he brought upon this father the bitterest sorrow; and especially by
having the trustworthy minister and friend of his father, Abul Fazl,
murdered while on a journey. Very close to Akbar also was the loss of
his old mother to whom he had clung his whole life long with a
touching love and whom he outlived only a short time.

Akbar lost his best friends and his most faithful servants before he
finally succumbed to a very painful abdominal illness, which at the
last changed him also mentally to a very sad extent, and finally
carried him off on the night of the fifteenth of October, 1605. He was
buried at Sikandra near Agra in a splendid mausoleum of enormous
proportions which he himself had caused to be built and which even
to-day stands almost uninjured.

This in short is a picture of the life and activities of the greatest
ruler which the Orient has ever produced. In order to rightly
appreciate Akbar's greatness we must bear in mind that in his empire
he placed all men on an equality without regard to race or religion,
and granted universal freedom of worship at a time when the Jews were
still outlaws in the Occident and many bloody persecutions occurred
from time to time; when in the Occident men were imprisoned, executed
or burnt at the stake for the sake of their faith or their doubts; at
a time when Europe was polluted by the horrors of witch-persecution
and the massacre of St. Bartholemew.[46] Under Akbar's rule India
stood upon a much higher plane of civilization in the sixteenth
century than Europe at the same time.

[Footnote 46: Noer, I, 490 n.]

Germany should be proud that the personality of Akbar who according to