priests was rather political than personal. It was with a political end in view that Akbar had married Rājput princesses, and those Rājput chiefs who had been persuaded to bestow daughters or sisters on him in marriage, though they had become closely allied to the throne, which was Akbar’s object, had violated their own social code and incurred the condemnation of their more exclusive brethren. The dismissal of their daughters and sisters from the palace as discarded concubines would have raised the whole of Rājāsthān against Akbar, his bitterest enemies would have been those whom he had doubly disgraced, and his highest political object, the fusion of the two great rival faiths and the establishment of a united empire, would have been irretrievably lost. Some of the doctrines of the Christian faith, above all the Incarnation, presented difficulties to Akbar, but the priests were probably unable to appreciate the gravity of his chief difficulty, the political effects of his acceptance of Christianity, for those of each mission accused him of having wilfully deceived them.