TheIndosphere

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Ghurid Empire

Also known as Shansabani dynasty

The Ghurids were a dynasty from the mountains of Ghur in central Afghanistan who built an empire in the twelfth century and, under Mu'izz al-Din Muhammad, conquered northern India between 1175 and 1206, opening the way for the Delhi sultanate.

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The mountain kingdom

Ghur is a region of high valleys in central Afghanistan that remained largely outside the control of earlier Islamic empires. Its chiefs, the Shansabani family, converted to Islam in the eleventh century and served the Ghaznavids. In the twelfth century they turned on their overlords. After the Ghaznavids killed two of his brothers, Ala al-Din Husayn defeated Bahram Shah and burned Ghazni in about 1150.

The two brothers

Ala al-Din's nephews, the brothers Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad and Mu'izz al-Din Muhammad, shared power in an unusual partnership. Ghiyath al-Din, the senior, ruled from Firuzkuh in Ghur and fought in Khurasan against the Khwarazm Shahs. From 1173 Mu'izz al-Din, often called Muhammad of Ghur or Shihab al-Din, ruled from Ghazni and turned east. The Minaret of Jam, a tall brick tower in a remote valley in Ghur, covered in decorative brickwork and Qur'anic inscriptions, is generally identified with the site of Firuzkuh and dated to the 1190s.

The conquest of northern India

Mu'izz al-Din took Multan in 1175. In 1178 he invaded Gujarat and was defeated near Mount Abu by the Chaulukya army. He then took Peshawar, Sialkot and, in 1186, Lahore, ending the Ghaznavid line. In 1191 he advanced against the Chahamana king Prithviraja III and was defeated at Tarain, north of Delhi, and wounded. He returned in 1192 and won the second battle of Tarain, after which Prithviraja was killed and Ajmer and Delhi fell. In 1194 he defeated the Gahadavala king Jayachandra at Chandawar and took Kannauj and Varanasi.

Much of the conquest was carried out by his commanders, Turkic slave officers, above all Qutb al-Din Aibak, who took Delhi in 1193 and governed his Indian conquests. Another commander, Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji, raided Bihar, where the great Buddhist monasteries were destroyed, and took the Sena capital in Bengal around 1204.

The conquerors marked their victories in stone. At Delhi, Aibak began the congregational mosque later called the Quwwat al-Islam in 1192–93, built with columns and carved stone taken from demolished temples, as its own inscription states, and beside it the Qutb Minar. At Ajmer a similar mosque, the Adhai Din ka Jhonpra, was built on the site of a Chahamana college. These buildings, made by Indian masons working for new patrons, are the first monuments of Indo-Islamic architecture in north India.

The end of the empire

Ghiyath al-Din died in 1203, and Mu'izz al-Din became sole ruler. In 1206 he was assassinated in his camp on the Jhelum while returning from suppressing a revolt of the Khokhars. He had no son, and his empire fell apart. His slave commanders took his Indian lands: Aibak at Lahore and Delhi, Yildiz at Ghazni, Qubacha in Sindh. Ghur itself fell to the Khwarazm Shahs around 1215, and the Mongols soon after destroyed Firuzkuh. Aibak's successors founded the Delhi sultanate, which treated Mu'izz al-Din as the founder of Muslim rule at Delhi.

Further reading

  • Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 1999
  • Wink, Andre. Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Brill, 1990
  • Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006

See also

  • Delhi Sultanate — The Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 CE) was a series of five Turkic and Afghan Muslim dynasties that ruled large parts of the Indian subcontinent from Delhi, beginning with the Mamluk dynasty founded by Qutb-ud-din Aibak.
  • Mamluk dynasty of Delhi — The Mamluk dynasty founded the Delhi Sultanate in 1206, ruled northern India for eighty-four years, and survived the Mongol invasions that destroyed every comparable state to its west.
  • Chāhamānas of Śākambharī — The Chāhamānas of Śākambharī were the leading Rajput dynasty of eastern Rajasthan, and their defeat at Tarain in 1192 opened northern India to the Ghurid conquest.
  • Destruction of Nalanda — The sack of Nalanda Mahavihara in Bihar, conventionally dated to 1193 CE and attributed to the Turkic military commander Bakhtiyar Khalji, ended the working life of one of the ancient world's largest Buddhist monastic universities.
  • Kannauj — Kannauj, ancient Kanyakubja, is a city on the Ganga in present-day Uttar Pradesh that served as the imperial capital of North India from the reign of Harsha Vardhana in the early 7th century until its fall to Ghurid forces in 1194 CE.
  • Ghaznavid Empire — The Ghaznavids were a Turkic dynasty that ruled from Ghazni in Afghanistan from 977 to 1186, whose sultan Mahmud raided northern India repeatedly in the early eleventh century, and whose later rulers held the Punjab from Lahore.
  • Second battle of Tarain — The second battle of Tarain, fought in 1192 north of Delhi, was the defeat of the Chahamana king Prithviraja III by the army of Mu'izz al-Din Muhammad of Ghur, a year after Prithviraja had won the first battle on the same field.

This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.