Timur's invasion of India

Background

By the 1390s Timur, a Turco-Mongol conqueror who traced descent from the Chagatai Mongol line and had built an empire centered on Samarkand, controlled territory stretching across Central Asia and much of Persia. The Delhi Sultanate, by contrast, had fractured badly since the death of Firuz Shah Tughluq in 1388: rival nobles and claimants contested the throne, and the reigning sultan, Nasir-ud-Din Mahmud Shah Tughluq, exercised little real authority beyond Delhi itself, with power in practice held by factional strongmen such as Mallu Iqbal Khan. Timur's own memoirs frame the invasion partly as a religious campaign against a Muslim state accused of insufficient rigor toward its Hindu subjects, though modern historians generally treat the wealth of the Indo-Gangetic plain as the primary motive.

The march to Delhi

Timur sent his grandson Pir Muhammad ahead with a vanguard force that besieged and took Multan earlier in 1398, before Timur himself crossed the Indus near Attock in September-October of that year. Advancing with an army drawn from across his Central Asian and Persian territories, Timur's forces sacked cities and towns along the route, including Bhatner and Panipat, and took a large number of prisoners as they went. According to Timurid chronicles, on the eve of the assault on Delhi, Timur, concerned that the roughly one hundred thousand captives accompanying his army might revolt during the battle, ordered them killed in a single day — a massacre recorded in the Zafarnama and the memoirs attributed to Timur himself, though modern historians treat the specific figure as an approximation drawn from sources composed partly to advertise Timur's ruthlessness.

The Battle of Delhi

On 17 December 1398, Sultan Mahmud Shah Tughluq and Mallu Iqbal Khan met Timur's forces outside a city that at the time comprised several adjoining walled foundations — Old Delhi, Siri, Tughlaqabad, and Jahanpanah among them — relying heavily on a force of war elephants fitted with armor and, by some accounts, poison on their tusks. Timurid accounts describe Timur countering the elephant charge with a mix of dug trenches, iron-spiked caltrops scattered before his lines, and buffaloes or camels loaded with dry brush and set alight, then driven toward the animals to panic them — a tactic credited with breaking the Delhi line. The defenders were routed; the sultan and Mallu Iqbal Khan fled the city rather than surrender.

The sack of Delhi

Timur entered Delhi on 18 December. Chronicles differ on how the initial surrender broke down into wholesale violence, attributing it variously to disorder among Timur's own soldiers during looting and to resistance from parts of the population; whatever the trigger, the result was several days of killing, plunder, and destruction across the city, affecting both Muslim and Hindu quarters. Timur's forces seized accumulated wealth, gold, and jewels, and deported large numbers of skilled artisans and craftsmen — masons, stonecutters, and builders among them — to Samarkand, where they were put to work on Timur's own building projects, including the Bibi-Khanym Mosque. Timur withdrew from India in early 1399, having spent less than six months in the subcontinent before returning to campaigns in Persia and the Levant; he would die in 1405 while preparing an invasion of Ming China.

Aftermath

Delhi took years to recover, and the already-weakened Sultanate never regained its former extent. Timur appointed Khizr Khan governor of Multan and Punjab; in 1414 Khizr Khan seized Delhi itself and founded the Sayyid dynasty, initially ruling as a nominal Timurid vassal. In the wider Sultanate, regional governors and dynasties in Bengal, Gujarat, Malwa, Jaunpur, and the Deccan consolidated their independence, a process of fragmentation already under way before 1398 but sharply accelerated by it; the Delhi Sultanate itself did not fully recover a stable central authority until the Lodi dynasty took power later in the fifteenth century. More than a century later, Timur's descendant Babur invoked his ancestor's earlier capture of Delhi as part of the claim underlying his own conquest of northern India and founding of the Mughal Empire in 1526.

Sources and historiography

The invasion is known chiefly through Persianate court chronicles composed to celebrate Timur's reign: the Zafarnama of Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi, completed around 1424, an earlier chronicle of the same name by Nizam al-Din Shami, and memoirs attributed to Timur himself, the Tuzuk-i-Timuri, whose authenticity and precise date of composition are disputed among historians. Because these accounts were written to glorify Timur's conquests as much as to record them precisely, modern historians generally treat their casualty figures and other numerical claims as indicative of scale rather than as exact counts.