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The Mughal conquests was a period of South Asian history which began with the Timurid prince Babur's invasion of India in 1525, saw his Islamic Turco-Mongol kingdom evolve into the mighty Mughal Empire, and culminated with Aurangzeb's nearly successful unification of the Indian Subcontinent under Muslim Mughal rule. The Mughals soon established an empire stretching from Afghanistan in the west to Kashmir in the north, Bengal in the east, and the Deccan in the south. Only the emergence of the powerful Hindu Maratha Confederacy in southern India checked the Mughals' unstoppable power, and invasions by the Marathas, Nader Shah's Afsharid Persians, and by the British East India Company later in the 18th century would lead to the Mughal Empire's disintegration.

Background[]

To the north, the Indian Subcontinent is protected by the formidable barrier of the Himalayas, but it had always been vulnerable to invasions and raids from the northwest, from the direction of Central Asia.

By the 11th century there were regular raids by the armies of the Ghaznavid Empire. Genghis Khan's Mongol horde swept through like a storm in the 1220s, and in 1398 it was the turn of Timur, who sacked the city of Delhi.

Babur was a descendant of both Timur Lenk and Genghis Khan. Caught up in the Timurid dynasty's protracted succession struggles, he found himself forced out of the Uzbek city of Samarkand in the late 15th century. Babur built a power base first in Afghanistan, then in India, establishing his own dynasty in Delhi.

History[]

Babur was just 12 years old when he was forced out of his home city of Samarkand in 1494 by the Uzbeks; at 15 he returned to besiege it, although without success. Leading his warband into Afghanistan, Babur took Kabul in 1504, making it his base for forays into the Central Asian region of Transoxania. Toward the east the wealth of India beckoned. He made a series of invasions into Punjab and was soon asked by local nobles to assist them in overthrowing Ibrahim Lodi's fearsome Afghan regime.

Before he did so, Babur took the time to furnish his army with the new gunpowder weapons and to train them in their use, meanwhile preserving the more traditional skills of steppe warfare. Not until the end of 1525 did he mount a full-scale invasion of Hindustan.

Victory at Panipat[]

Babur's army numbered only 10,000, but it brushed aside the Afghan force sent to intercept it. On 12 April 1526, Sultan Ibrahim, with 100,000 men and 1,000 elephants, confronted the invaders at Panipat, north of Delhi. Unperturbed, Babur built an impromptu fortress on the open plain, lashing 700 carts together, with earthen ramparts to safeguard his cannon ane new matchlocks. He also dug trenches and felled trees to create barriers to left and right, leaving gaps through which his cavalry could charge. On 21 April, Ibrahim attacked, but his soldiers were brought up short at Babur's well-placed fortifications. As the Mughal cavalry approached from the wings to encircle the enemy, the bombardment began from behind the barrier, Babur's men firing at point-blank range into this close-packed mass. Unable either to advance or retreat, the Afghan army was pulverized - almost 16,000 soldiers fell. Many were trampled to death by their own elephants. Sultan Ibrahim was killed and Babur was left lord of Hindustan, soon occupying the cities of Delhi and Agra. Babur was to prove a humanitarian and civilized ruler, as indeed were most of his successors. Babur had established a template: the use of modern firepower and field-fortifications alongside the traditional mounted archers of the steppe.

Shaping the empire[]

The Muslim Mughals are famed for their religious tolerance and their openness to India's aesthetic values. Babur's grandson, Akbar the Great, ascended the throne in 1556, allying himself with the northwest India's Hindu princes, the Rajputs. The new emperor soon adopted Indian ways of waging war: from elephants to the bagh nakh, or "tiger claw" - a sequence of razor-sharp blades fitted to a haft or gauntlet, for slashing at close-quarters. Rajput nobles were recruited, along with their peasant troops; armies of up to half a million warriors were mobilized.

Akbar the Great spent almost all his reigning life at war. During the 1560s and 70s he asserted his power over his Rajput "allies" - most accepted, since Akbar gave them privileged offices of state. Those who resisted had to be cut down by force, as at the Siege of Chitor in 1568; simultaneously, Akbar invaded the country's eastern states, including Orissa and Bengal, extending the empire across the whole of northern India. During this period Kabul was taken by Babur's old nemesis, the Uzbeks, under their formidable leader, Abd Allah Khan. Khan's death in 1598 brought the northwest security, and Akbar soon established a new frontier on the banks of India's Godavari River.

Under the subsequent Mughal emperors like Jahangir (1605-27) and Shah Jahan (1627-58), these conquests were made safe. Emperor Aurangzeb purshed further into the south from 1658. A puritanical and single-mided Muslim, the Mughal empire reached its greatest extent under his authority, but it was less happy and more restive. Aurangzeb's death in 1707 saw his successors facing increasing difficulties and ocal unrest. In the end, the dynasty fell into decline, gradually losing its territories to others.

Aftermath[]

The Mughals had modernized Indian warfare, but had no answer to a changing political environment in which the power of Britain was playing an ever increasing role.

As the 18th century went on, the Mughals were increasingly powerless to prevent the expansion of the Maratha Confederacy from the south. The threat from the northwest was soon renewed ,moreovver: in 1739, at the Battle of Karnal, Nader Shah of Iran defeated the Mughal army. His subsequent sack of Delhi was a massive humiliation. This was followed by a shattering defeat in 1764, at Buxar in Bihar, at the hands of the troops of Britain's East India Company.

India's Mughal empire was allowed to continue, but its reign was becoming a sham: revenue-raising and decision-making powers were claimed by the East India Company. In 1857, in the aftermath of the bloody Sepoy Mutiny, British rule continued and government reorganized, and India was incorporated into the ever-expanding British Empire.

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