Mughal Empire

Origins and Founding

Babur was born in 1483 in Andijan, in the Fergana Valley of present-day Uzbekistan, a descendant of Timur through his father and of Genghis Khan through his mother. As a young prince he seized and lost Samarkand more than once against rival Timurid and Uzbek claimants, suffering a decisive defeat to the Uzbek leader Muhammad Shaybani at Sar-i-Pul in 1501 that ended his hopes of a Central Asian kingdom and pushed him toward Kabul, which he took in 1504, and eventually toward India, where the Delhi Sultanate under Ibrahim Lodi was weakened by factional revolt among its own Afghan nobility. At the First Battle of Panipat in April 1526, Babur's smaller but artillery-equipped force, using field guns and matchlocks alongside the tulugma flanking tactic, defeated and killed Ibrahim Lodi, taking Delhi and Agra. The following year, at the Battle of Khanwa (1527), Babur defeated a large Rajput confederacy led by Rana Sanga of Mewar, removing the strongest remaining challenge to his new position in northern India. Babur's memoir, the Baburnama, written in Chagatai Turkic, remains a primary source for the empire's founding and for his own governing outlook. He died in 1530 and was eventually buried in Kabul.

Humayun and the Interregnum

Babur's son Humayun inherited an unconsolidated empire in 1530 and was decisively defeated by the Afghan noble Sher Shah Suri at the battles of Chausa (1539) and Kannauj (1540), forcing him into exile in Safavid Persia. With Persian military assistance and the support of commanders including Bairam Khan, Humayun recovered Delhi in 1555 but died the following year after a fall from the library stairs of the Purana Qila. The interregnum under Sher Shah Suri, though brief, left a substantial administrative legacy: he restored and extended the trade route later known as the Grand Trunk Road, standardised a silver coin, the rupiya, that became the basis of Mughal and later British Indian currency, and reorganised land revenue assessment, all of which the restored Mughal state under Akbar largely retained and built upon.

Akbar and Imperial Consolidation (1556–1605)

Akbar succeeded his father at age 13 in 1556 and, after defeating the Hindu general Hemu at the Second Battle of Panipat that same year, ruled initially under the regency of Bairam Khan before assuming direct control around 1560. Over the following decades he brought Malwa, Gujarat, Bengal, and most of Rajasthan under Mughal control, securing key Rajput alliances through marriage while defeating holdouts such as Chittor (1568) militarily; Mewar under Maharana Pratap resisted, fighting Akbar's forces to a tactical standstill at the Battle of Haldighati in 1576 without submitting. Akbar built a new capital at Fatehpur Sikri (1571–1585), later abandoned for water shortages, and established the Mansabdari system, a graded scale of military-administrative rank, alongside the Zabt revenue system assessing land tax by measured productivity. Religiously, he convened debates among scholars of different faiths at the Ibadat Khana from 1575 and later promoted a syncretic court order, Din-i-Ilahi, that did not survive his reign. His minister Abul Fazl composed the Akbarnama and its administrative companion, the Ain-i-Akbari, the principal chronicle of the reign.

Jahangir (1605–1627)

Akbar's son Jahangir inherited a stable empire and is remembered chiefly for his patronage of painting and for the influence of his wife, Nur Jahan, married in 1611, who effectively co-governed through much of his reign. His memoir, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, records both court affairs and his own naturalist interests. His reign also saw the 1606 execution of the Sikh Guru Arjan Dev on Mughal orders, an episode that hardened relations between the Mughal state and the emerging Sikh community, and the loss of Kandahar to Safavid Persia in 1622, a strategic setback on the empire's northwestern frontier. Jahangir's court also received the English ambassador Sir Thomas Roe, sent by James I between 1615 and 1618 to negotiate trading privileges for the English East India Company, an embassy that marked the beginning of sustained direct diplomatic contact between the Mughal court and England.

Shah Jahan (1628–1658)

Shah Jahan's reign is associated above all with Mughal architecture at its height. After the death of his wife Mumtaz Mahal in childbirth in 1631, he commissioned the Taj Mahal at Agra as her mausoleum, built between roughly 1632 and 1653, and also built the Red Fort and Jama Masjid in his new capital, Shahjahanabad (Delhi), and commissioned the jewelled Peacock Throne. These projects, along with continued campaigns in the Deccan, placed heavy strain on imperial finances. When Shah Jahan fell seriously ill in 1657, his four sons fought a war of succession; Aurangzeb defeated his brothers, including the execution of the eldest, Dara Shikoh, in 1659, and imprisoned Shah Jahan in Agra Fort, where he remained until his death in 1666.

Aurangzeb (1658–1707)

Aurangzeb's nearly fifty-year reign brought the empire to its greatest territorial extent, extending Mughal authority over most of the subcontinent after the annexation of the Deccan sultanates of Bijapur (1686) and Golconda (1687) and the capture and execution of the Maratha ruler Sambhaji in 1689. This expansion came at severe cost: prolonged Maratha guerrilla resistance in the Deccan drained the imperial treasury and army for the remainder of the reign, and Aurangzeb relocated his court to the Deccan for the last quarter-century of his life, effectively governing from military camp. Relations with Rajput states also deteriorated after the death of the Marwar ruler Jaswant Singh in 1678, when a dispute over succession and Mughal control of Marwar triggered a prolonged Rajput rebellion, further stretching imperial resources. Aurangzeb also departed from the religious accommodation of his predecessors in specific, documented respects, including the 1675 execution of the Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur in Delhi, the reimposition of the jizya tax on non-Muslims in 1679, and orders for the demolition of a number of temples, among them the Kashi Vishwanath temple at Varanasi (1669) and the Keshavdev temple at Mathura (1670). At the same time, he continued to employ substantial numbers of Hindu officials and mansabdars, including figures such as Raja Jai Singh and Jaswant Singh himself earlier in the reign, reflecting a more complex administrative reality than a uniformly sectarian policy. He died in 1707 near Ahmednagar while still campaigning in the Deccan, leaving an overextended empire and a depleted treasury to his successors.

Administration, Economy, and Culture

The empire was governed through provinces (subahs), each headed by a subahdar, subdivided into districts (sarkars) and sub-districts (parganas). Persian served as the language of administration and high culture, while the interaction of Persian, Central Asian Turkic, Arabic, and local Indian vernaculars in army camps and cities contributed to the emergence of Urdu as a literary language. Mughal painting, developed under Akbar with artists such as Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad, blended Persian technique with Indian subject matter in works like the Hamzanama, while Mughal architecture combined Persian, Central Asian, and Indian elements, most visibly in the char-bagh quadrilateral garden layout used across imperial tombs and palaces. Economically, the empire profited from control of major overland and maritime trade routes carrying Indian cotton textiles, indigo, and other goods to markets from Persia to Europe, taxed through the Zabt land-revenue system established under Akbar.

Decline

The decades after Aurangzeb's death saw rapid political fragmentation. A rapid succession of weak emperors between 1707 and 1719 came to be dominated by two powerful nobles, the Sayyid brothers, Abdullah Khan and Hussain Ali Khan, who deposed and installed emperors at will during this period and were themselves eventually overthrown in 1720. The Persian ruler Nadir Shah invaded in 1739, defeated the Mughal army at Karnal, and sacked Delhi, carrying off the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond; the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Abdali launched a further series of invasions in the 1740s–1760s. Mughal authority in the east collapsed after the Battle of Buxar in 1764, where combined forces under the emperor Shah Alam II, the Nawab of Awadh, and the Nawab of Bengal were defeated by the British East India Company; the resulting Treaty of Allahabad (1765) granted the Company the diwani, or revenue-collection rights, over Bengal, Bihar, and Odisha, leaving the Mughal emperor a largely pensioned figurehead. Delhi itself fell under the effective protection first of the Marathas, notably Mahadji Scindia from 1771, an arrangement violently interrupted in 1788 when the Rohilla chief Ghulam Qadir seized the city and had Shah Alam II blinded, and then, after the Second Anglo-Maratha War of 1803, of the British East India Company directly.

The Final Mughals and 1857

The last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II (Bahadur Shah Zafar), reigned from 1837 as a British pensioner with only nominal authority confined to the Red Fort. During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, mutinying sepoys and rebel leaders proclaimed him their nominal head, a role he accepted with reluctance. After British forces retook Delhi later that year, he was tried for rebellion, deposed, and exiled to Rangoon in British Burma, where he died in 1862, formally ending Mughal rule after 332 years.