Keywords

‘We were living times of tranquillity and peace (paz e quietação)’, wrote Jerónimo Xavier around 1603. The head of the Jesuit mission at the Mughal court had been encouraged by recent gestures made by the Akbar, and his son Prince Selim, who ‘were showing us favour’, and the ‘enemies of the faith and all strangers were giving us peace’.Footnote 1 This favourable state of affairs suddenly changed, and Father Xavier was unexpectedly ‘dragged into such a fight that I have felt so tired (…) and so dishonoured and insulted (…) bearing the weight of the battle like the greatest enemy and the main culprit’.Footnote 2

The source of Jerónimo Xavier’s problems was one ‘heretic Englishman’, who was inciting an unnamed Portuguese man to spread rumours about the deviant and scandalous behaviour of the Jesuit missionaries, especially towards women. Although the Englishman alerted Xavier and the other missionaries of the growing rumours about their conduct, the Jesuits discovered that he was bribing the Portuguese man and spreading more rumours among the Armenian community, with some success. One Armenian told Xavier that the stories circulated by this fulano (fellow)—a rather depreciative word that reveals the Jesuit’s animosity—forced the Armenian community to decide to stop frequenting the church and not send their ‘wives and daughters’ until everything was clarified.

The impact of the rumours among the Armenians of Agra was such that Xavier was advised to seek Akbar’s intervention to avoid serious damage to the reputation of the padres at the Mughal court.Footnote 3 The reaction of the Armenians of Agra to the rumours about the padres constituted a serious setback, since Jesuit proselytising and charity often relied on donations from the Armenians settled in Agra, Lahore or Surat.

The unnamed English fulano who troubled Jerónimo Xavier was the rather obscure and roguish John Mildenhall, a merchant who had been previously involved in the Levant trade. Around 1600, he was contemplating the possibility of travelling to Cairo from Aleppo but he rapidly changed his plans and decided to travel to Lahore, probably influenced by the news of the establishment of the EIC. John Mildenhall’s days at the Mughal court were not only some of the primordial moments of the English presence in India, but also an important and neglected episode in the complex interactions between the Iberian Crowns and the Great Mughal. The Englishman arrived in Agra at a delicate moment when the Mughal expansionist campaigns in the Deccan and the Portuguese attempts to enforce a monopoly in the Indian Ocean raised tensions on both sides. Mildenhall’s exploits in Agra also coincided with the more dynamic period of the Jesuit mission at the Mughal. The clash between the English fulano and the padres is not only one among many episodes of Anglo-Iberian rivalry outside Europe, but an illustrative case of the improvisational nature of early modern diplomacy and the pivotal role of non-state actorsFootnote 4 in diplomatic exchanges, especially outside the increasingly formalised diplomatic structures that were slowly emerging in Europe.

I

In 1599, Mildenhall and other English merchants based in the Levant received news of the safe return of a Dutch fleet sent to the East Indies led by Jacob Corneliszoon van Neck. The Dutch exploits generated considerable apprehension in the English merchants involved in the Levant trade. William Aldrich, for example, expressed to James Sanderson his fears that the new competition posed by the ‘Flemings’ could have a devastating impact on the Levant Company: ‘if spices be not brought from Aleppo, as in time past, into England, but the place be otherwise served, our Company shall not be able to defray half their charges’.Footnote 5 Alarmed by the new threat posed by the Dutch, between 24 and 25 September 1599 an ‘assembly’ of London merchants willing to explore the East Indies trade decided to request Elizabeth I and her Privy Council to grant them a charter to form a trading company ‘in a joint and united stock’.Footnote 6

The circulation of the news related to Van Neck’s fleet and the movements in London that would lead to the foundation of the EIC coincided with Mildenhall’s sudden decision to travel to Lahore and suggests that the English merchant sought to collect relevant knowledge about the Mughal Empire and establish contacts with the Timurid authorities in the hope of obtaining a reward for his good services. Indeed, some years later, after returning to England, Mildenhall petitioned the EIC as well as the English Crown and wrote a long letter to Richard Staper, a prominent and well-connected London merchant who was behind the foundation of the Levant Company and the EIC.

Staper was behind the establishment of the Turkey Company in 1581 and was also one of the promoters of the first English commercial expedition to South Asia. In 1583, around the same time that Rodolfo Acquaviva returned to Goa, three English merchants named John Newberry, Ralph Fitch, John Eldred, the jeweller William Leedes and the painter James Story embarked on the Tiger bound to Tripoli. As Richard Hakluyt duly noted in The Principal Navigation, this expedition was a direct consequence of the ‘great charges and speciall industrie of the worshipfull and worthy Citizens, Sir Edward Osborne Knight, M. Richard Staper, and M. William Hareborne’.Footnote 7

The mission headed by John Newberry was thus one of information gathering or, in Hakluyt’s words, an enterprise of ‘wonderfull trauailes’ that aimed to explore ‘ouer land and by riuer through Aleppo, Birrha, Babylon and Balsara, and downe the Persian gulfe to Ormuz, and thence by the Ocean sea to Goa, and againe ouer-land to Bisnagar, Cambaia, Orixa, Bengala, Aracan, Pegu, Malacca, Siam, the Iangomes, Quicheu, and euen to the Frontiers of the Empire of China’.Footnote 8 All these markets were still relatively unknown to English merchants. The Portuguese monopoly of the maritime route from Europe to the ‘seas of India’ was, throughout most of the sixteenth century, an almost impossible obstacle to overcome for English and other European merchants. The alternative overland routes such as the Northeast Passage from Europe to China sought by English merchants required an unprecedented mobilisation of logistical and financial resources that were not available.

As in the case of Harbourne’s mission to Istanbul, Newberry and his companions carried a letter from Elizabeth I addressed to Akbar and the Emperor of China. Previous experiences with the Ottoman Empire and Morocco revealed that royal letters often allowed English emissaries to gain direct access to rulers and avoid dealing with complex foreign bureaucratic machineries. Unlike the correspondence with Murad or the Moroccan ruler, which were based on previous English and European experiences with Levantine Islamic rulers, Elizabeth’s letter to Akbar was loosely based on the rhetoric of Moroccan and Ottoman correspondence and presented Newberry’s visit not as a royal legation but as a part of a private undertaking that offered the opportunity to establish diplomatic contacts between England and the Timurid court:

Elizabeth by the grace of God, &c. To the most inuincible, and most mightie prince, lord Zelabdim Echebar king of Cambaya. Inuincible Emperor, &c. The great affection which our Subiects haue, to visit the most distant places of the world, not without good will and intention to introduce the trade of marchandize of al nations whatsoeuer they can, by which meanes the mutual and friendly trafique of marchandize on both sides may come, is the cause that the bearer of this letter Iohn Newbery, ioyntly with those that be in his company, with a curteous and honest boldnesse, doe repaire to the borders and countreys of your Empire, we doubt not but that your imperial Maiestie through your royal grace, will fauourably and friendly accept him. And that you would doe it the rather for our sake, to make vs greatly beholding to your Maiestie; wee should more earnestly, and with more wordes require it, if wee did think it needful. But by the singular report that is of your imperial Maiesties humanitie in these vttermost parts of the world, we are greatly eased of that burden, and therefore we vse the fewer and lesse words: onely we request that because they are our subiects, they may be honestly intreated and receiued. And that in respect of the hard iourney which they haue vndertaken to places so far distant, it would please your Maiestie with some libertie and securitie of voiage to gratifie it, with such priuileges as to you shall seeme good: which curtesie if your Imperiall maiestie shall do to our subiects at our requests performe, wee, according to our royall honour, wil recompence the same with as many deserts as we can. And herewith we bid your Imperial Maiestie to farewel.Footnote 9

While Elizabeth counted on the experiences of agents like William Harbourne to adapt the style, presentation and format of her letters to ensure a positive reception at the Ottoman or Moroccan courts, for the Mughal Empire there was a profound lack of information about its ruler, political organisation and territorial extension. The little available knowledge about Akbar and his empire forced the English queen to adopt a neutral tone loosely based on the Levantine correspondence, which, through the proposal of reciprocal friendship, aimed to attenuate any eventual embarrassing faux pas.

Although Newberry and his companions presented a letter from Elizabeth I, Akbar seemed to have overlooked them. The Akbarnama, for example, does not have any reference to the meeting between the Englishman and Akbar. The absence of detailed description of Mughal-European encounters in Timurid courtly literature is a recurrent theme of discussion. Works such as the Akbarnama or even the more critical Muntakhabu-ut-Tawarikh were written for a courtly and elite readership that was more interested in the figure of the emperor and his interventions in the Indo-Persian and Central Asian world. This does not mean that the Mughals neglected the firangis or considered them irrelevant. The presence of Jesuit missionaries and the diplomatic exchanges between Akbar and the Estado da Índia were occurrences that both Abu’l Fazl and Badaoni considered relevant enough to be mentioned in their works due to their implication in Mughal foreign and religious policy.

Ralph Fitch’s account of his travels in Asia are also rather laconic regarding his experience at the Mughal court. He does not tell much about how the court was organised, the presence of other Europeans or his audiences with Akbar. The Mughal emperor is depicted as an apparently austere ruler ‘apparelled in a white cabic [i.e. Muslim tunic] made like a shirt tied with strings on the one side, and a little cloth on his head coloured oftentimes with red or yellow’.Footnote 10 It is important to note that Fitch was a merchant and his main mission was to gather relevant information about the Asian markets and trade routes. His account was, indeed, more concerned in enlisting the products available across South and Southeast Asia, mentioning the logistics behind the trade routes or how marketplaces were organised. Like other sixteenth-century merchants who travelled across Asia, Fitch also included in his account some ethnographic observations on local religious and social practices, an always valuable information to prepare merchants who wished to establish commercial exchanges with unfamiliar regions and peoples. The contact with Akbar was an important part of the expedition to India and Southeast Asia, but the main objective of Fitch and his companions was to evaluate the English possibilities of penetrating into markets where the Portuguese and Spanish had already consolidated their presence. In other words, the four Englishmen only had to present a letter from Elizabeth to Akbar and respond accordingly to the emperor’s interest on the terms proposed to him. The unenthusiastic reaction from the ‘King of Cambaya’ corresponded thus with Fitch’s laconic lines.

Another reason for the few lines describing the encounter between Akbar and the English merchants is that 1585 was also the year when the Mughal court was transferred to Lahore. The news from Afghanistan and Abdullah Khan’s successful expeditions in the Safavid territories forced Akbar to move to the Punjabi city to monitor the situation closely and support the activities of the army led by Raj Man Singh—the Rajput Raja of Amer and one of the closest aids of the emperor—who was sent to Kabul to impose Mughal authority across Afghanistan.Footnote 11 Arriving at Agra while the transfer of the imperial court was being planned was hardly the ideal moment for Fitch and his companions to open negotiations with Akbar.

The Englishmen’s brief presence at the imperial court was far from being of immediate importance to Mughal political and commercial interest in the 1580s. At the time that Newberry presented Elizabeth’s letter, Akbar’s immediate concerns lay in the political convulsion troubling Safavid Persia, the expansion of the Uzbek Empire and the turmoil in Afghanistan after Mirza Hakim’s death. 1585, the year when Fitch and his companions reached Agra, was also the year of the death of the Afghan ruler and Akbar’s half-brother.

English knowledge about Mughal India was, in fact, limited. Around the same time that Mildenhall travelled to Lahore, on 10 March 1600, Sir Fulke Greville presented Sir Robert Cecil and the Privy Council with a brief report on the ‘Names of such kings as are absolute in the East, and either have war or traffic with the King of Spain’.Footnote 12 This list of the natural resources, ports and military capacity of the rulers and potentates from Morocco to the Philippines who had friendly or hostile relations with the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns, apart from a vague reference to Gujarat, which is identified as the ‘Kingdom of Cambaia, the most fruitful of all India’,Footnote 13 does not mention Akbar or the Mughal Empire.

Before leaving Aleppo, Mildenhall met John Cartwright, an English Protestant minister and curious traveller who wished to visit Persia and India. In his account of his travels, Cartwright mentions that he and Mildenhall obtained the ‘leaue of the Consull and Merchants, with a full intent and purpose to trauell vnto the great City Lahor, in the great Mogors Countrey in the East Indies’.Footnote 14 This reference to a ‘leaue’ issued by the English consul at Aleppo, Richard Coulthrust, suggests that Mildenhall’s plan to travel to the Mughal court was known and approved by some members of the Levant Company, although the existing sources on Mildenhall’s exploits in India do not make any reference to an official appointment as an English envoy. It is very likely that Coulthrust issued a license not for a diplomatic mission, but for a trading expedition with the aim of identifying the main cities, ports, markets and routes of the territories under Safavid and Timurid rule.

Mildenhall arrived in Lahore in 1603 and immediately presented himself as an emissary from Elizabeth I, requesting ‘free leave’ and an audience with Akbar to ‘treat of such businesse as I had to doe with him from my Prince’.Footnote 15 After being informed of the presence of an English emissary, Akbar instructed the nawab of Lahore to treat Mildenhall ‘with all honour and courtesie’ and arrange ‘a guard of horse and foote’ to escort him to Agra.Footnote 16

Mildenhall’s claim to be an envoy from Elizabeth I was a bold statement that sought to exploit the different notions of ambassadorship that predominated in the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Persia and Mughal India, which favoured temporary missions and granted a limited and transitory juridico-political status to diplomatic agents. The differences between the increasingly formalised European diplomatic practices, structured on the model of the resident ambassador, and the Indo-Persian approaches to ambassadorship were often noted by European observers. John Chardin, for example, explained to his readers that ‘the Persians make no distinctions between Embassadours, Envoys, Agents, Residents, &c. but still make use of the word Heltchi, which comprehends all’.Footnote 17 This perception that a laissez-faire or informal diplomatic modus operandi that did not make any clear distinction between different categories of diplomatic agents and missions prevailed in the Islamicate and Asian powers prompted Mildenhall to present himself as an envoy despite not having any valid credentials to support his supposed identity as an official diplomatic agent. This strategy was also adopted by other adventurous freelance diplomats from the Islamicate world. Jahangir in his memoirs mentions the case of one ‘Transoxanian named Aqam Hajji’ who claimed to be an Ottoman ambassador, although he ‘had credentials of unknown authorship’. The Mughal emperor and most courtiers had serious doubts about Aqam Hajji’s true identity but offered him ‘generous treatment’ because ‘neither has anyone come on behalf of the Ottomans nor have they sent an ambassador’. Only after some months, following the erratic behaviour of the supposed Ottoman envoy and his inability to provide valid credentials, did Jahangir dismiss him from the court.Footnote 18

Probably aware of the problems surrounding his freelancing diplomatic enterprise, which could raise questions about his true intentions, in his letter to Richard Staper, the English fulano laid out a careful narrative of his exploits that suggested that he was an altruistic patriot and loyal subject who, moved by a profound sense of duty, successfully projected a prestigious image of England and Elizabeth I in a foreign court at significant personal cost—a strategy that aimed to attenuate eventual criticisms of the fact that Mildenhall decided to act as royal emissary without permission. While narrating his first audience with Akbar, for example, Mildenhall boasts that he offered the emperor a lavish gift of ‘nine and twenty great horses, very faire and good, such as were hardly found better in those parts (some of them cost me fiftie or threescore pounds an horse), with diverse jewels, rings, and earing to his great liking’.Footnote 19

Mildenhall’s gift suggested his intention or commitment to advance English interests in the East Indies, but it was, above all, an investment that served both personal and national aspirations. A gift of luxurious commodities such as horses and jewellery could help to enhance the reputation of a mysterious foreign emissary who came from a distant and unknown country, not to mention support future claims for a substantial financial reward due to his expenses at the service of the English Crown. At the same time, an exhibition of English profligacy could catch Akbar’s attention and persuade the emperor to establish an alliance with England. Indeed, Mildenhall believed that his gift had opened the doors of the Mughal court to him and boasted in his letter that after his first audience with Akbar he made ‘a great man my friend’.Footnote 20

Following the Mughal protocol, on the day following the audience, Mildenhall had another audience with the emperor to present and discuss his ‘businesse’. After presenting himself again, Mildenhall made a brief declaration where he stated that Akbar’s ‘renowned kindnesse unto Christians’ had reached the court Elizabeth I of England, ‘who desired to have friendship with him and, as the Portugals and other Christians had trade with His Majestie [Akbar], so her Subjects also might have the same, with the like favours’. Besides offering a commercial partnership between England and the Mughal Empire, Mildenhall informed Akbar of the ongoing conflict between the Iberian Crowns and England and proposed that if any Portuguese ship or port was attacked by English forces the emperor ‘would not take it in evill part, but suffer us to enjoy them to the use of our Queenes Majestie’.Footnote 21

Mildenhall based his proposals on a simplistic, but nonetheless correct, interpretation of the main strategic goals of Elizabethan foreign policy vis-à-vis other Islamic power such as the Ottoman Empire and the Sultanate of Morocco, and which were probably known by the English merchant during his time in Istanbul and Aleppo: the expansion of English trade to the Asian markets; and an intention to challenge the Iberian colonial expansion in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Indeed, Mildenhall was anticipating the first EIC voyage, which was authorised by Elizabeth I to ‘apprehend, and take the shippes, goodes, & merchandizes of the Kinge of Spaine, or any of his subjects wheresoever upon the seas’.Footnote 22

II

In spite of his lack of valid credentials, Mildenhall’s gift respected the Indo-Persian diplomatic protocol. Furthermore, the delicate matter of his proposed ‘business’—to negotiate the establishment of trade relations and an Anglo-Mughal alliance against the Portuguese Estado da Índia—suited the strategic interests of Akbar’s foreign policy. From a Mughal perspective, the concession of trading privilege to new firangi merchants and the establishment of an Anglo-Mughal alliance against the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean were interesting proposals that coincided with Akbar’s intentions to increase the traffic of the Mughal ports and increase the prestige of the Timurid polity in Europe.

Mildenhall arrived in Lahore at the precise moment when Luso-Mughal relations were at an impasse. The correspondence between the Portuguese viceroys and the royal officials at Lisbon and Madrid reveal continual concern with the Mughal expansionist movements in the Deccan. After the Mughal conquest of the Sultanate of Berar, the Portuguese authorities feared that Akbar would ‘extend his forces, and become the lord of all these lands, and even challenge the Portuguese and end their power and dominion’.Footnote 23

Akbar’s plans, however, faced a sudden setback in 1599. The defeat of the Mughal army in Bir and the death of Prince Murad, who was leading the campaign in the Deccan, forced the emperor to delay his plans vis-à-vis the Estado da Índia. In a letter to Philip III, Viceroy Francisco da Gama celebrated Murad’s death as ‘the best thing to happen’, an event that would end the Mughal expansion in the region and cause instability at the Timurid court over the succession of Akbar. A close witness of the impact of the news of Murad’s death in Agra, Jerónimo Xavier told Claudio Acquaviva with some relief that when Akbar ‘had lost his hope of having a victory when the Deccani [sic] rebuffed his troops, he slackened us’.Footnote 24 Rather than causing instability in the Timurid court or forcing the abandonment of the expansionist ambitions in the Deccan, Murad’s death led Akbar to personally supervise the Mughal offensive in the region. Between 1600 and 1601, the emperor led a successful campaign that culminated in the conquest of the Khandesh and most of the Sultanate of Ahmadnagar.

By 1601, the Mughal emperor was still seeking an agreement with the Portuguese Estado da Índia regarding the Mughal ships in the ‘seas of Hindustan’, but the ‘other matters’ mentioned in the firman were probably related to the Mughal campaigns in the Deccan and the Jesuit mission. Indeed, at the same time that Akbar sent an ambassador to Goa, three other Mughal embassies were sent to the Deccani rulers of Bijapur, Golconda and Bidar with the aim of securing their obedience.Footnote 25 The Mughal embassy seemed thus to have been both a gesture to demonstrate Akbar’s apparent goodwill towards the Estado da Índia, by fomenting a cultural exchange between Goa and Agra, and to evaluate the Portuguese reaction to the Pax Mogolica in the Deccan.

Mildenhall, a supposed emissary from another European power who was hostile to Portuguese interests in the Indian Ocean, notwithstanding his dubious credentials, offered Akbar an interesting opportunity to redefine his foreign policy and exert more pressure on the Estado da Índia. According to Jerónimo Xavier, after Akbar’s audience with the English emissary rumours instantly started to circulate that the emperor had accepted Mildenhall’s requests and was ready to issue a firman granting permission ‘for his people to come to the King’s ports’ and ‘end all contacts with the Portuguese’.Footnote 26 Mildenhall’s proposals received the support of some factions of the Mughal court who, in the words of the Jesuit missionary, together with the English fulano plotted ‘a thousand things to be made against us and the Christian religion to favour these Englishmen’.Footnote 27

The English fulano’s close association with some Mughal courtly factions posed some risks. According to Xavier, Akbar discovered a conspiracy led by a group of courtiers who had been bribed by Mildenhall and ‘decided to give up on all the arrangements he had made with the Englishman, who fell in disgrace, and the King destroyed the paper he had secretly signed in front of us’.Footnote 28 By associating Mildenhall’s sudden fall with his involvement in Mughal court intrigues, Xavier implied that Akbar feared that the English fulano could rapidly become a disruptive element that would instigate more division between the different court factions surrounding the Mughal princes, especially Salim, the future emperor Jahangir.

Salim’s accession to the imperial throne was carefully prepared. The prince built efficient networks of support and alliances with influential members of the court and the administrative and military apparatus.Footnote 29 He also sought to establish regular communication with other regional actors, including the Portuguese via the Jesuit missionaries, establishing a parallel political centre that competed and disturbed his father’s state and courtly apparatus. The emergence of Salim as a strong alternative to Akbar and his brother led the emperor to make a systematic effort to thwart Salim’s imperial claims by undermining his networks of supporters. This could involve subtle manoeuvres such as arranging marriages between daughters of Salim’s supporters and influential courtiers and officials who were loyal to the emperor, as well as less subtle actions such as the public humiliation and ostracism of his son’s supporters.Footnote 30

Indeed, Mildenhall’s account reveals an extreme difficulty in accessing the emperor following his two audiences and the discovery, according to Xavier, of his alleged involvement with a group of Mughal courtiers. After being informed of Akbar’s decision to change the conditions of the firman, Mildenhall sought to arrange a new audience. ‘Every day’, he wrote, ‘I went to the court, and in every eighteene or twentie days I put up Ars [sic] or petitions; and still he put mee off with good words and promised that this day and tomorrow I should have them’.Footnote 31 After a month without a definitive answer from the Mughal authorities, and almost without enough funds to maintain his lavish persona, Mildenhall sought an alternative strategy: to leave the court in the hope that his absence would be noticed. The plan seemed to have worked. Surprised by the Englishman’s absence, Akbar called him to his presence. Mildenhall complained about the constant delays in obtaining a firman, ‘which was wholly for his [Akbar’s] profit and nothing of his losse’.Footnote 32 The emperor promised a speedy resolution and, in a gesture of goodwill, offered Mildenhall garments ‘of the Christian fashion very rich and good’.Footnote 33

Although a potentially disruptive presence, Mildenhall had some utility to Akbar. The Jesuit hostility towards the English fulano and his request to establish an Anglo-Mughal alliance against the Portuguese suggested that Mildenhall could be used by the emperor to gain some leverage over the Estado da Índia by suggesting that the Mughals were ready to welcome and support the rivals of the Iberian monarchies. Akbar could not have been ready to open hostilities with the Portuguese, as his initial rejection of Mildenhall’s proposal indicates, but the presence of the Englishman at the court and the Jesuit reaction offered the Mughals interesting opportunities to frustrate the strategies of the Estado.

While Mildenhall sought to obtain his firman, the Portuguese Padre Bento de Góis informed Goa that Akbar instructed his armies to move to positions close to the Portuguese cities of Bassein and Chaul.Footnote 34 These movements coincided with two Mughal embassies to the Sultanate of Bijapur, a long-standing rival of the Estado da Índia in the Deccan, to negotiate a marriage between one of Akbar’s sons, Daniyal, and a daughter of Sultan Ibrahim II. A matrimonial alliance between Mughals and Bijapuris was seen in Goa and Madrid as a serious threat to the Estado. After being informed of the contacts between Akbar and Ibrahim II, Philip III instructed Viceroy Aires de Saldanha to ‘use all the possible ways’ to thwart the negotiations. The viceroy, in spite of the attempts made by Portuguese emissaries sent to Bijapur, was unable to impede Daniyal’s marriage in 1604. Akbar’s alliance with Bijapur was an important diplomatic coup that allowed the emperor to cement the Mughal presence in the Deccan and have all the necessary conditions to attack the Estado da Índia, as many in Goa, Lisbon and Madrid feared. Against this backdrop, from a Portuguese and Jesuit standpoint, Mildenhall’s presence at the Timurid court was a sign that Akbar was willing to explore all possible avenues to find partners to form an anti-Portuguese alliance.

Despite the encouraging promises made by Akbar, the signature of the firman was yet to be confirmed, a setback that the English fulano attributed to Xavier and Corsi, who ‘day and night sought how to work my displeasure’.Footnote 35 Mildenhall presented the Jesuit missionaries, ‘who lived there in great honour and credit’, as a serious obstacle for English interests.Footnote 36 The presence and alleged influence of a group of Catholic missionaries sponsored by the king of Portugal and Spain offered a plausible explanation for Mildenhall’s successes and failures, as well as suited the concerns of a corporation whose ‘leading members were pious Protestants nostalgic for the days of frank hostility with Spain’.Footnote 37

In a last attempt to obtain a firman, Mildenhall hired a Persian schoolmaster ‘and in my house day and night, I so studied the Persian tongue that in sixe monethes space I could speake it something reasonably’.Footnote 38 Without the need for an interpreter, Mildenhall requested an audience with Akbar and presented, once again, his requests and complaints. ‘Mooved’ by Mildenhall’s words, Akbar decided to call an audience to confront the Englishman with the Jesuits. Mildenhall refuted the accusations made by the missionaries and claimed that, as the presence of an English resident ambassador in Istanbul demonstrated, Elizabeth’s intentions towards Akbar were friendly and respectful, and highlighted the fact that the Mughal court never received a temporary embassy from Lisbon or Goa:

Know you all that Her Majestie hath her ambassadour leiger in Constantinople, and everie three yeares most commonly doth send a new and call home the old; and at the first comming of every ambassadour slice sendeth not them emptie, but with a great and princely present; according where unto Her Highnesse intent is to deale with Your Majestie. This profit of rich presents and honour like to redound to Your Majestic by having league of amitie and entercourse with Christian Princes, and to have their ambassadours leigers in your court, these men by their craftie practices would deprive you of.Footnote 39

This short speech praising English diplomatic practices based on the model of the resident ambassador aimed to seduce the Mughal emperor to forge an alliance with England, promising an uninterrupted flow of presents and communication that would increase Mughal wealth and political prestige in Europe and Asia. But Mildenhall’s words also suggested something else: the failure of the Portuguese and Spanish authorities to recognise or respect the power and authority of the Great Mughal. Whereas England promised to send a royal ambassador and to establish a resident embassy at the Mughal court as sign of friendship, goodwill and deference, the Portuguese Crown, who had established diplomatic contacts with the Timurids in the 1570s, had never demonstrated such intentions, conducting its diplomatic dealings with Akbar through the employment of informal emissaries or agents such as the Jesuit missionaries.

These two different approaches suggested not only different levels of deference towards the Mughal Empire, but of diplomatic sophistication and savoir faire. Mildenhall presented England as a friendly power who recognised the prominence of the Mughal Empire and knew how to establish a diplomatic relationship according to Akbar’s status. In contrast, the lack of a Portuguese resident ambassador, or the fact that the Mughal court never received a royal ambassador from Lisbon or Goa, suggested that the Portuguese Crown deliberately failed to recognise the prestige and power of the Timurid ruler. The modus operadi adopted by the Estado da Índia, as Mildenhall sought to suggest, could be easily interpreted as a sign of hostility and diminution of the Mughal Empire, as well as a demonstration of the lack of political sophistication of the Portuguese authorities vis-à-vis England and the Mughals.

Mildenhall’s brief speech not only raised doubts on the Portuguese diplomatic approach to the Mughal Empire, but also questioned the role of the Jesuit missionaries in the Timurid court, revealing their ambiguous triple role as clergymen, Mughal courtiers and informal Portuguese diplomatic agents who employed ‘craftie practices’. These arguments seemed to have impressed Akbar and Prince Selim in particular, who stated that it ‘was most true that in an eleven or twelve yeares not one came, either upon ambassage or upon any other profit unto His Majestie’.Footnote 40

Jerónimo Xavier does not mention the tripartite audience in his correspondence, but confirms that Mildenhall continued to lobby the Mughal authorities during his time in Agra. ‘The Englishman’, he wrote, ‘diligently works in a thousand ways with large bribes to have firmans and dispatches from the king allowing his people to come to the king’s ports (…) For more than two years that he is working on this, but I trust in God Our Lord that it will pass many more years in which the Englishman will not get what he wants, and it is not a small service to Our Lord to impede such a harmful thing to the Estado and the religion’.Footnote 41

III

In spite of his apparent triumph, Mildenhall is rather laconic about what happened next. In his letter to Richard Staper, he mentions only that after his audience with Akbar, Selim and the Jesuits he promised the emperor and his son that he would ‘not onely procure an ambassador but also a present at my safe returne againe into your countrie’.

Mildenhall left Agra sometime in 1605 or 1606, a turbulent period shaped by Akbar’s death, Salim’s accession to the imperial throne as Jahangir, the ‘seizer of the world’, and the conflict between the new emperor and his son, Khusrau. Jerónimo Xavier described 1605 as the year when ‘the world went upside down with the death of King Akbar’.Footnote 42 Jahangir’s accession was behind profound changes in the composition of the Mughal court and nobility. As Jerónimo Xavier noted, with ‘the change of king, the court changed, those who were elevated were brought down, and those who had been lowered were raised’.Footnote 43 The Jesuits often aided those who were neglected or relegated after the accession of Jahangir. Jerónimo Xavier mentions that the

servants of the old king suffered many necessities: [Jahangir] did not pay them anything and after the transfer of the court to Lahore they had follow him (…) and without any remedy they left their destitute wives and children in Agra. The Father who went to Lahore had to help them during their journey and in Lahore until they obtained what was theirs from the king; and the father who stayed in Agra helps their wives and children and if it was not for him, as well as the Christians, it would not be humanly possible for them to survive.Footnote 44

Before his accession, Jahangir and his entourage insinuated to Xavier and other missionaries that he was a crypto-Christian, giving hope for a ‘great conversion’.Footnote 45 The hopes of this soon dissipated after the emperor, immediately after his accession, had ‘sworn to obey the law of Mohammad to win and keep the support of the Moors’.Footnote 46 Although the Jesuit claims of an imminent conversion of Jahangir were exaggerated, and should be read as an attempt to justify the ups and downs of the mission, Xavier and his companions feared that the emperor’s proximity to the Sunni orthodox factions would place the missionaries in the group of those who lost out due to the recomposition of the Mughal court. Indeed, Xavier noted that after his accession, Jahangir ‘acts as if he does not known us, and does not make any attention’.Footnote 47 Such an attitude of apparent indifference towards the Jesuits seemed to have been related to Khusrau’s rebellion. The recomposition of the Timurid court instigated the emperor’s son, who was seen by dissatisfied factions as a viable alternative to Jahangir, to rebel and suggested a prolonged period of instability. As Xavier bitterly noted, the rebellion and the need to control the Mughal governmental apparatus forced Jahangir ‘to give himself to government’ and neglect the ‘things of letters and debates’ that the missionaries participated in during Akbar’s reign.

In the same way that the Jesuits became secondary figures during the change of regime at the Mughal court, Mildenhall seemed to have been unable to maintain his position and keep the support of those who were keen to promote his interests. Mildenhall’s proposals were far from being a priority to the new regime. Immediately after succeeding his father, Jahangir launched a series of unsuccessful campaigns against the Sultanate of Ahmadnagar in the Deccan, which would last until 1616. At the same time, Shah Abbas’ ambitions in Kandahar indicated an imminent conflict with the Safavids that would eventually pause the Mughal expansionist campaigns in the Deccan. Against this backdrop, Jahangir sought to guarantee the Estado’s neutrality and informed the Jesuits of his intention to send an embassy to Lisbon and Madrid, which would be headed by Naqib Khan, a relevant courtier described by Xavier as ‘not hostile towards the Portuguese’.Footnote 48 Without reliable interlocutors at the court, and also probably confronted with Jahangir’s investment in the diplomatic exchanges with the Estado da Índia, Mildenhall opted to return to England in the hope of obtaining support for his project.

On his way to England, Mildenhall apparently spent some time at the Safavid court. In 1608, his name appears in a letter from Dom Fr. Aleixo de Menezes, the Archbishop of Goa, to Philip III reporting Shah Abbas’ decision to send Robert Shirley on an embassy to Europe. The archbishop mentions that Shirley would be joined by one ‘Joan de Mendenel who came to India during the time of Queen Elizabeth with some letters from her to the Mughal, and he is very well regarded by the Shah’.Footnote 49 Menezes’ words suggest that, in spite of the lack of valid credentials and the many doubts surrounding his real status, Mildenhall’s claims to be an English emissary were cautiously assumed to be legitimate by the Portuguese authorities at Goa. The use of informal emissaries was a well-tested and common practice of the Estado’s diplomatic repertoire often used to establish initial contact and pave the way for formal exchanges.Footnote 50

Another interesting point in the archbishop’s letter is the mention of the supposed letters from Elizabeth I to Akbar. Although Mildenhall had no document from the English queen to her Mughal counterpart, the fact that he presented himself as an emissary from the English Crown suggested that, as was expected from royal envoys, he brought letters from the monarch. Indeed, in other English diplomatic dealings with the Moroccan and Ottoman courts, the emissaries representing Elizabeth I carried with them a letter signed by the queen. Menezes’ reference to the supposed letters transmitted thus the incomplete information that arrived in Goa, as well as the assumption that diplomatic exchanges between royal courts followed more or less standardised procedures. In fact, the information received by the archbishop suggested that Mildenhall was part of a planned or concentrated English effort to forge partnerships with the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal polities. In 1587, a concerned Viceroy Duarte de Menezes reported that intelligence gathered from the Ottoman territories indicated that the Turk granted to the English ‘many favours, and it is said that all Frenchmen are gone from those lands’.Footnote 51

Little is known of Mildenhall’s exploits in Persia and how he travelled from Isfahan to London. However, around the summer of 1608 he was already in England. His name appears in a petition to the administrators of the EIC dated 21 June 1608. In this document, Mildenhall requests to be paid £1,800 as a reward for his services and the supposed privileges he obtained from the Mughal emperor. On 30 May 1609, the directors decided to set up a special committee to analyse his demands.Footnote 52 Meanwhile, on 27 July 1609, Mildenhall petitioned James I, requesting a reward for the commercial privileges he had obtained from Akbar at the cost of £3,000 for ‘the discovery of a rich trade in the dominions of the Great Mogul, and praying that he and his coadventurers may be permitted to enjoy the privileges he had obtained there’.Footnote 53 Before taking a decision, the Lord Treasurer decided to consult the EIC first. On 20 October 1609, the EIC toyed with the idea of sending Mildenhall to India as factor, but one month later, on 18 November 1609, the company removed the appointment and deliberated that Mildenhall’s petition was ‘not thought fit to be engaged’,Footnote 54 a decision that could be explained by the expectations raised by the company’s third voyage to India in which William Hawkins was assigned to present a letter from James I to Jahangir.Footnote 55 More importantly, Mildenhall’s project clashed with the monopolistic ambitions of the EIC. The proclamation of 1609 confirming the company’s monopoly on pepper imports, as K. N. Chaudhuri noted, aimed ‘not only to exclude non-members from trading with the Indies but also to prevent them from any trading at all in commodities of the Indies’.Footnote 56

Mildenhall, nevertheless, travelled to Persia in 1611 charged with the mission of selling a quantity of goods belonging to a group of merchants led by Richard Staper. Apparently Mildenhall decided to seize all the merchandise and sell it in India, but he was detained by two other merchants, Richard Steel and Richard Newman, and forced to return the goods and a sum of £9,000.Footnote 57 Mildenhall continued his journey to India. At Lahore, he Mildenhall fell ill but was able to travel to Ajmer, where Jahangir had temporarily based his court. He would die in June 1614 and was buried at the Catholic cemetery of Agra.

According to Thomas Kerridge, who met Mildenhall ‘at the point of death’, the English fulano was now on good terms with his former nemesis, ‘being lodged by the Jesuits in the house of a Frenchman that is here in the king’s service’.Footnote 58 The proximity between Mildenhall and the padres is also corroborated by Robert Coverte, another Englishman who visited the Mughal court in 1609. In his account, Coverte mentioned that Jerónimo Xavier, the ‘chiefe friar’, secured a series of safe conducts and letters of recommendation for Coverte and his companions. One of these letters was destined for John Mildenhall. However, when Coverte arrived at London, Mildenhall was already en route to Persia. The letter was delivered to the deputy governor of the EIC.Footnote 59 Mildenhall’s apparent conversion to Catholicism and reconciliation with the padres, more than an unexpected twist in the plot, seems to have been yet another attempt by the English fulano to ensure a connection with the Mughal court. The archival sources do not tell us much about the rapprochement between Mildenhall and the Jesuits, but their capacity to reinvent their relation and articulate their interests suggest that the firangi at the Mughal court, in spite of their rivalries, were able to redefine their positions and collaborate whenever it was necessary for their benefit.

A rather roguish individual motivated by his personal interests, John Mildenhall is an illustrative case of the improvisational nature of early modern diplomacy and the pivotal role of non-state actors in diplomatic exchanges, especially outside the increasingly formalised diplomatic structures that were slowly emerging in Europe.Footnote 60 In settings where there was an apparent absence of formalised or immediately recognised rules for diplomatic exchanges, these were often guaranteed by a myriad of informal agents who operated outside official state apparatus—merchants, interpreters, missionaries, mercenaries, doctors, scholars or renegades—and who were able to facilitate contacts and maintain regular communication between different polities outside the formal structures of state diplomacy, thanks to their personal network of contacts and capacity to move between different social and cultural contexts. Mildenhall’s political agency and legitimacy as a diplomatic agent resulted not from being an official delegate of the English monarch, but from his immediate usefulness to Mughal geopolitical goals at a specific moment when Akbar sought to pressure the Estado da Índia. Although, Mildenhall was not an official representative of the English Crown, his position was far from constituting a problem for the Mughal authorities, as long as he acknowledged the superior status of the Timurid polity and was able to cooperate and serve the immediate interests of Akbar’s foreign policy. Jerónimo Xavier’s complaints about Mildenhall’s surprising ability to manoeuvre in the Mughal court by establishing friendships with relevant courtiers was a recognition of the ability of the English fulano not only to engage with local actors according to their own forms of social interactions, but also to adapt to Mughal commercial and political interests.

From an English perspective, Mildenhall was a more problematic figure who lacked the necessary conditions to serve as a viable intermediary between the English authorities and the Great Mughal, despite his ability to gain access to the Timurid court and initiate a negotiation process with Akbar. The fact that he acted outside the official English diplomatic apparatus—and followed a personal agenda that escaped the control of the Crown and the EIC—led him to be deliberately marginalised. Another important reason, and perhaps the more decisive one, for the clash between Mildenhall and the English authorities was the absence of a palpable outcome from the English fulano’s exploits at the Mughal court. A firman or a letter from Akbar to the English monarch would, perhaps, have forced the Crown and the directors of the EIC to redefine their plans for Mughal India and include Mildenhall in them. Indeed, the success of non-state actors relied on their capacity to produce immediate outcomes that served the interests of different sides.

Mildenhall and Xavier’s accounts also reveal how Akbar and later Jahangir sought to use them according to their geo-strategic interests. The fact that the Mughal chronicles rarely mentioned European agents—Mildenhall, for example, is not mentioned in the Akbarnama and there is no reference to Sir Thomas Roe’s embassy in the Jahangirnama—has contributed to a widespread perception that the firangis were ‘utterly incidental’Footnote 61 to the Timurids. For the courtly readership targeted by the authors of the imperial chronicles, the firangis were superfluous figures in a historical narrative focused on the lives and deeds of emperors and relevant courtiers; but in the field of realpolitik, Europeans were far from being irrelevant to the process of consolidation of Mughal power in the subcontinent. The story of the dispute between Mildenhall and the Jesuit missionaries, however, reveals a clear Mughal interest in the potential commercial, military and even artistic advantages offered by European agents. When assessing the correspondence of John Mildenhall and Jerónimo Xavier, a Mughal voice that exposes how Akbar, Jahangir and other relevant Mughal political actors actively sought to manipulate and influence the behaviour of the firangi and frustrated their agendas in order to protect Mughal commercial and geopolitical interests emerges.