Fall of the Mughal Empire v3.c41.s2.11

v3.c41.s2.11

But where he had most right to hope, he was most cruelly disappointed. The wise young Peshwa Madhav Rao II felt a generous impulse to support his hard-pressed general in the north and proposed to send a large army there under Hari Pant Phadké, the best Maratha general then in the south. But *his* Peshwa, the cold calculating Nana Fadnis, whispered that Phadké would never consent to serve under Sindhia. Chitpavan Brahmanic pride would not stoop to taking orders from a man of the Maraté caste. The Puna Government had neither the will nor the money necessary for backing Mahadji in his hour of need. Ali Bahadur, an illegitimate grandson of Baji Rao I, was then chosen to lead the proposed reinforcements, which Tukoji Holkar was ordered to join on the way. The man was utterly incompetent and had no heart for his work. Nor, indeed, had any of the Puna soldiers. They remembered how, 28 years before, a gallant army had been sent forth from Maharashtra to retrieve the disaster to a Sindhia in the north and that it had the *Gesta Romanorum*, the *Legenda Aurea* of Jacobus de Voragine, and the *Speculum Historiale* of Vincent of Beauvais. These were the books that fed the imagination of the Middle Ages, and they were the books that the Church, in its wisdom, provided for the instruction and edification of the faithful.