1Two Hundred Years of Nobody in Charge
And at the very end of it, for the first time in seven parts and three thousand years, somebody who actually lived in Punjab writes down what a war looked like.
Part Six ended with a frontier general marching from Dipalpur and taking the throne of Delhi. Part Seven is
what his dynasty did with it, and the short answer is: they lost the country.
Not to an invader — not at first. They lost it the ordinary way, through overreach, bad money, savage taxation and
a spectacular run of ideas that did not work. By the middle of the fourteenth century the Delhi Sultanate had
shrunk from an empire to a large kingdom, and the Punjab had become a place where the writ of Delhi was a
suggestion.
Then, in 1398, Timur came down the Punjab road and destroyed what was left.
What follows the destruction is the most unusual stretch in this book. For roughly a century, Punjab is not ruled
by anybody in particular. A Khokhar chief from the Salt Range holds the northern plain for twenty years and
fights Delhi to a standstill. Multan becomes an independent sultanate under its own dynasty. Lahore, Sirhind,
Dipalpur and Jammu are effectively separate powers. And the men who eventually take Delhi are, in both cases,
Punjab frontier commanders coming down the same road as Ghazi Malik.
Four things to hold on to
- The pattern from Part Six now runs twice more. Khizr Khan, governor of Multan and Lahore, takes Delhi in 1414. Bahlul Lodi, governor of Sirhind, takes Delhi in 1451. Then Babur takes Lahore in 1524 and Delhi in 1526. Three times in this part alone, the road runs from Punjab to the throne.
- Punjab produces its own rulers for the first time since the Shahis. Jasrat Khokhar and the Langahs of Multan are not governors appointed from elsewhere. They are local powers, running local states, on their own account.
- Somebody opens the door — explicitly, in writing. The governor of Lahore invites Babur into India. This is the Ambhi problem from Part Two, four hundred years after the Shahis, and it decides everything.
- And then Punjab finds its voice. In about 1520, a man from a village near Lahore watches an army sack a town and writes about it — in Punjabi, in verse, as a moral accusation against God and the conqueror both. It is the first surviving account of a war in this book written by somebody from the country the war happened in. That is where this part ends.
CERTAIN means contemporary evidence — a writer who was present, an inscription, a document made at the
time. LIKELY means good sources writing later, generally accepted. STORY means tradition, often written
centuries afterwards.
Part Seven has an unusual problem: for some of it we have too much source, and the source is the killer. Timur’s
campaign is described in memoirs presented as his own and in an official history written for his family. The invasion of
1526 is described by Babur in a diary he kept himself. These are extraordinary documents and they are also self-
portraits by men explaining their own conquests. When a conqueror tells you how many people he killed, he is
not confessing. He is reporting a result.
2Tarmashirin, 1327 — The Last Mongol Invasion LIKELY
Twenty years after the Ravi, the Mongols came back one final time — and this time Delhi paid them to go away.
When: Around 1327–1329. The dating is loose and the sources disagree.
Where: Down through the Punjab — Lahore, Multan — and towards Delhi.
Who: Ala al-Din Tarmashirin, khan of the Chagatai Mongols, against Muhammad bin Tughluq.
The evidence: Ibn Battuta, who was in India shortly afterwards and later met Tarmashirin in person; and the Persian tradition.
What happened
1. The Chagatai realm pulled itself together. The civil wars that had ended the invasions after 1306 produced,
- eventually, a strong khan. Tarmashirin was that khan.
- He came down the old road and plundered the Punjab — Lahore and the Multan country — before pushing towards the capital.
- He got a long way in. The sources describe him reaching the neighbourhood of Delhi itself, and the country around Meerut being ravaged.
- And then Delhi paid. Muhammad bin Tughluq bought him off with a very large sum and he withdrew.
- He never came back, and neither did anybody else. This is the last Mongol invasion of India in this book.
This war is less well documented than the ones in Part Six and the accounts do not agree. Some sources have
Tarmashirin reaching Delhi’s outskirts; others describe a campaign that got as far as the Punjab and the upper doab
and was then bought off. A few modern historians are sceptical that he came near Delhi at all.
What is not in doubt: a substantial Mongol force came down through the Punjab in the late 1320s, did serious
damage, and left with a payment rather than after a defeat. That is a real change from 1306, and the explanation is in
the state of the Sultanate rather than the strength of the Mongols.
There is also a footnote of the kind this book enjoys. Ibn Battuta later met Tarmashirin in Central Asia and
describes him as a hospitable and pious host. The Moroccan traveller who served as a judge in Delhi sat down to dinner
with the man who had marched on it.
- The frontier system had been let go. Alauddin Khalji’s fort line and permanent frontier command depended on constant funding and attention, and it got neither after 1316.
- The army was committed elsewhere. Muhammad bin Tughluq had ambitions in the Deccan and beyond, and the field force was rarely where the threat was.
- Paying is cheaper than losing. The same arithmetic the republics used against Samudragupta in Part Four. It works, once.
- And the sultan had bigger plans. That is the problem, and it is the next war.
- The deterrent. Alauddin’s whole policy had been to make invading India unprofitable. A payout advertises the opposite.
- Lahore and Multan again. Two cities that had barely recovered from the thirteenth century.
- Confidence in Delhi. A frontier province watches how the capital responds, and this response was noted.
- And within a decade, control. The revolts start almost immediately.
Put 1306 and 1327 side by side, because they are the same country meeting the same enemy with two
completely different states behind it.
In 1306, a Mongol army under Kebek crossed into the Punjab. It was intercepted in the Punjab by a
permanent frontier command based at Dipalpur, caught at the crossings of the Ravi, and destroyed. The
survivors were taken to Delhi and killed in public. The message was unmistakable and it worked for twenty
years.
In 1327, a Mongol army came down the same road, plundered the same cities, marched much further in,
and was handed a bag of money.
Nothing about the Mongols had improved. What had changed was on the Indian side, and it was not
military in origin. Alauddin Khalji’s system — the paid standing army, the price controls that made a fixed
salary worth having, the stocked forts on the Punjab road, the frontier warden with a free hand — was
expensive, unpopular and required a ruler willing to spend on defence rather than on anything else.
Within ten years of his death, most of it had been dismantled or allowed to decay, because that is
what happens to expensive systems that solve a problem which has stopped happening.
Hold on to this, because it is one of the quiet laws of this book. The frontier is always defended by the
last generation’s fear. When the fear fades, the funding goes; and by the time the next army comes down
the road, the thing that stopped the last one is a line in the accounts.
3The Revolts of Muhammad bin Tughluq, 1327–1351 LIKELY
The most educated ruler in medieval India spent twenty-five years having brilliant ideas, and his empire came apart underneath him.
When: 1325–1351, the reign.
Where: Everywhere at once — but for this book, the Punjab, the Salt Range and Sindh.
Who: Muhammad bin Tughluq against his own provinces, his own nobility, and eventually his own army.
The evidence: Barani, who loathed him; Ibn Battuta, who served him as a judge for seven years and was terrified of him.
The man
He was, by every account including hostile ones, formidably intelligent. Ibn Battuta describes a ruler who debated
philosophy and medicine, wrote elegant Persian, and gave away money on a scale that astonished a man who had
seen most of the Islamic world. The same passages describe him executing people almost casually, and a court that
lived in permanent fear of him.
What ruined him was not stupidity. It was a habit of implementing enormous ideas at full scale without testing
them.
1. He moved the capital. In 1327 he transferred the administration — and, by the accounts, a large part of
- Delhi’s population — a thousand miles south to Daulatabad in the Deccan, to govern the empire from its centre. The logic was sound. The execution killed people on the road, and within a few years the whole thing was reversed and everyone marched back.
- He reinvented the currency. Facing a shortage of silver, he issued token coins of brass and copper to circulate at the value of silver. It is an idea that modern economies run on. It requires a state that can prevent forgery, and his could not. The country forged them by the cartload — Barani says every householder became a mint — and the treasury eventually had to redeem the lot in real metal.
- He planned an invasion of Khurasan. An enormous army was raised and paid for a year, and then the project was abandoned and the army disbanded, having achieved nothing but its own wages. 4. He sent an army into the Himalayas. The Qarachil expedition of the late 1330s went up into the mountains north of the doab and was destroyed by weather, terrain and hill fighters. Very few came back.
- And he taxed the doab during a famine. The revenue demand was increased in the richest agricultural region of the empire at exactly the wrong moment, and the peasantry abandoned the land and took to the forests.
An empire that is executing its nobles, wrecking its own currency, marching armies to no purpose and driving its
farmers off the land does not hold its frontier provinces.
Revolt after revolt broke out — Bengal, the Deccan, Gujarat, Sindh — and in the north-west, the Khokhars rose again.
The Salt Range and the Jhelum country, which had killed a sultan in Part Six and nearly broken Mahmud’s line in Part
Five, went back to doing what it does whenever Delhi is weak.
By the end of the reign, the effective authority of the Delhi Sultanate over the Punjab beyond the Sutlej had become
nominal. The province was not conquered by anybody. It simply stopped being governed.
And the sultan died chasing a rebel. In 1351, pursuing a Sindhi insurgent named Taghi through the country near Thatta,
Muhammad bin Tughluq fell ill and died in camp. Barani’s verdict, endlessly quoted, is that the king was freed from his
people and they from their king.
- The centre stopped paying. A currency crisis and a disbanded army mean garrisons that go unpaid, and unpaid garrisons make their own arrangements.
- Terror does not travel well. Fear of a sultan works within a day’s ride of him. At a thousand miles it is just a rumour.
- The nobility had been thinned by executions, which meant the men who might have held provinces loyally were dead or afraid.
- And the Khokhars had never needed permission. They had no state to lose and nothing to be taken away.
- He scaled every idea straight to national size. No pilot, no province-sized trial, no way back if it went wrong.
- He mistook the plan for the problem. The token currency was correct in theory and required an anti-forgery capacity he did not have. That is not a small detail; that was the policy.
- He punished failure so hard that nobody would report it. A ruler who executes bearers of bad news gets no bad news, and therefore no warning.
- And he was never in one place. Twenty-five years of moving between crises meant no crisis was ever finished.
Of all the things in this reign, the token currency is the one worth understanding properly, because it is not
the joke that popular accounts make of it.
Muhammad bin Tughluq faced a genuine shortage of silver. His answer was to issue coins of brass and
copper and declare them legal tender at the value of a silver coin — money whose worth came from the
state’s word rather than from its metal. Every note in your pocket today works on exactly that
principle. He was, by several centuries, early.
The catch is the one every currency has ever had. A token is worth what it says only if nobody else can
make one. A silver coin is hard to counterfeit because silver is hard to get. A brass coin is not, and
fourteenth-century India was full of skilled metalworkers.
Barani says the houses of the Hindus became mints, and that the countryside produced the sultan’s money
by the cartload — using it to pay taxes, to buy horses and weapons, and to settle debts in coin the state had
promised to honour.
When the scale of it became clear, the government did the only thing it could and offered to redeem the
tokens in real silver and gold. The country brought them in. The treasury paid out. The chronicles
describe heaps of worthless metal piling up outside the palace at Tughlaqabad, where they were reportedly
still lying years later.
The lesson is not that the idea was mad. The lesson is that a policy is only as good as the state’s ability
to enforce it — and by the 1330s the Delhi Sultanate could not enforce anything, which is exactly
why it was also losing the Punjab. The forged coins and the Khokhar revolt are the same fact wearing
different clothes.
4Firoz Shah in Sindh, 1362–1367 — The Army That Got Lost LIKELY
A sultan took an army into the desert country of the lower Indus and disappeared for six months, and half of India thought he was dead.
When: 1362 the first campaign; 1365–1367 the second.
Where: Sindh and the Rann of Kutch, launched from Multan and the southern Punjab.
Who: Firoz Shah Tughluq against the Sammas of Thatta.
The evidence: The Persian chroniclers, and Firoz Shah’s own inscription-cum-memoir, the Futuhat-i Firoz Shahi.
What happened
1. The campaign was launched from the Punjab — the army assembled and supplied through Multan, which
- is why it is in this book.
- It went wrong immediately. Disease broke out among the horses; the accounts describe the cavalry losing a large proportion of its mounts, which for a medieval army is close to a death sentence.
- The supply system failed. The country was hostile, the grain did not arrive, and the boats on the Indus that were supposed to feed the army were unreliable.
- The retreat became the disaster. Withdrawing towards Gujarat, the army entered the Rann of Kutch — a salt marsh that floods, dries, and looks identical in every direction — and the guides either failed or misled them.
- They were lost for months. The accounts describe an army wandering in the Rann with no communication reaching Delhi at all. For about six months, the capital did not know whether its sultan was alive.
- He came out, went back, and did it properly. The second campaign, with better preparation, forced Thatta to submit in 1367.
Firoz Shah ruled for thirty-seven years and fought remarkably few wars. What he did instead was build, and a great
deal of it was in the Punjab and the country immediately east of it.
He built the largest canal network in medieval India. Channels were cut from the Sutlej, from the Ghaggar and
from the Yamuna, carrying water into dry country that had never been farmed. He founded Hisar — Hisar-Firoza — as
a city in the middle of it, along with Fatehabad, Firozpur and Jaunpur, and repaired the reservoirs and forts of his
predecessors.
This is the only sustained programme of construction anywhere in this book’s medieval section, and it
changed the map. Land that had been scrub became cultivable. Towns appeared where there had been nothing.
Several of those canals were still being used, in improved form, under later governments.
He was also a harsher ruler than the building programme suggests — his religious policy was narrower than that of the
sultans before him, he extended the jizya tax to groups that had previously been exempt, and he was capable of
considerable cruelty. Both things belong in the same paragraph. The man who dug the canals is the same man, and
this book is not going to hand you only the half you prefer.
- He had learned the ground. The first expedition was an education paid for in horses and men.
- Supply was organised in advance through Multan and the river, rather than assumed.
- He was patient. Two years between attempts, which is exactly what Muhammad bin Tughluq never allowed himself.
- Horses, not enemies. Disease in the cavalry lines did more damage than the Sammas ever did.
- He fought in country he did not understand. The Rann is not desert and not sea and behaves like neither.
- He trusted local guides in hostile country. An old mistake with a very long history.
- And nobody could reach him. An army out of communication for six months is an army that cannot be reinforced, redirected or rescued.
Here is a thing Firoz Shah Tughluq did that has almost nothing to do with war and everything to do with
this book.
In the 1350s he found two ancient stone columns in the countryside north of Delhi — one near Topra in the
Ambala district, in the eastern Punjab, and one near Meerut. They were enormously old, beautifully
polished, covered in writing nobody could read, and lying in fields.
He had them moved to Delhi. The operation is described in detail in the chronicles: the pillar wrapped in
silk cotton and reeds, lowered onto a bed of raw cotton, loaded on a forty-two-wheeled carriage, hauled by
thousands of men to the Yamuna, floated downriver on boats lashed together, and then raised again on a
purpose-built structure at his new city.
He also had scholars brought in to read the inscription. None of them could. The script was Brahmi, it had
been dead for something like a thousand years, and it was not deciphered until James Prinsep worked it out
in 1837 — nearly five hundred years later.
The columns were Ashoka’s. The writing on them was the edicts you met in Part Three — the pillar edicts
about restraint, about care for living things, about what a ruler owes the ruled.
So a fourteenth-century sultan hauled a third-century-BCE emperor’s plea against cruelty across
a hundred and sixty kilometres, at enormous expense, purely because it was beautiful and old —
and could not read a word of it.
You met this pillar’s cousin in Part Three, at Allahabad, where Samudragupta’s minister carved a war
record over Ashoka’s edicts and Jahangir later carved over both. Here the same thing happens with the
opposite motive: not contempt, but a kind of blank, expensive reverence for something whose meaning had
been completely lost.
The pillar is still standing in Delhi. It says what it always said.
5Multan, 1397–1398 — Six Months in the Rain LIKELY
Timur’s grandson opened the invasion of India by sitting outside Multan for half a year, and the weather nearly beat him before the city did.
When: Siege from 1397; the city falls in 1398, before Timur himself crosses the Indus.
Where: Multan, and the Uch country.
Who: Pir Muhammad, Timur’s grandson, against Sarang Khan, the governor for Delhi.
The evidence: Sharaf al-Din Yazdi's Zafarnama, the official Timurid history, and the memoirs presented as Timur’s own.
Why Multan first
Because it is the door, and it always has been. Muhammad bin Qasim took it in 712 in Part Five. Mahmud fought
over it in Part Five. Muhammad of Ghor took it in 1175 in Part Six. Every invader who comes from the west and
does not want to fight through the northern passes comes at Multan.
Timur’s plan was a pincer. His grandson Pir Muhammad would come up through Sindh and take Multan and the
southern Punjab; Timur himself would cross the Indus in the north and come down the road through Lahore.
They would join in the middle and go to Delhi together.
What happened
1. Pir Muhammad invested Multan in 1397. The city was well walled and the governor, Sarang Khan, held it.
2. The siege lasted about six months and went into the rainy season, which is the detail that matters.
3. The rains destroyed his cavalry. The Timurid accounts describe the horses dying in large numbers in the
- wet — from disease, from foundering, from lack of dry fodder. A Central Asian army in the Punjab monsoon stops being a Central Asian army.
- Multan fell anyway, in the early part of 1398, and Sarang Khan was taken. 5. But Pir Muhammad’s force was wrecked. When Timur came down to join him, he had to re-horse and reinforce his grandson’s army before it was fit to fight.
Almost everything in the next four wars comes from two texts, and you should know what they are before you read a
single number.
The Zafarnama of Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi, completed in the 1420s, is the official history of Timur written for his
descendants. It is detailed, well-informed and entirely committed to presenting its subject as an instrument of divine
will.
The Malfuzat-i Timuri — also called the Tuzuk-i Timuri — is a Persian text presented as a translation of Timur’s own
memoirs, made in the seventeenth century by Abu Talib Husaini, who said he had found the original Chagatai
manuscript in Yemen. Many scholars doubt that story and regard the text as later work built on genuine
material. It is the source of the most quoted passages about the Indian campaign, including some of the worst.
So: when this part quotes a figure or a motive from “Timur”, it means a text that claims to be Timur. The
events are corroborated. The self-justifications should be read as what a Timurid court wanted posterity to believe.
- No relief came. Delhi in 1397 was in the middle of a succession war between rival princes and could not have sent an army if it had wanted to.
- Timurid siegecraft was excellent, inherited from the Mongol tradition and improved.
- Six months is a long time. Walled cities fall to patience more often than to assault.
- The horses. The single most expensive item in a steppe army, and the campaign started by losing most of them to weather.
- The timetable. Six months for the first city meant the main invasion had to be fitted into one dry season.
- And it proved the point Genghis Khan had made. Part Six ended with the Mongols turning back from India partly because of the climate. Seventy-five years later, Timur’s advance guard learned the same lesson in the same country.
Here is a question this book has been circling since Part Four, and Multan in 1397 is the clearest place to
answer it. Why do invaders from Central Asia raid India rather than settle it — and why, when
they do settle, do they change?
Part of the answer is horses, and it is almost entirely unromantic.
A steppe army’s whole advantage is mobility, and mobility is animals. A Mongol or Timurid horseman rode
with several remounts, which is what let him cover ground nobody could match. Those animals needed
grazing — dry, open, cool grazing of the kind that runs for thousands of kilometres across Central Asia.
The Punjab in the wet season is the opposite of that country in every particular. It is hot, it is
humid, the ground turns to mud, the fodder rots, and horses that have never met these conditions get sick
and die. Pir Muhammad lost his cavalry to a monsoon without a battle being fought.
This is why the campaigning season for every invasion in this book runs from autumn to spring, why
armies from the north-west almost always leave before the rains, and why the ones who stay — the
Kushans in Part Three, the Ghaznavids in Part Five, the Sultanate in Part Six — end up buying Indian
elephants, recruiting Indian infantry and importing horses at ruinous expense from the very country they
came from.
The four-hundred-year habit that Part Three described — invaders becoming Indian within two
generations — starts with the weather. You cannot keep being a steppe army in a place that kills steppe
horses. You either leave, or you become something else.
6Timur Crosses the Indus, 1398 LIKELY
The march from the Indus to Delhi took three months and destroyed every town on the road, and the man doing it wrote down why.
When: Crossed the Indus 24 September 1398; reached Delhi in December.
Where: Attock, the Jhelum, the Salt Range, Talamba, Bhatnair, Sirsa, Kaithal, Panipat.
Who: Timur — Tamerlane — against the Khokhars, the local chiefs, and a Sultanate in civil war.
The evidence: Yazdi and the memoirs attributed to Timur. Both written by the winning side.
Why he came
Timur was in his sixties and had already conquered Persia, Central Asia and the Caucasus. The reason he gave —
in the texts written for his own court — was religious: that the rulers of Delhi were too tolerant of their Hindu
subjects, and that the campaign was therefore a holy war.
Read that with the scepticism it deserves. His main victims were Muslim states: he had already sacked
Baghdad’s neighbours and would shortly destroy the Ottoman army and the Mamluk cities of Syria. India in 1398
was the richest and least defended target within reach of a man who financed his state through conquest.
And it was undefended in a very specific way. The Delhi Sultanate had split into two rival courts. Since 1394
there had been competing sultans, one at Delhi and one at Firozabad, with the nobility fighting between them.
There was no functioning central army. Timur’s intelligence would have told him this, and the speed of his march
says he knew.
What happened
1. He crossed the Indus on a bridge of boats near Attock, on 24 September 1398, and moved fast.
2. He fought his way across the Jhelum country. The local ruler around Jhelum resisted and was defeated; the
- accounts describe him drowning in the river rather than being taken. 3. The Khokhars fought him. Under their chief Shaikha, the people of the Salt Range did what they had done to Mahmud in Part Five and to Ghor in Part Six. They lost, and Shaikha’s son will be War Nine of this part.
- Talamba was sacked, then the army swung south-east into the desert country.
- Bhatnair — modern Hanumangarh — was stormed after a hard fight. The accounts describe a massacre and mass self-immolation inside the fort.
- Then Sirsa, Fatehabad, Kaithal, Panipat. The chronicles describe town after town found empty, the population having fled, and burned anyway.
- And by mid-December he was on the Jumna, in front of Delhi.
On the march, Timur’s army took captives in enormous numbers — the texts give a figure of about a hundred
thousand, and as always the number is the winner’s.
Before the battle for Delhi, the decision was taken to kill them. The reason given in the memoirs attributed to Timur is
coldly practical: the prisoners were in the camp, they had shown signs of joy at the approach of the Delhi
army, and a battle would leave them behind the fighting line. The order was that every man in the army should
put his own captives to death, on pain of forfeiting his life.
This book is not going to soften that or bury it in a subordinate clause. It was the mass killing of unarmed
prisoners as a matter of administrative convenience before a battle, ordered by the commander, and recorded by his
own side without embarrassment because they did not think it required any.
The figure of a hundred thousand should be treated like every other figure in this part — as a court number rather
than a count. The order and the killing are not in dispute. They are in the sources written to praise him.
- There was no field army in the Punjab. Not a small one, not a beaten one — none. The frontier command of Part Six had ceased to exist.
- Delhi was fighting itself. Two sultans and a divided nobility, at the exact moment the largest army in Asia crossed the Indus.
- He moved faster than news. Three months from the Indus to Delhi, in a country where a message takes weeks.
- And terror did the rest. After Bhatnair, towns emptied before he arrived, which is precisely what the reputation was for.
- Everything was local. The Khokhars fought, the Jhelum chief fought, Bhatnair fought — each on its own, in sequence, exactly as the cities of Sindh did in 712.
- The forts were not stocked. Alauddin’s grain-filled fort line on the Punjab road was a century gone.
- The rivers were not held. Five rivers, not one of them defended.
- And there was nothing to rally to. No legitimate government, no summons, no coalition — not even the doomed kind this book usually gets.
There is a detail that repeats through the accounts of this march, and it is more revealing than any of the
battles.
Again and again, Timur’s army arrives at a town — Sirsa, Fatehabad, Kaithal, the villages along the road —
and finds it deserted. The people have gone. They have taken what they could carry and left for the ravines,
the jungle, the river islands, anywhere that a cavalry army will not follow.
The chroniclers record this with mild irritation, as a logistical inconvenience: fewer captives, less plunder,
no supplies.
What it actually records is the only defence available to the people of the Punjab in 1398, and the
fact that they knew exactly when to use it.
Nobody warned them officially. There was no government to issue a warning. What there was, was a road
that had been carrying invasions for four hundred years, a population that had lived through the Mongol
raids of Part Six within family memory, and a very old set of instincts about what the dust on the horizon
means.
So they went. Not heroically — there is no last stand in an empty town, and this book is not going to invent
one. They read the situation correctly, wrote nothing down, saved as many of their families as they could,
and came back afterwards to rebuild on the same spot, which is what people in the Punjab have done after
every war in these sixteen parts.
The chronicles call these towns abandoned. The better word is evacuated. It is the single most
common act in the military history of this province and it has never once been called a strategy.
7Delhi, 17 December 1398 LIKELY
The Sultanate put a hundred and twenty armoured elephants in the feld, and lost to burning hay.i
When: 17 December 1398; the sack begins within days and runs into January.
Where: Outside Delhi, on the plain by the Jumna.
Who: Timur against Nasir al-Din Mahmud Shah and his commander Mallu Iqbal Khan.
The evidence: Yazdi, in detail, and the memoirs attributed to Timur.
The elephants
The Sultanate’s one real asset was its war elephants — the accounts say about a hundred and twenty, armoured,
with blades fixed to their tusks, and in some versions poison on the blades. Timur’s army had never fought
elephants and the sources are unusually frank about the fact that his men were frightened of them.
His answer was engineering, and it is worth setting out because it is a masterclass in beating a weapon you have
never faced.
1. He dug a trench in front of his position and threw up defences.
2. He scattered iron caltrops — spikes designed to point upward however they land — across the ground the
- elephants would cross.
- He tied his baggage animals into a barrier. Buffaloes and camels roped together in front of the line, so that a charge would hit an obstacle rather than a rank of men.
- And then he set them on fire. The animals were loaded with dry grass and wood, and at the moment of the elephant charge the loads were lit and the animals driven forward.
- The elephants turned. Burning, screaming animals coming towards them broke the charge, and the elephants went back through their own army.
- The Delhi army disintegrated, and the battle was effectively over. Mahmud Shah and Mallu Iqbal fled the city that night.
Count how often this animal has decided a battle in this book, and in which direction.
Part Two, the Hydaspes: Porus’s elephants panic under Macedonian pikes and trample his own infantry. Part Five,
Waihind 1008: Anandapala’s elephant bolts and an entire Indian confederacy dissolves. Part Six, Tarain 1192: the
elephant line is useless against horse archers who will not close. Part Seven, Delhi 1398: the elephants turn and go
back through their own army.
Four battles, four defeats, one animal. The war elephant is the most consistently catastrophic weapon system in
Indian military history, and the reason is not that it was weak — it was terrifying and it worked, when it worked. The
reason is that it is a living creature with its own opinions about fire, noise and pain, positioned at the centre of an army
that has no plan for what to do when it changes its mind.
And it kept being used, for two thousand years, because when it did work it was decisive, and because a king on an
elephant is visible to his whole army. That visibility was the point, and it was also the flaw.
- He studied the weapon and built a counter. Trench, caltrops, animal barrier, fire. Four separate answers to one problem, prepared before the battle.
- He fought from a prepared position. Almost nobody in this book digs in, and the ones who do tend to win.
- His army had no other job. Professional, unified, campaigning for years under one commander.
- And his enemy had already lost the country. A sultan whose writ ended at his own city walls was not going to win a battle outside them.
- It had spent four years fighting itself. Two rival courts, and the army that met Timur was what could be scraped together from one of them.
- It committed its one advantage frontally. Elephants driven straight at a prepared position with fire waiting for them.
- It had no reserve and no second plan. When the elephants turned, there was nothing behind them.
- And its leaders left that night. Which is the beginning of the next paragraph, and the worst part of this war.
Here is what makes the destruction of Delhi different from every other sack in this book, and it is not the
scale.
Delhi surrendered. The sultan and his commander had fled in the night. The remaining notables of the
city — the religious leaders, the merchants, the officials — came out, submitted formally, and were granted
quarter. Timur’s own account is clear that terms were given and that he intended the city to be spared, and
Yazdi says the same.
Then a levy was imposed, and parties went into the city to collect it, and something went wrong. The
accounts describe resistance in the streets over the collection, then fighting, then more troops going in, then
the whole thing coming apart.
For several days, one of the great cities of the world was destroyed. The population was killed or
enslaved; the accounts describe the survivors being driven out in columns, and craftsmen — especially
masons — being separated out and sent to Samarkand to build Timur’s capital. The chroniclers describe
towers built of heads. When it was over, Delhi was effectively empty, and it did not recover for generations.
Both surviving accounts present this as an accident that got out of hand — a sack that occurred despite the
commander’s intention.
You are entitled to disbelieve them, and you should at least notice what the excuse is doing. A
commander who cannot control his army for three days is either not in command or is choosing not to be,
and Timur was in command of that army for forty years. The claim of an accidental massacre is the
standard defence of every general in history who wanted the result without the responsibility.
What is beyond argument is what it produced. Northern India lost its capital, its administration, its
treasury and its craftsmen in one month. A famine and an epidemic followed. And the Delhi Sultanate
— the state that had held off the Mongols for eighty-five years in Part Six — never functioned as an empire
again.
Everything in the rest of this part happens in the hole that this left.
8The Road Back, 1399 LIKELY
Having destroyed Delhi, Timur went home along the Himalayan foothills, fighting all the way — and left behind the man who would take the throne.
When: Left Delhi 1 January 1399; recrossed the Indus in March 1399.
Where: Meerut, Hardwar, then west along the Siwaliks through the Jammu country.
Who: Timur against the hill rajas, the Jammu country and the Khokhars again.
What he leaves: Khizr Khan, installed over Multan, Lahore and Dipalpur.
What happened
1. He stormed Meerut, which had refused terms, and then moved north to the Ganges at Hardwar.
2. He turned west along the foothills. This is the route that keeps a large army in supply and out of the worst
- of the plains, and it took him straight through the hill states of the eastern Punjab and Jammu.
- He fought the whole way. The hill rajas resisted in country that suited them, and the accounts describe repeated engagements rather than a march.
- The Raja of Jammu was defeated and captured.
- He crossed the Indus in March 1399 and was gone. He never returned to India.
- And on the way out he made an appointment, handing Multan, Lahore and Dipalpur to a local noble named Khizr Khan as his deputy.
It is worth being concrete about what a country looks like after this, because the chronicles move straight on to the next
reign.
Delhi was empty. The administration was gone, the treasury was gone, and the skilled workforce had been marched to
Samarkand. Famine and epidemic followed the sack, and the sources describe both.
The Punjab had been crossed twice — once going in and once coming back by a different route — with the towns
on both roads destroyed or emptied. Multan had endured a six-month siege before any of it started.
And there was no government. Not a weak one. For a period after 1399 there is effectively no state authority between
the Indus and the Ganges, and the country reorganises itself around whoever is locally strong: a Khokhar chief in the
Salt Range, hill rajas in the Siwaliks, a governor in Multan, Afghan clans around Sirhind.
That reorganisation is the political history of the next hundred years, and every remaining war in this part
comes out of it.
- He had what he came for. The plunder of Delhi, in a campaign that lasted six months from the Indus and back.
- The season was ending. The hot weather and then the rains were coming, and Part Four of this book explains what those do to a steppe army.
- He had other wars. The Ottomans and the Mamluks were next, and he beat both within four years.
- And India was never the objective. He wanted its wealth, not its administration — the Mahmud model from Part Five, at ten times the scale.
- A functioning state. The Sultanate survives in name for another century and never again rules an empire.
- A generation of craftsmen. Deported to Central Asia to build somebody else’s capital.
- The Punjab’s towns, twice over. On the way in and on the way out.
- And the deterrent, permanently. It had been demonstrated that India could be entered and its capital destroyed by an army that then simply went home.
The most consequential thing Timur did in India was not the battle or the sack. It was a personnel decision
made on his way out of the country.
Riding home in early 1399, he confirmed a local noble named Khizr Khan in charge of Multan, Lahore and
Dipalpur — the southern and western Punjab — as his deputy. It was an administrative tidying-up, the sort
of thing a departing conqueror does so that the ground behind him has a name attached to it.
Fifteen years later, in 1414, that deputy marched on Delhi and took it, and founded the dynasty that ruled
northern India for the next thirty-seven years.
And here is the detail that makes it worth a page. Khizr Khan never called himself sultan. He ruled
Delhi without taking the royal title, had the Friday prayers read in the name of Timur’s son Shah Rukh
rather than his own, and continued to describe himself as a deputy — of a dynasty in Samarkand that had
no ability whatever to enforce the claim and, so far as anyone can tell, very little interest in it.
Historians have argued about why: caution, genuine loyalty, a legitimacy he could borrow but not
manufacture. Whatever the reason, the effect is one of the strangest sentences in Indian history. For a
generation after Timur destroyed Delhi, Delhi was governed in his family’s name by a man from
the Punjab who had been left in charge on the way out.
Watch the mechanism, because it is the rule of Part Six repeating on schedule. The frontier command
takes the capital. Ghazi Malik from Dipalpur in 1320. Khizr Khan from Multan and Lahore in 1414. Bahlul
Lodi from Sirhind in 1451. Babur, by way of Lahore, in 1526.
Four times in two hundred years, and every one of them comes down the same road.
9Khizr Khan Takes Delhi, 1414 LIKELY
The Punjab governor spent fifteen years grinding towards the capital, took it, and then spent the rest of his life collecting taxes at the head of an army because there was no other way to collect them.
Khizr Khan — founding the Sayyid dynasty, which never quite admitted it was WON BY
a dynasty
- Delhi taken in 1414; he rules until 1421.
- From Multan, Lahore and Dipalpur to Delhi, along the usual road.
- Khizr Khan against Daulat Khan Lodi, who was holding Delhi.
- Yahya bin Ahmad Sirhindi's Tarikh-i-Mubarak Shahi, written at this court — contemporary, and the best source for the fifteenth-century Punjab.
What happened
1. He held on through fifteen years of chaos. After Timur left, the Punjab was contested between Khizr Khan,
- rival nobles, and whatever Delhi could occasionally project. He lost Multan and Lahore at times and took them back.
- He built a base rather than raiding. Multan, Lahore and Dipalpur were governed, taxed and garrisoned — which meant that when he moved, he moved with a revenue behind him.
- He took Delhi in 1414 from Daulat Khan Lodi, who had held it after the last Tughluq.
- And then he ruled without a crown. No royal title, no coins in his own name, the Friday prayer read for Shah Rukh in Samarkand. His successors eventually took the title; he never did.
- He spent the rest of his reign on campaign, not to conquer but to collect. The Tarikh-i-Mubarak Shahi reads, for these years, like an annual circuit: ride out, extract the revenue from a district by force, ride to the next one, repeat.
The Sayyid “empire” is worth understanding because it is not really an empire at all, and the difference matters for
everything that follows.
It had no administration to speak of. The revenue system that Alauddin Khalji had built and Firoz Shah had
maintained was gone, along with the officials who ran it.
So taxation became a military operation. Instead of assessors and collectors, a field army rode out each season and
took what it could from districts that would otherwise not have paid. This is not government; it is organised extraction
with a throne attached.
And the territory was tiny. A contemporary jibe, quoted in several later histories, held that the sultan’s kingdom ran
from Delhi to Palam — that is, about fifteen kilometres. It is a joke rather than a survey, and like most good jokes it is
roughly the right shape.
This is why the Punjab in the fifteenth century belongs to local men. There was nothing above them to belong to.
- He had a province and everyone else had a faction. Multan and Lahore produced revenue; Delhi’s claimants produced claims.
- He waited fifteen years. The same patience that got Muhammad of Ghor to Lahore in Part Six.
- He borrowed a legitimacy he could not create. Ruling in Shah Rukh’s name made him a deputy of the man who had destroyed Delhi, which was more authority than any local claimant could invent.
- And he came from the frontier. Where the soldiers were.
- He inherited a ruin. There was no functioning state to take over, only a city and a title.
- Extraction is not administration. A government that must send an army to collect its own taxes has already told every district what its real position is.
- The Punjab did not come with him. Taking Delhi meant leaving the province, and within a few years there was a Khokhar chief running most of it.
- And the dynasty lasted thirty-seven years, ending when another Punjab frontier lord walked in.
There is a line about this period that has been repeated for six hundred years, in various forms, in various
languages: that the empire of the Sultan of Delhi extended from Delhi to Palam.
Palam is now under an airport. It was then a village a short ride from the city gates.
The joke is aimed at the Sayyids, and it is unfair in the way jokes are — Khizr Khan and his successors did
control considerably more than that, at least in the sense of being able to ride into it once a year with
enough cavalry. But the reason it stuck is that it describes something true about the whole century, and the
truth is not really about Delhi.
Between roughly 1400 and 1500, northern India had no centre. Not a weak centre or a contested one
— no centre. The Punjab beyond the Sutlej was held by whoever held it. Multan went its own way entirely.
Jaunpur in the east became a separate sultanate with its own splendid architecture, Malwa and Gujarat
became independent kingdoms, and the hill states of the Siwaliks did as they pleased.
And here is the part that this book keeps having to insist on. For most people in the Punjab, this was
not a catastrophe. A century without a distant capital demanding revenue is a century in which local
arrangements govern, canals get maintained by the people who use them, and the harvest mostly stays
where it was grown.
The chroniclers hate this period because they were employed by kings and it is a period without impressive
kings. Every source you have for the fifteenth-century Punjab was written by somebody who
thought the absence of an empire was a disaster, and none of them asked the farmers.
10Jasrat Khokhar’s Twenty Years, 1420–1442 LIKELY
A chief from the Salt Range came home from captivity, took the northern Punjab, and fought the Sultan of Delhi to a standstill for two decades.
When: Released around 1420; active until his death around 1442.
Where: The Salt Range, Sialkot, Lahore, Jalandhar and the Jammu country.
Who: Jasrat, son of Shaikha Khokhar, against Mubarak Shah of the Sayyid dynasty and the Raja of Jammu.
The evidence: The Tarikh-i-Mubarak Shahi — a contemporary Delhi chronicle that hated him and had to keep writing about him.
Who he was
His father Shaikha was the Khokhar chief who fought Timur in 1398 in War Five of this part. Jasrat himself was
taken prisoner during the Timurid wars and spent years in captivity in Central Asia, and was released around 1420
by Timur’s son Shah Rukh.
He came back to the Salt Range and found the Punjab with no government in it.
These are the same people you have been following since 1008. The Khokhars charged Mahmud’s line at
Waihind in Part Five. They killed Muhammad of Ghor on the Jhelum in Part Six. They rose under Muhammad bin
Tughluq in War Two of this part, and fought Timur in War Five. Now, for the first and only time in this book,
they run the country.
What happened
1. He beat Jammu first. Defeating the hill raja gave him the northern flank and, by the accounts, a great deal of
- plunder and prestige.
- He took Sialkot, then Lahore. The two cities that anchor the northern Punjab, both of them in this book since Part Three. 3. He fought Delhi for twenty years. Mubarak Shah campaigned against him repeatedly through the 1420s and 1430s. The pattern is monotonous and it is the whole story: the Delhi army comes, Jasrat withdraws into the Salt Range and the river country, the Delhi army cannot stay, and when it leaves he comes back.
- He raided as far as the Sutlej, and at times threatened the approaches to Delhi itself.
- He was never decisively defeated, and he died — around 1442 — still in possession of a great deal of what he had taken.
This is the fourth time in this book that a Punjabi people has proved unremovable, and by now the mechanism is clear
enough to state as a rule.
He had no capital to take. A state can be destroyed by capturing its centre. Jasrat’s power had no centre — he held
Lahore when it suited him and left it when it did not.
He had ground that suited him. The Salt Range and the river country between the Jhelum and the Chenab is the
terrain Part Five described at Nandana: broken, waterless in the wrong places, and hostile to a large cavalry army from
the plains.
He did not need to win. Delhi had to conquer him; he only had to still be there. Every campaign that ended with the
Sultanate’s army going home for the season was a Khokhar victory by default.
And he had a population, not an army. The distinction is everything. Armies can be destroyed in an afternoon. A
people that supports a chief has to be occupied, and occupation costs more than the Punjab was worth to a government
that could barely tax Delhi.
- He came back to a vacuum. Timur had removed every institution capable of stopping him, and the Sayyids were extracting rather than governing.
- Local legitimacy. He was not a governor sent from elsewhere; he was a Khokhar chief in Khokhar country, which is a different kind of authority.
- He fought a war of avoidance. Never a pitched battle against the main Delhi army if it could be helped.
- And he used the hills and the rivers. The lesson Part Five spent a whole chapter on: Punjab wins in its broken country and loses on its plains.
- He never took a capital and kept it. Holding Lahore permanently would have meant defending it, which was the one thing his method could not do.
- No administration, no succession. Personal authority over a set of clans does not survive the man.
- He fought his neighbours as readily as Delhi. Jammu, the local chiefs, rival factions — there was no coalition of Punjabi powers, only Jasrat and everybody else.
- And when he died it dissolved. Within a decade the Punjab belonged to the Afghan clans around Sirhind, and one of them took Delhi.
Line up the appearances, because when you see them together they stop looking like footnotes.
1008, Waihind. Unarmoured hillmen charge on foot into the fortified line of the best army in Asia and kill
several thousand of Mahmud of Ghazni’s professionals before the line re-forms. An elephant panics half a
mile away and none of it counts.
1206, Damyak. Muhammad of Ghor crushes a Khokhar rising on the Jhelum and is dead in his tent within
a fortnight, probably at their hands.
1330s. They rise against Muhammad bin Tughluq while his empire falls apart around him.
1398. Shaikha Khokhar fights Timur — Timur, who had just come from destroying Persia and would
shortly destroy the Ottoman army — and loses, and survives.
1420–1442. Shaikha’s son takes Lahore and Sialkot and runs the northern Punjab for twenty years while
the Sultan of Delhi tries and fails to remove him.
Four hundred and thirty years. Six empires. And in all that time they never had a capital, never
founded a dynasty, never built a monument, never minted a coin, and never — not once —
produced a chronicle of their own.
Everything we know about them comes from the people they fought, and those people were writing in
Persian, in Delhi, in irritation.
This is the same shape as the Yaudheyas at the end of Part Three, who outlasted five empires and left one
word stamped on copper. The states of the Punjab lose in this book with terrible regularity. The
peoples of the Punjab are never finished, and are almost never written down.
11The Langahs of Multan, 1445–1526 LIKELY
Southern Punjab spent eighty years as an independent country, and it is the closest thing to a native Punjabi state between the Shahis and Ranjit Singh.
When: Independent from about 1445; falls to the Arghuns in the 1520s.
Where: Multan and the southern Punjab, from the Sutlej down towards Sindh.
Who: The Langahs, against the governors of Delhi, the Lodis, and eventually Sindh.
The evidence: Persian chronicles of the Lodis and of Sindh, and later Multani tradition. Thin, and mostly written by outsiders.
What happened
1. Delhi lost its grip on Multan in the 1440s, as it had lost its grip on everywhere else, and the local governor
- could not hold the city against the surrounding tribes.
- A Langah chief took it — the accounts differ on the details, and a marriage into the previous governor’s family is part of most versions — and took the title of sultan.
- The dynasty ruled for about eighty years. Its high point was under Husain Langah in the later fifteenth century, when Multan expanded north and east and became a serious regional power.
- It fought the Lodis. Delhi under Bahlul and Sikandar Lodi tried repeatedly to bring Multan back, and did not manage it.
- And it fell to Sindh, not to Delhi. In the 1520s the Arghuns — themselves refugees pushed out of Afghanistan by the same upheavals that produced Babur — came up the Indus and took Multan after a long siege, at exactly the moment Babur was taking Lahore.
The origins of the Langahs are genuinely disputed and the dispute is old. Some accounts make them a Jat clan of the
southern Punjab; others make them of Baloch or Afghan descent; the dynasty itself, once established, claimed a more
prestigious foreign ancestry, which is what almost every dynasty in this book does the moment it gets a throne.
The argument matters less than the pattern. Whatever their origin, the Langahs were a local power that took a
local city and ran it as an independent state for three generations, at a moment when there was no empire able to stop
them.
And they were not alone. The same century produces the Khokhars in the north, hill states in the Siwaliks, Baloch
chiefs in the south-west, and Afghan clans around Sirhind. Left without a capital for a hundred years, the Punjab
did not collapse. It reorganised into its own components. That is a fact about this province that almost never gets
said, because the chronicles are written by the people whose empire had failed.
- Delhi could not reach it. Multan is far from the capital, across country the Sultanate no longer controlled, and the Lodis had a war with Jaunpur on their hands for thirty years.
- It was rich in its own right. The city sat on the trade between Sindh, Khurasan and the Punjab, and paid for its own defence.
- It had local support. A dynasty rooted in the surrounding tribes is much harder to remove than an appointed governor.
- And it had walls with a reputation. Multan had held Pir Muhammad for six months in 1397 and would hold the Arghuns for a long siege in the 1520s.
- Internal division. The last phase of Langah rule is a succession dispute, which is how the Arghuns got in.
- It was caught by the same wave as everyone else. The Uzbek conquest of Central Asia pushed the Arghuns into Sindh and Babur into India within the same twenty years.
- Regional powers cannot survive a continental shift. Multan was strong enough to defy Delhi and far too small to matter to what was coming.
Multan has now appeared in five parts of this book, and it is worth putting the appearances in one place,
because the repetition is the point.
712. Muhammad bin Qasim cuts the water supply and takes it; the sun temple becomes a taxable asset and,
later, a hostage held on the walls to deter Hindu armies.
1006 and after. Mahmud of Ghazni fights over it; a Hindu king blocks his road to it; a converted Shahi
prince governs it and then rebels.
1175. Muhammad of Ghor’s Indian conquests begin here.
1397. Timur’s grandson sits outside it for six months and loses his cavalry to the rain.
1445–1526. It becomes a country.
1520s. It falls to Sindh in the same season Babur takes Lahore. And in Part Fourteen, an Englishman will be
murdered there and it will start a war that ends the Sikh empire.
The reason is entirely geographical and has not changed in thirteen hundred years. Multan sits where the
road from Sindh, the road from Khurasan and the road up the Punjab meet. An army coming from
the west that does not want to fight through the northern passes comes here. An army coming from Delhi
that wants to control the Indus comes here.
It has been besieged more often than any other city in this book. It has never been strategically irrelevant
for a single century of the period these sixteen parts cover.
And it is the only city in the Punjab that has been, at various times, the capital of an independent
country — twice. Once under the Ismailis in Part Five, and once here.
12Bahlul Lodi Comes Down From Sirhind, 1451 LIKELY
The third time in this book that a Punjab frontier lord took the throne of Delhi — and this one did it by being the man everybody trusted.
When: 1451; he reigns until 1489.
Where: From Sirhind and the eastern Punjab to Delhi; then thirty years of war eastward against Jaunpur.
Who: Bahlul Lodi, Afghan chief and governor of Sirhind, succeeding the last Sayyid, Alam Shah.
The evidence: Persian histories of the Lodi period, most of them written under the Mughals afterwards.
Who the Lodis were
Afghans — specifically of the Lodi clan, part of the large Afghan population that had been settling in the Punjab
and the Ganges plain for two centuries as soldiers, horse traders and holders of frontier commands. Bahlul’s family
had held Sirhind and Dipalpur.
They were not Turks, and this matters more than it sounds. Every previous dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate had
been Turkish and had ruled on the Persianate model of an absolute sultan. Afghan political culture was
tribal and consultative: a chief was first among equals, his nobles were his kinsmen, and he was expected to
behave like it.
What happened
1. The last Sayyid gave up. Alam Shah, sultan in name, withdrew to Badaun and left Delhi to be argued over —
- one of the very few voluntary abdications in this book.
- Bahlul took the city in 1451. There was manoeuvring and there were rivals, but the throne was taken by the man with the army and the reputation rather than in a decisive battle.
- He then spent nearly thirty years fighting Jaunpur. The Sharqi sultans of the east were the other serious power in northern India, and the war between them ran, on and off, from the 1450s to the 1470s. Bahlul eventually won it and absorbed Jaunpur. 4. He held the Punjab through his family. Sons and kinsmen were given Lahore, Multan’s frontier, Sirhind and Dipalpur — the standard Afghan method, and the reason the province was quiet for the first time in a century.
- He died in 1489, leaving a real kingdom to his son Sikandar, who moved the capital to Agra and ruled well.
Bahlul Lodi ruled by consent among his own people. The accounts describe him refusing to sit on a raised throne in the
presence of his nobles, sharing plunder rather than hoarding it, and treating the Afghan chiefs as partners.
That works beautifully, and it works exactly once. It made the Lodi state possible and it made the Lodi state fragile,
because the nobility now expected to be consulted, and a consultative aristocracy is very hard to turn back into
subjects.
His grandson Ibrahim Lodi tried to do exactly that. He insisted on the older Turkish model — the sultan as absolute
master, the nobles as servants — and enforced it by humiliating, imprisoning and executing men whose grandfathers
had put his own family on the throne.
The result is the whole of War Twelve. The Afghan nobility of the Punjab did not rebel in the ordinary way. They
went looking for somebody else to be king.
- He came from the frontier with an army. Sirhind, on the Punjab road. Fourth time in this book.
- He was trusted by his own class. The Afghan chiefs followed him because he behaved like one of them, and that got him more soldiers than a title would have.
- He fought the war that mattered and finished it. Thirty years against Jaunpur — slow, unglamorous, and it doubled his kingdom.
- He held Punjab through kin. A brother or son in each frontier command is not a modern system, but it worked for two generations.
- There was nothing left to defend. A capital, a title and an annual tax-raid did not amount to a state worth fighting for.
- Their legitimacy was borrowed. Ruling as deputies of a Timurid in Samarkand meant never having a claim of their own.
- The Punjab had gone. Jasrat in the north, the Langahs in the south, the Afghans around Sirhind — the province that had produced Khizr Khan no longer belonged to his family.
The stories told about Bahlul Lodi are all about the same thing, and they are told by later historians who
found them either admirable or embarrassing depending on their politics.
He would not use a throne in front of his nobles, preferring to sit on a carpet with them. He divided plunder
rather than taking the ruler’s share. He addressed his chiefs as kinsmen, and when they disagreed with him
in council he let them. One account has him, on being enthroned, telling the Afghan nobles that he was
their equal and had merely been given a task.
Mughal historians writing a century later found this faintly ridiculous — the point of a king, in their world,
was to be unlike everyone else — and modern accounts often repeat it as charming provincial simplicity.
It was neither. It was the constitution of an Afghan chiefdom being operated at the scale of a
kingdom, and for one reign it worked better than anything Delhi had managed since Firoz Shah.
The trouble is what it does to the next generation. A system in which power is shared among kinsmen has
no way of handling a ruler who wants it back. When Ibrahim Lodi tried to be an absolute sultan over men
who had been promised partnership, there was no constitutional mechanism for the disagreement — only
rebellion, or invitation.
And so the most consequential political decision in this part was made by a governor of Lahore
who decided that if he could not have the king he had been promised, he would find a different
king.
13Daulat Khan Opens the Door, 1519–1525 CERTAIN
The governor of Lahore wrote to a king in Kabul and asked him to come. It is the clearest single decision in this book, and it is the one that ends it.
When: Five expeditions between 1519 and 1526; Lahore taken in 1524.
Where: Bajaur, Bhera, Sialkot, Saidpur, Lahore, Dipalpur, Milwat.
Who: Babur, king of Kabul, invited by Daulat Khan Lodi, governor of Lahore, and by Ibrahim’s uncle Alam Khan.
The evidence: The Baburnama — Babur’s own diary, written in Chagatai Turkish. One of the great autobiographies of world literature.
Why the invitation was sent
Because Ibrahim Lodi was destroying his own nobility. He had imprisoned and executed Afghan chiefs, humiliated
others, and made it clear that the partnership his grandfather had offered was over. Daulat Khan Lodi, who held
Lahore and the Punjab, had every reason to believe he was on the list.
His plan was the standard one and it has never worked in this book. Invite a foreign army to remove the king,
then govern the Punjab yourself under a grateful and distant patron. Ambhi tried it with Alexander in Part
Two. It has the same result every time.
Babur, for his part, had a claim he genuinely believed in — he was descended from Timur, and Timur had ruled
here for six months in 1398 — and, much more to the point, he had lost Samarkand three times and needed a
country.
What happened
1. 1519: Bajaur and Bhera. Babur storms Bajaur, and his own diary describes the massacre of its garrison in flat,
- unembarrassed detail. He crosses the Indus for the first time.
- 1520–21: the Punjab raids. Bhera, Sialkot, and Saidpur — modern Eminabad, near Gujranwala — which is stormed and sacked. This is the event at the centre of the story below. 3. 1524: Lahore. Now formally invited, Babur comes in force, beats the Lodi army sent against him, and takes Lahore. His men burn the bazaar and much of the city.
- Then the arrangement collapses. Daulat Khan had expected to be handed the Punjab. Babur gave him Jalandhar and Sultanpur and kept Lahore and Dipalpur for himself.
- Daulat Khan turned on him, drove out the garrisons, and fought — old, by now, and out of options. He was besieged at Milwat, surrendered in 1526, and died on the road into custody.
- And Babur kept coming. By the winter of 1525 he was across the Indus for the fifth time, with the Punjab behind him and Delhi in front.
This book has now watched it happen enough times to state it as a law rather than an observation.
Ambhi invites Alexander (Part Two) to settle a score with Porus, and loses his independence. Jayapala’s grandson
governs for Mahmud (Part Five) and ends his life in a fortress. Daulat Khan invites Babur (here) to remove
Ibrahim Lodi, and dies a prisoner on a road while a foreign dynasty takes the country for three hundred and thirty-one
years.
In every case the logic was locally sound. The invited power was genuinely stronger than the enemy at hand. The
invitation genuinely did remove the enemy.
And in every case the man who opened the door was the second person through it, and got nothing.
The reason is not that these men were fools. It is arithmetic. A power strong enough to be worth inviting is strong
enough to have its own plans, and the Punjab is not a prize that anybody who reaches it agrees to hand back.
- He was invited. The single most important fact. He entered the Punjab with local guides, local supplies and a faction of the Lodi nobility on his side.
- He came five times. Not one invasion but a decade of raids, each one learning the country, the roads and the rivers.
- He had gunpowder. Field artillery and matchlocks, and — crucially — Ottoman-trained men who knew how to use them together with cavalry.
- And he had nothing to go back to. Kabul was small and Samarkand was lost. This was not an adventure; it was the only option he had.
- He mistook a king for a mercenary. Babur was not a hired sword; he was a dynast with a Timurid claim to the very ground he was standing on.
- He had no way to enforce the bargain. Once the foreign army was inside the Punjab, the terms were whatever it said they were.
- He turned too late. Fighting Babur in 1525, after handing him Lahore in 1524, was the worst possible order in which to do those two things.
- And his own side was split. Some Punjabi Afghans went with Babur, some with Ibrahim, some with Daulat Khan. The oldest failure in this book, at the worst possible moment.
Babur kept a diary, and it is astonishing. The Baburnama is a real autobiography — self-critical, observant,
funny, interested in fruit and gardens and birds and the taste of melons, honest about defeats and about
being frightened. There is nothing else like it from the medieval world, and it is our main source for
everything in this war.
It is also the account of a conqueror describing his own conquest, and he does not flinch from it. His
account of Bajaur in 1519 records the storming and the killing of the garrison in the same steady voice he
uses for the local flowers.
And it has holes. The manuscript tradition of the Baburnama has gaps, and one of them falls across
the early 1520s — the years of the Punjab raids, of Saidpur, of the taking of Lahore.
So the most detailed first-person account of an invasion of India ever written thins out at exactly the point
where it crosses the country this book is about.
That is almost certainly an accident of transmission. Manuscripts lose pages; this one lost several stretches.
It is not a cover-up and this part is not going to suggest it was.
But the shape of the accident is worth noticing, because it is the shape of the whole book. Seven
parts, three thousand years, and the record of every war in the Punjab has come to us through somebody
else’s manuscript, somebody else’s language, somebody else’s purpose — Greek, Chinese, Persian, Arabic,
Sanskrit from another province — with the Punjabi part of the story either unwritten or lost.
Which is what makes the last page of this part what it is. Because somebody else was at Saidpur in
1520, and he did write it down.
14Panipat, 21 April 1526 CERTAIN
Twelve thousand men beat a hundred thousand in about half a day, using carts, ditches and guns — and three hundred and thirty-one years of Mughal India began.
When: 21 April 1526, and over by early afternoon.
Where: Panipat, on the Punjab road north of Delhi — twenty miles from Tarain.
Who: Babur against Ibrahim Lodi, Sultan of Delhi.
The numbers claimed: Babur says he had about 12,000 and that Ibrahim had 100,000 and 1,000 elephants. Both are his figures.
What Babur built
He had a week before the battle and he spent it constructing a position, which is the entire explanation of what
followed.
1. He anchored his right on the town of Panipat itself, so that flank could not be turned.
2. He dug a ditch on his left and filled the front of it with felled trees and branches — an obstacle that cavalry
- cannot cross at speed.
- Across the centre he chained together carts — the araba, several hundred of them, roped with twisted hide, with gaps left between them.
- Behind the gaps he put matchlockmen and field guns, under two Ottoman-trained specialists, Ustad Ali Quli and Mustafa Rumi. This is the crucial import. Guns had existed in India before; what Babur brought was the Ottoman method of using carts, firearms and cavalry as one system.
- And he held back flanking parties — the tulughma — to swing wide around both wings and hit the enemy from behind once he was committed.
What happened
1. Ibrahim attacked into the prepared front. He had the numbers and he used them the way numbers had
- always been used.
- His army could not deploy. The frontage between the town and the ditch was narrow, and an enormous army pushing into a narrow space compresses. Men in the rear could not get forward; men in the front could not withdraw.
- The guns and matchlocks fired into a stationary mass. The casualties mattered less than the noise and the horses.
- The flanking parties closed behind him. The tulughma detachments came around both wings and shot into the rear of an army that was already jammed.
- It was over by midday. Babur says the fighting began in the morning and was finished around noon.
- Ibrahim Lodi was killed in the field — the only Sultan of Delhi in three hundred and twenty years to die in a battle — and his body was found among the dead.
Babur’s figures are his own and are the classic shape of a victory account: very few of us, very many of them. Twelve
thousand is probably close to the force he brought from Kabul, but by 1526 he had been in the Punjab for two years and
had Afghan defectors with him, so his actual strength was larger. Ibrahim’s hundred thousand and thousand elephants
are not credible.
What decided it was not the ratio and it was not, mainly, the guns. Sixteenth-century field artillery was slow,
inaccurate and fired a handful of times in a battle. It contributed, and the noise terrified elephants and horses that had
never heard it.
The battle was won by the position. A narrow frontage that prevented a larger army from deploying; a fortified centre
it had to attack head-on; and mobile detachments to envelop it once it was stuck. Babur did to Ibrahim Lodi what
Muhammad of Ghor did to Prithviraj at Tarain in Part Six — he made sure the battle his enemy was equipped
to fight never happened.
- He chose and prepared the ground. A week of digging beats a week of marching.
- He turned the enemy’s size into a liability. A hundred thousand men who cannot deploy are worse than twenty thousand who can.
- He integrated three arms. Guns, matchlocks and cavalry working as one system, which nobody in India had.
- And half the enemy did not want to be there. The Afghan nobility had been alienated for a decade; contingents held back, and some had already changed sides.
- He attacked a fortified position frontally. With no reconnaissance worth the name and no attempt to go round.
- He had destroyed his own command. Executing and humiliating the chiefs whose men he needed is why his army fought like a crowd.
- He fought the last war. Weight, elephants and a frontal advance — a system that had not won a major battle in this book since before Tarain.
- And he had given Babur the Punjab already. Two years of Babur holding Lahore and Dipalpur meant the invader arrived at Panipat rested, supplied and knowing the ground.
Six parts of this book have ended with the same complaint, and by now you should be tired of reading it.
Nobody in Punjab wrote anything down.
Every war so far has reached us through somebody else’s hand. Greeks writing centuries later about
Alexander. A Chinese pilgrim describing the ruins of Taxila. Persian court historians in Delhi counting the
dead of Waihind and Tarain. A Kashmiri poet six hundred years after Mihirakula. Inscriptions carved by
winners in provinces a thousand kilometres away. In seven parts and three thousand years, not one
surviving account of a war in the Punjab, written in the Punjab, by somebody it happened to.
That ends here.
Around 1520, Babur’s army stormed Saidpur — Eminabad, near Gujranwala. And a man from a village on
the Ravi, who had spent his life travelling and teaching and was then somewhere near fifty years old, saw
what happened there and wrote about it.
Guru Nanak’s four hymns on Babur’s invasion — the Babarvani — are preserved in the Guru
Granth Sahib. They are in Punjabi. They are contemporary. And they are not a chronicle at all: they are an
accusation.
He describes the invasion as a wedding party of sin, come from Kabul demanding wealth as its dowry. He
describes the killing, the women dragged from their homes, the destruction of a town that had done
nothing. He says he speaks only what he is given to speak.
And then he does something that no court historian in this entire book has ever done, in any language. He
turns and asks God why it was allowed. Having described the slaughter, he says the people cried out in
agony — and asks whether God felt no compassion, whether the Creator felt no pain at what was done.
Read what that is, precisely. It is not a lament for a defeated king; there is no king in it. It is not a call to
arms. It is an eyewitness moral judgement on a conqueror, written in the language of the country
he was conquering, by a man who had no army, no throne and no patron, and it was preserved by
the community he founded and is still recited daily.
Babur, who was there, has a gap in his diary across those years. The Persian chroniclers record the
campaign as a stage in a successful conquest. The only voice that records what Saidpur was actually
like belongs to a Punjabi, in Punjabi, who was not interested in who won.
Panipat begins the Mughal empire, and Part Eight will be full of emperors. But the thing that changes
permanently in 1526 is not on the battlefield twenty miles from Tarain.
It is that from this point on, the Punjab has its own record of what is being done to it — and for
the rest of this book, it never falls silent again.
15The Whole Chapter on One Page
Five patterns to carry into Part Eight
1. The Punjab frontier command takes Delhi — now four times. Ghazi Malik from Dipalpur in 1320, Khizr
- Khan from Multan and Lahore in 1414, Bahlul Lodi from Sirhind in 1451, and Babur by way of Lahore in 1526. It is not coincidence and it is not martial spirit. It is that the empire keeps its army where the enemy is, and the enemy is always west of Delhi. Watch for it again with Sher Shah Suri in Part Eight.
- Somebody always opens the door, and never profits by it. Ambhi and Alexander in Part Two; Sukhpal and Mahmud in Part Five; Daulat Khan and Babur here. The invitation always works and the man who sends it always ends badly, because a power worth inviting is a power with its own plans.
- When the empire disappears, Punjab does not. The century after Timur has no central authority at all, and the province reorganises into Khokhar, Langah, Afghan and hill-state power rather than collapsing. The chroniclers call this anarchy because they worked for kings. Remember that when Part Eleven describes the eighteenth century in the same words.
- Prepared ground beats numbers, every single time. Ghor’s four divisions and evening reserve at Tarain; Timur’s trench, caltrops and burning camels at Delhi; Babur’s carts, ditch and flanking columns at Panipat. Three of the four most decisive battles in the last two parts were won by the smaller army, and in every case it had spent days building something before the enemy arrived.
- And the silence ends. Six parts of this book asked why nobody in Punjab wrote down what happened to them. From 1520 there is an answer, in Punjabi, in verse, in a scripture that is still recited. Part Eight has both the Mughal chronicles and the Sikh Gurus writing at the same time about the same country — and for the first time, this book can quote both sides.
Mughals, Suris and the Gurus, 1526–1605. Babur’s victory nearly dies with him: Humayun loses India to Sher Shah
Suri, an Afghan from Bihar who builds the best-run state medieval India ever had and rebuilds the Grand Trunk Road
across the Punjab. Humayun comes back from Persian exile through Lahore in 1555. Then the Second Battle of
Panipat in 1556, where a thirteen-year-old Akbar’s regent beats Hemu on the same ground — the third decisive battle
within twenty miles of Tarain. And running underneath all of it, in the villages between the Ravi and the Beas, the
succession of the Sikh Gurus, the founding of Amritsar, and the compilation of a scripture that will make Punjab, for the
first time in this book, a place with its own written voice.
16Words Used in This Part
The dynasty founded by Ghazi Malik in 1320 and effectively ended by Timur in 1398. Also spelled Tughlaq.
Coins whose value comes from the state’s declaration rather than their metal. Muhammad bin Tughluq issued brass and copper tokens at silver value; the country forged them.
The Himalayan expedition of the late 1330s, destroyed by terrain and weather. One of several catastrophic projects of that reign.
A tax levied on non-Muslim subjects. Firoz Shah Tughluq extended it to groups previously exempt.
Firoz Shah’s own account of his reign — part memoir, part public inscription. Unusual: a sultan describing his own policies in the first person.
Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi’s official history of Timur, completed in the 1420s. Detailed, well-informed and entirely committed to its subject.
Also Tuzuk-i Timuri. A Persian text presented as Timur’s own memoirs, produced in the seventeenth century. Its authenticity is doubted by many scholars; it is the source of the most quoted passages on India.
A four-spiked iron object that always lands with a point upward. Scattered by Timur in front of the elephant charge at Delhi.
The dynasty founded by Khizr Khan, ruling Delhi 1414–1451. Its first ruler never took the title of sultan.
Yahya bin Ahmad Sirhindi’s chronicle, written at the Sayyid court. The best contemporary source for the fifteenth-century Punjab, and thoroughly hostile to Jasrat.
The people of the Salt Range and Jhelum country. In this book since 1008; here, under Jasrat, they run the northern Punjab for twenty years.
The dynasty that ruled Multan as an independent sultanate from about 1445 to the 1520s. Their origins are disputed.
A dynasty of Central Asian origin pushed south into Sindh by the Uzbek conquests, who took Multan in the 1520s.
The Afghan dynasty ruling Delhi 1451–1526. Bahlul, Sikandar and Ibrahim. The last dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate.
A cart. At Panipat, several hundred were chained together with twisted hide to form Babur’s fortified centre, with gaps for matchlockmen.
The flanking manoeuvre in which detachments swing wide around both wings of an engaged enemy and attack its rear. The other half of how Panipat was won.
An early firearm fired by touching a burning cord to the powder. Slow and inaccurate, and terrifying to horses and elephants that had never heard one.
Babur’s autobiography, written in Chagatai Turkish. Candid, observant and self-critical — and with gaps in the manuscript tradition, including across the early 1520s.
The four hymns of Guru Nanak on Babur’s invasion, preserved in the Guru Granth Sahib. The first surviving Punjabi account of a war in the Punjab.
Sources used for this part
- Ziauddin Barani, Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, for Muhammad bin Tughluq and the token currency
- Ibn Battuta, Rihla — he served as a judge in Delhi for seven years and later met Tarmashirin in Central Asia
- Shams-i Siraj Afif, Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, and Firoz Shah’s own Futuhat-i Firoz Shahi, for the canals, the Sindh campaigns and the
- moving of the Ashokan pillars
- Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi, Zafarnama, and the Malfuzat-i Timuri, for Timur’s campaign — both from the Timurid side, and the second of disputed authorship
- Yahya bin Ahmad Sirhindi, Tarikh-i-Mubarak Shahi, for Khizr Khan, Mubarak Shah and Jasrat Khokhar
- Persian histories of the Lodi period, including those compiled under the Mughals
- Babur, Baburnama, in Beveridge’s and Thackston’s translations
- The Babarvani hymns of Guru Nanak in the Guru Granth Sahib (Raags Asa and Tilang)
- Elliot and Dowson, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, for the translated Persian material
- Standard modern accounts of the Tughluq collapse, Timur’s invasion, the Sayyid and Lodi periods, and the founding of the
- Mughal empire
The open questions here include: how far Tarmashirin actually got in 1327; whether the Malfuzat-i Timuri preserves
anything genuinely Timur’s; every casualty figure and army size in the part, without exception; the origins of the
Langah dynasty; the precise sequence and dating of Babur’s Punjab raids; and how much of Ibrahim Lodi’s army at
Panipat had already decided not to fight.
One caution deserves particular weight. The most-quoted passages of Timur’s Indian campaign — including the
order to kill the prisoners and the explanation given for it — come from a text presented as his memoirs whose
authenticity is disputed. This part has said so on the page rather than in a footnote. The events are corroborated by
the official Timurid history; the self-justifications should be read as a court’s account of itself.
And a note on the last war. Guru Nanak’s hymns are quoted here in paraphrase rather than as a translated text,
because they are scripture in daily liturgical use and translations differ meaningfully; anyone who wants the words
should read them in the original or in a translation they trust. The historical claim being made in this part is narrow
and, so far as this book can tell, solid: that they are contemporary with Babur’s invasion, that they respond to it directly,
and that they are the earliest surviving account of a war in the Punjab written in the Punjab by somebody who was
there.