Background
Nadir, a Turkman soldier of the Afshar tribe, rose to power in Iran in the 1720s by driving out the Afghan invaders who had overthrown the Safavid dynasty, and made himself shah in 1736. In 1738 he besieged and took Kandahar. Fugitive Afghans had taken refuge in Mughal territory, and Nadir's envoys complained that the Mughal court had ignored his requests. He crossed into the Mughal province of Kabul, took Kabul and Peshawar, and advanced across the Punjab.
The Mughal empire by then was divided. The emperor Muhammad Shah reigned over a court split among factions of nobles, while the Marathas had overrun Malwa and raided up to Delhi itself in 1737. The great nobles, Nizam al-Mulk of the Deccan and Saadat Khan of Awadh, came to Delhi's defence, but distrusted each other.
Karnal
The armies met at Karnal, north of Delhi, in February 1739. The Mughal army was much larger, but Nadir's disciplined cavalry and musketeers routed it in a few hours. Khan Dauran, a leading Mughal noble, was mortally wounded and Saadat Khan was captured. Muhammad Shah came to Nadir's camp to negotiate and was effectively held there. Contemporary accounts accuse Nizam al-Mulk and Saadat Khan of intriguing with Nadir, each against the other, but the details are uncertain.
The sack of Delhi
Nadir entered Delhi with the emperor in March 1739. Two days later a rumour that he had been killed led to attacks on Persian soldiers. Nadir ordered a general massacre in parts of the city, and his troops killed for several hours before he called a halt at the emperor's request. Contemporary estimates of the dead range from about twenty thousand to much higher figures, and no reliable total exists. Nadir then collected the treasury of the Mughals and levied huge sums from nobles and citizens. He left in May, taking the Peacock Throne of Shah Jahan, the Koh-i-Noor diamond, jewels, gold, elephants and craftsmen. The wealth was so great that he remitted taxes in Iran for three years.
Consequences
Nadir restored Muhammad Shah to his throne but took the Mughal provinces west of the Indus. The invasion showed the world that the empire could not defend its capital, and the remaining provinces moved further towards independence under their governors. The way was opened for later invasions by Ahmad Shah Durrani, one of Nadir's commanders, who after Nadir's assassination in 1747 founded an Afghan kingdom and took the Koh-i-Noor with him. The Peacock Throne was later broken up. Historians treat 1739 as one of the decisive moments in the decline of Mughal power, alongside the rise of the Marathas and, soon after, of the East India Company.
Further reading
- Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993
- Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. Bloomsbury, 2019
- Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000
See also
- Mughal Empire — The Mughal Empire was a Persianate Muslim dynasty of Timurid and Chagatai descent that ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from Babur's victory at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 until the deposition of Bahadur Shah II following the 1857 rebellion, reaching its territorial and cultural peak under Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb.
- Delhi — Delhi is the capital of India and one of the longest continuously inhabited urban regions in the subcontinent, having served as the seat of power for successive dynasties across more than a millennium.
- Maratha Empire — The Maratha Empire was a Hindu warrior state that rose in the Deccan under Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in the mid-17th century and, as a loose confederacy of allied houses, became the dominant power across most of the Indian subcontinent before its final defeat by the British in 1818.
- Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms of Afghanistan — The Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms of Afghanistan were a succession of polities in Gandhara, Bactria, and the Kabul valley — including the Kushan Empire and the later Kabul Shahi and Hindu Shahi dynasties — that governed the region before its Islamization was completed in the 11th century CE.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.