Chinggis Khan at the Indus
In 1219 Chinggis Khan invaded the Khwarazmian empire of Central Asia and Iran. The Khwarazm Shah's son, Jalal al-Din Mingburnu, retreated south-east through Afghanistan, and in late 1221 the Mongols caught him on the bank of the Indus. After his army was destroyed, he is said to have ridden his horse off the bank into the river and swum across, and Chinggis is said to have admired the feat. Jalal al-Din asked the sultan of Delhi, Iltutmish, for refuge or an alliance. Iltutmish, unwilling to draw the Mongols into his territory, declined. Chinggis sent detachments into the Punjab, but the main army turned back, according to the sources because of the heat and the difficulty of the route.
Mongol presence on the frontier
For the next decades the Mongols, and especially the Chagatai khans of Central Asia and the Ilkhans of Iran, controlled much of the country west of the Indus and raided across it. They sacked Lahore in 1241, and Multan and parts of Sindh changed hands several times. The Delhi sultans, chiefly Balban (r. 1266–1287), held a line of fortified posts in the Punjab under trusted commanders. Balban's eldest son, Prince Muhammad, was killed fighting the Mongols near Multan in 1285. The threat shaped the sultanate's politics: it justified a large standing army and drew refugees, scholars and soldiers from Central Asia to Delhi.
The great attacks
The heaviest attacks came under Alauddin Khalji (r. 1296–1316), from the Chagatai khanate under Duwa. In 1299 a large army under Duwa's son Qutlugh Khwaja reached the outskirts of Delhi and was checked at the battle of Kili, where Alauddin's general Zafar Khan was killed. In 1303, while Alauddin's army was away at Chittor and in the Deccan, a Mongol force under Targhi besieged Delhi for about two months; Alauddin entrenched himself at Siri, which he afterwards walled as a new city. In 1305 and 1306 further invasions were heavily defeated, at Amroha and on the Ravi, and large numbers of prisoners were killed.
To pay for the army these wars required, Alauddin raised the land revenue and introduced the price controls described by the historian Barani. The frontier was entrusted to Ghazi Malik, who later founded the Tughluq dynasty, and who is credited with many victories over the Mongols.
The end of the threat
The Chagatai khanate weakened in the early fourteenth century through internal conflict. A raid under the Chagatai khan Tarmashirin reached the Punjab around 1327, during the reign of Muhammad bin Tughluq. After that the Mongol danger receded until Timur, a Turkic ruler from the former Chagatai lands, invaded in 1398. Historians count the Delhi sultanate's success in resisting the Mongols as one reason why north India escaped the destruction suffered by Iran and Iraq.
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
- Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004
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.
- Khalji dynasty — The Khalji dynasty was a Turko-Afghan ruling house that governed the Delhi Sultanate from 1290 to 1320, ending Mamluk (Slave dynasty) rule and expanding Delhi's power further into the Deccan and south India than any predecessor.
- Tughlaq dynasty — The Tughlaqs ruled Delhi from 1320 to 1414, took the Sultanate to its greatest extent under Muhammad bin Tughlaq, and lost most of it again within his own reign.
- Timur's invasion of India — Timur's invasion of India was a campaign by the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur, known as Tamerlane, against the Delhi Sultanate in 1398, culminating in the sack of Delhi and the mass killing of its population.
- Muhammad bin Tughluq — Muhammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325–1351) was the second sultan of the Tughluq dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate, remembered for an unusually ambitious and disruptive program of administrative experiments, including relocating the capital to Daulatabad and introducing a token currency.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.