Aisha Sultan Begum

Aisha Sultan Begum was Queen consort of Ferghana Valley and Samarkand as the first wife of Emperor Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire and the first Mughal emperor. Aisha was born a Timurid princess and was the third daughter of Babur's paternal uncle, Sultan Ahmed Mirza, the King of Samarkand and Bukhara.

Aisha Sultan Begum was born a Timurid princess as the third daughter of Sultan Ahmed Mirza, the King of Samarkand and Bukhara and his wife Qutaq Begum. Her father was the eldest son and successor of Abu Sa'id Mirza, the Emperor of the Timurid Empire. Aisha's paternal uncles included Umar Sheikh Mirza, the ruler of Ferghana Valley, who later became her father-in-law as well while her first cousins included her future husband, Babur, and his elder sister, Khanzada Begum.

In her infancy, Aisha was betrothed to her first cousin, Babur, in 1488 at Samarkand, when Babur himself was only five years old. He was the eldest son of her paternal uncle, Umar Sheikh Mirza and her aunt, Qutlugh Nigar Khanum. Aisha married Babur eleven years later in August 1499 at Khojand and subsequently joined him in Ferghana, where Babur had succeeded his father as King of Ferghana Valley after his death. The young queen found her husband a bashful lover. Babur remained very shy of her in the beginning of their marriage and went to see her only once in ten or fifteen days. When even his first inclination did not last, his bashfulness increased.

Thereafter, Aisha's mother-in-law, Qutlugh Nigar Khanum, used to scold him with great fury and used to send him to visit her more often. As Babur tells it, "Though I was not ill-disposed towards her (Aisha), yet, this being my first marriage, out of modesty and bashfulness, I used to see her once in ten, fifteen, twenty days."

Though overtime Babur's bashfulness decreased as Aisha gave birth to his first child after three years of marriage, a daughter: Princess Fakhr-un-Nissa, who was born in 1501 at Samarkand but died after a month or forty days. Her death grieved Babur the most as he dearly loved his daughter.

Though their relationship was much closer now, it seems that Aisha and Babur quarrelled and she left him before the overthrow of Tashkent in 1503. Babur states that his wife was misled by the machinations of her elder sister, Rabiah Sultan Begum, who induced her to leave his house.