He built India’s greatest early-modern empire on the radical idea of tolerance.
Akbar (1542–1605) — Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar, “Akbar the Great” — was the third Mughal emperor, reigning from 1556 to 1605, who expanded a fragile foothold into an empire covering most of the Indian subcontinent, governing some 100 million people through religious tolerance and administrative genius.
He abolished the jizya tax on non-Muslims, married Rajput Hindu princesses, appointed Hindus to the highest offices, and held interfaith debates at his court. His empire’s wealth, order and pluralism made Mughal India one of the world’s richest states — and his model the standard every later Indian ruler would be judged against.
Akbar was thirteen when his father Humayun died falling down library stairs in 1556, leaving a Mughal realm reduced to Delhi and Agra. His regent Bairam Khan won the decisive Second Battle of Panipat that same year, crushing the Hindu king Hemu — and the teenage emperor then spent a decade breaking free of his own regent and generals to rule in his own right.
What followed was forty years of near-continuous expansion: Malwa, Gondwana, Gujarat, Bengal, Kashmir and the Rajput kingdoms were absorbed by war, marriage alliance or both. By 1605 the empire held some 100 million people — a fifth of humanity.
Akbar’s revolution was administrative and religious at once. He replaced arbitrary tribute with a measured land-revenue system, paid officials in cash salaries rather than land grants, and opened the mansabdari officer ranks to Hindus — including his great general Raja Man Singh and his finance minister Raja Todar Mal.
In 1564 he abolished the jizya; in 1579 he issued the mahzar decree asserting his authority over religious interpretation; and at Fatehpur Sikri’s Ibadat Khana he staged debates between Sunni, Shia, Hindu, Jain, Zoroastrian and Jesuit Christian scholars. His own syncretic Din-i Ilahi “divine faith” attracted few followers — but the message was clear: the emperor belonged to no faction.
He died in 1605, probably of dysentery, and was buried at Sikandra. His son Jahangir kept the system; his great-grandson Aurangzeb would dismantle the tolerance — reimposing the jizya and alienating the Rajputs — and historians still debate how far that reversal caused the empire’s later unraveling.
Akbar’s reputation has survived every revision: Indians across religious lines invoke him as proof that pluralism can be a governing doctrine, not just a slogan. In an age of religious war — Europe was tearing itself apart over Protestantism while he debated Jesuits over dinner — he remains the early modern world’s strongest argument that diversity is administrable.
The empire’s economy underpinned it all: standardized weights, a surveyed land-revenue system that funded the court without ruinous taxation, and trade links from the Red Sea to Central Asia made Mughal India, by some estimates, a quarter of world GDP — richer, per head, than contemporary Europe.
