This edition and translation of Tratado da Corte e Caza de Iamguir Pachá Rey dos Mogores (Treatise of the court and household of Jahangir Padshah king of the Mughals)— a short and hitherto unpublished manuscript assessing Mughal emperor Jahangir’s power and resources, likely written in Portuguese for the authorities in Goa—serves as a useful counterpoint to the English, French, and Dutch accounts of the empire that have tended to dominate the historiography. While Jorge Flores provides an extended introduction to his edition that endeavors to situate the treatise in the context not just of Mughal history and political ethnography, but within the history of the book and that of reading, the result raises more questions than it answers.

Based upon internal evidence, Flores dates the Tratado between late 1610 and early 1611. It is clearly the work of a Jesuit resident at the Mughal’s court—either Jerónimo Xavier or the product of some form of collaboration between Xavier and fellow Jesuit Manuel Pinheiro. This places the text at what the Portuguese administration in Goa thought was an opportune juncture in Jesuit-Mughal relations, for four of Jahangir’s nephews had recently converted to Christianity. Although all would subsequently lapse, the text is likely a response by the Jesuits in Agra to Goa’s desire for political intelligence about the emperor’s court as it envisioned redefining its relationship with the Mughal. At this level, the Tratado reads like ambassadorial correspondence, with sections devoted to describing the structure of court politics at Agra, Jahangir’s children, his wives and the imperial harem, and his daily routine, along with an assessment of the value of his treasures and revenues. It concludes with an itemized list of the income of the emperor’s sons, and the rank and income of his various mansabdars (officer holders appointed by the emperor). Beyond a few derogatory asides, it is surprisingly free of religiously inspired invective and orientalizing comments about Asian depravity.

With the exception of the section on the mansabdars, the reliability of which Flores concedes is an open question, as a piece of political intelligence intended to be useful to the authorities in Goa, what is most curious about the Tratado is that it furnishes very little information that would not have been available to them at this time about the Mughal and his court. The assessment of Jahangir, for instance, is so generalized and devoid of specific detail as to have been effectively useless to any future emissary. It contains nothing about his personality, interests, weaknesses, or proclivities. Nor does it have much to say about the relative influence of different personalities at court. In short, it contains very few of the kind of details that feature so prominently in ambassadorial reports in Europe. How, then, was the text intended to be used? Unfortunately, Flores treats its utility as self-evident.

That said, the Tratado clearly did have some currency, for it is extant in four manuscripts—a long and an abbreviated version in Portuguese and Spanish respectively. While the relationship between the two longer versions is unclear, they both seem to be copies of a lost original, and intended for quite different audiences. Flores dates the longer Portuguese manuscript between 1615 and 1617, and it is this that he has chosen to edit and translate for the book, arguing that because it contains language that would only have been familiar to Europeans resident in India, it was likely made in Goa and so closer to the Jesuit original. The Spanish text is more curious, for it seems to have been made in Spain around 1613 and intended for readers unacquainted with life in India: unfamiliar language is glossed; there are differences in synthesis and interpretation of key parts; the section dealing with the mansabdars is omitted completely. As Flores notes, the copyist was clearly concerned about how the text would be received. But he does not speculate as to why the text would have been translated or to what community of interest it was intended to appeal.

While this is an accessible and readable edition of a hitherto unnoticed text, Flores’s analysis leaves several important questions about the text’s intended audience unanswered.