Mughal India

Babur lost Samarkand three times before he was twenty. A descendant of both Timur and Genghis Khan, he spent his youth fighting over Central Asian cities he could never hold. By 1504 he had given up on his ancestral lands entirely and taken Kabul instead. Twenty-two years later, with a force of perhaps twelve thousand men and a few dozen cannons, he defeated Sultan Ibrahim Lodi's army of over fifty thousand at the First Battle of Panipat. The date was April 21, 1526. The The Muslim dynasty that ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from 1526 to 1857. Founded by Babur, a Central Asian prince of Timurid and Mongol descent, the empire reached its territorial and cultural peak under Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb. At its height in the late seventeenth century, the Mughal Empire governed roughly 150 million people and produced about a quarter of global GDP. had begun.

Babur did not think much of India. His memoirs, the Baburnama, are remarkably candid about his distaste for the heat, the dust, the lack of good melons. He missed Central Asian gardens. He missed running water. He missed conversation with literate people. What India had, and what Central Asia did not, was wealth beyond anything Babur had encountered. The Sultanate of Delhi sat atop centuries of accumulated treasure, vast agricultural surpluses fed by monsoon rains, and trade networks that reached from the Spice Islands to the Mediterranean.

Babur died in 1530. His son Humayun lost the empire almost immediately, driven into fifteen years of exile by the Afghan warlord Sher Shah Suri. The Mughal enterprise looked finished. It was Humayun's son, born during that exile, who would transform a shaky military conquest into one of the most remarkable states the world has ever produced.