The Delhi Sultanate

In 1192, Muhammad of Ghor's cavalry destroyed the Rajput confederation at the Second Battle of Tarain, a flat stretch of ground near modern Haryana. It was not a close contest. The Rajput forces were larger but fragmented. Ghor's generals understood siege warfare, light cavalry tactics, and how to coordinate across terrain in ways that the Hindu princes, who had spent decades fighting each other, had not had to learn.

Within fifteen years, a new political order controlled the Gangetic plain from the Punjab to Bengal. It drew its administrators from Persia, its soldiers from Central Asia, its theology from Baghdad, and its revenue from one of the richest agricultural zones on earth.

The India that received this new order was not passive or uniform. The subcontinent in 1200 was a dense web of kingdoms, trading cities, pilgrimage routes, caste hierarchies, and philosophical schools. It had absorbed wave after wave of outsiders — Kushans, Huns, Arabs along the coasts — and transformed them, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly. The question with the Turks was whether the same absorption would happen again, or whether the scale and character of this particular entry would produce something genuinely new.