Babur Founds the Mughal Empire

# Babur and the Founding of the Mughal Empire

The Prince of Ferghana

Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur was born on 6 Muharram 888 AH (February 14, 1483 CE) in Andijan, in the Ferghana Valley of what is today Uzbekistan. His father Umar Shaykh Mirza was the ruler of Ferghana, a minor principality of the fragmented Timurid empire. His mother Qutlugh Nigar Khanum was a great-granddaughter of the Mongol conqueror Yunus Khan, making Babur the descendant of both Timur (through his father) and Genghis Khan (through his mother) — a lineage that defined his political identity and his claim to rule.

He became ruler of Ferghana at eleven years old when his father died in an accident. What followed was two decades of extraordinary adventure, setback, determination, and resilience. He lost Ferghana, captured Samarkand — the great city of his ancestor Timur — lost it, recaptured it, lost it again. He spent years as a wandering prince, occasionally without a city to call his own, dependent on the loyalty of a shrinking band of followers. He captured Kabul in 910 AH (1504 CE) and made it his base, consolidating control over Afghanistan. But the dream of Samarkand — and behind it, the dream of restoring Timurid glory — never left him.

His autobiography, the Baburnama (Book of Babur), written in Chaghatai Turkish with directness, self-awareness, and literary skill that have made it one of the greatest works of autobiographical literature in any civilization, records all of this with remarkable honesty. He did not write the memoir of a triumphant emperor; he wrote the account of a man who failed repeatedly before ultimately succeeding, and who never pretended otherwise.

The Decision to Turn to India

By the 920s AH (early 1510s CE), Babur had accepted that Transoxiana was lost to him — the Uzbek confederation under Muhammad Shaybani Khan had driven the Timurids from Central Asia definitively. Kabul was a respectable kingdom but not an empire. India, however, was another possibility.

The Delhi Sultanate — the series of Turkic and Afghan dynasties that had ruled northern India since the late 6th century AH (late 12th century CE) — was in serious disarray. The last Lodi Sultan, Ibrahim Lodi, had alienated his Afghan nobles through his autocratic style and his attempts to centralize power. Several of these discontented nobles, including Alam Khan (Ibrahim's uncle) and Daulat Khan Lodi (governor of Lahore), invited Babur to invade, promising support. Babur had been conducting raids into the Punjab for several years and knew the terrain.

In 932 AH (1524 CE), he launched a more serious campaign, and in 932 AH (1525-1526 CE) he marched with a force of approximately 12,000 men to meet Ibrahim Lodi's far larger army.

The First Battle of Panipat

The First Battle of Panipat was fought on 1 Rajab 932 AH (April 21, 1526 CE) on the flat plains north of Delhi. Ibrahim Lodi brought an army estimated at 100,000 men and 1,000 war elephants — a force that dwarfed Babur's. The outcome was determined not by numbers but by two decisive advantages.

First, Babur possessed artillery — specifically, the Ottoman technique of deploying field artillery with matchlocks behind a barrier of chained wagons (the "Rumi method"), which he had learned from Ottoman specialists. This was a tactical innovation that had not yet reached India. Babur positioned his artillery and matchlock infantry behind wagons with gaps for cavalry to charge through.

Second, he used the classic Timurid tulughma — a flanking maneuver in which cavalry wings sweep around the enemy's flanks to attack from the rear while the center holds and the artillery fires. The effect was devastating: the Afghan cavalry and elephants were caught in a crossfire of artillery and flanking cavalry, and the army collapsed. Ibrahim Lodi died in the battle. His body was later found among the ordinary soldiers.

Babur rode into Delhi and Agra within days. In Agra, he found the famous diamond that would become known as the Koh-i-Noor in his treasury. His son Humayun, who had led the vanguard, secured the treasuries of Agra and sent to his father an enormous load of wealth. Babur reportedly found the treasures of all the Delhi sultans — accumulated over 320 years of rule — in Agra's vaults.

The Test of Keeping India

Winning a battle and establishing an empire are different things. After Panipat, Babur faced the question of whether he could hold India. His commanders urged him to take the treasure and return to Kabul — the heat of the Indian plains, the monsoon climate, the alien landscape were disorienting to men raised in Central Asia's cool highland steppes. Babur refused. He gave a speech (recorded in the Baburnama) that combined religious appeal with practical argument: they had come for India, they had won it from Allah, and to abandon it now would be to show ingratitude and cowardice.

He had to fight again almost immediately. The Rajput confederacy under Rana Sanga of Mewar presented the most formidable resistance. At the Battle of Khanwa (933 AH / March 1527 CE), Babur again faced a force considerably larger than his own. Before the battle, he made a public pledge to give up alcohol (he had been a wine drinker, recording his drinking honestly in the Baburnama). He had the wine vessels smashed and the wine poured out. He asked his men to swear on the Quran to fight or die. He declared the battle a jihad against the polytheist Rajputs. The Mughals won decisively, breaking Rajput power in northern India.

A third major battle — at Ghaghra (935 AH / 1529 CE) against an Afghan coalition — completed his military consolidation of northern India.

His Islam

Babur's personal faith is documented in his own words with an honesty that is both admirable and complex. He was a sincere Muslim who performed the five daily prayers, observed Ramadan fasts, made supplications to Allah throughout his campaigns, and sought divine assistance before every major battle. He attributed his victories explicitly to divine help: "By the grace and mercy of Almighty Allah, this difficult task has been made easy."

At the same time, he recorded his drinking with equal honesty — he drank wine regularly from his youth until his pledge before Khanwa. He also used bhang (cannabis preparations) occasionally, which he discussed in the Baburnama. His willingness to record his faults alongside his virtues is part of what makes the Baburnama such a remarkable document — a Muslim ruler who saw no inconsistency between his faith and his honest self-documentation.

The pledge before Khanwa appears to have been genuine. He gave up alcohol in his late forties and maintained the pledge. The Baburnama itself is full of prayers, Quranic citations, and explicit dependence on Allah that appear throughout the text without rhetorical artifice.

The Longing for Home

The Baburnama is suffused with longing. Babur never felt at home in India. He found the landscape monotonous, the heat oppressive, the flowers unfamiliar. He missed the streams and gardens of Kabul and Samarkand, the melons and grapes of Central Asia, the cool breezes of the steppe. He created formal gardens (char bagh — the four-quartered Persian garden) in India to recreate something of the landscape he missed.

He died in Agra on 26 Jumada al-Awwal 937 AH (December 26, 1530 CE), at the age of forty-seven, having ruled India for only four years. He is buried in a garden he designed himself in Kabul — the Bagh-e-Babur — not in India. He was brought home after his death to be buried in the city he loved, in the cooler highlands where the flowers he knew grew naturally.

The Dynasty He Founded

The dynasty Babur founded — called "Mughal" by the Persians and Indians, from "Mongol" — lasted until 1857 CE, over three centuries. His son Humayun lost India to the Afghan Sher Shah Suri, spent fifteen years in exile in Persia, and reconquered India in 962 AH (1555 CE), only to die in an accident six months later. Humayun's son Akbar (963-1013 AH / 1556-1605 CE) established the empire on firm foundations and became the greatest Mughal emperor in terms of institutional development, though his religious policies caused controversy. The line continued through Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb, and then a long line of increasingly powerless emperors until the British formally abolished the Mughal title after the uprising of 1857.

Babur's contribution was the beginning: the military genius that created an entry point, the personal example of combining Timurid cultural sophistication with practical military leadership, and the Baburnama itself — a testament to one Muslim ruler's inner life, struggles, faith, and humanity that remains among the most readable historical documents ever produced.

Sources:

• Babur, Zahiruddin Muhammad. Baburnama (Memoirs of Babur). Trans. Wheeler Thackston. Washington: Smithsonian, 1996.
• Dale, Stephen F. The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Babur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan and India. Brill, 2004.
• Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Beveridge, Annette Susannah (trans.). Babur-Nama in English. London: Luzac, 1922.
• Thackston, Wheeler M. (trans.). The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor. New York: Random House/Modern Library, 2002.
• Erskine, William. A History of India under the Two First Sovereigns of the House of Taimur, Báber and Humáyun. 2 vols. London: Longman, 1854.