© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi �0.��63/�5700658-� �34�4�0 Journal of early modern history �8 ( �0 �4) 559-577 brill.com/jemh Mughals, Mongols, and Mongrels: The Challenge of Aristocracy and the Rise of the Mughal State in the Tarikh-i Rashidi Ali Anooshahr University of California, Davis Abstract The present article seeks to re-evaluate the problem of the Central Asian military elite that emigrated to Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent in the sixteenth century during the foundation of the Mughal Empire. By reading the Tarikh-i Rashidi, the his- torical composition of Mirza Haydar Dughlat (d. 1551) and the main literary source for the period, modern scholars have developed two distinct historiographical strands of scholarship. Those mainly focused on Mughal India have used the text to argue for the absence of a meaningful political culture among the Central Asian elite. Others, mostly focused on Inner Asian history, have used the text for the opposite purpose of describ- ing a fairly static “tribal” structure of Mirza Haydar’s world. I, on the other hand, will abandon the imprecise and essentially meaningless concept of “tribe” and will rather argue that Mirza Haydar instead chronicles the perspective of “aristocratic lineages” whose world was collapsing in the sixteenth century and who had to adjust themselves to changing conditions that saw the alliance of monarchs and servants through “meri- tocracy” both in their homeland as well as the new regions to which they moved. Keywords Tarikh-i Rashidi – Mughal Empire – historiography – aristocracy – meritocracy Introduction One of the greatest challenges to the establishment of the Mughal Empire (1526-1857) came from its own military elite, a group of Central Asian commanders called the Turani or Chagatay Emirs. Scholars have generally