Later Mughals v2.c16.s2.1

v2.c16.s2.1

Throughout his reign Muhammad Shah was influenced by private favourites, most of them women and eunuchs, whom his weakness encouraged to interfere in public affairs. As one writer [Ashob, 11a] says, the nobles of this time delighted in nothing but childish stories such as that of Hamza the Arab, who fought in seventy-two battles although he had become a martyr in the first of them—or the rubbish of the Shahnama and the Mahabharat: and to them these lines applied