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The 500th Anniversary of the First Battle of Panipat

Contrary to popular belief, the Mughals did not bring Islamic rule to India — but their rule did shape India’s military, administrative, and geopolitical landscape in ways that endure to this day.

Mughal musketeers of the 17th century.

Five hundred years ago, on April 21, 1526, two armies clashed near the town of Panipat, some 65 kilometers (40 miles) northwest of Delhi. The battle that ensued — the First Battle of Panipat — would change the course of Indian and world history. The victor, Zahir ud-Din Muhammad Babur, would now found the Mughal Empire on the ruins of the Delhi Sultanate.

Contrary to popular belief, the Mughals did not bring Islamic rule to India — Muslim states had already ruled much of the subcontinent for three centuries prior. The legacy of the empire that Babur founded lay in how it shaped India’s military, administrative, and geopolitical landscape in ways that endure to this day.

Historical Background

Babur, a prince of the Timurid dynasty, was born in Andijan in 1483 CE, in present-day Uzbekistan. He was descended from two great conquerors: Timur from his father’s side and Genghis Khan from his mother’s. After Uzbek attacks forced him to leave his homeland, he wandered around the region, and eventually seized Kabul in 1504, where he ruled before conquering India.

Timur had sacked Delhi in 1398, leading to the sultanate’s decline, which precipitated the political fragmentation of much of North India. Soon after Timur’s invasion, the Sayyid dynasty came to power in Delhi and ruled as Timurid vassals, eschewing royal titles. Therefore, Babur would have had good reason to believe that India was part of his legal patrimony and that the Timurids alone were the fount of political authority there. In 1508, even before arriving in India, Babur took the exalted sovereign title of padishah (emperor), denoting supremacy over emirs and sultans.

By the time Babur arrived on the scene, the Delhi Sultanate was ruled by the Afghan Lodi Dynasty and, though undergoing somewhat of a revival, only controlled a strip of land in the Indo-Gangetic Plains extending from Punjab to Bihar. Unlike the preceding Sayyid dynasty, the Lodi dynasty considered itself sovereign and not subject to the Timurids. The final sultan of the Lodi dynasty, Ibrahim Lodi, was unpopular enough that many conspired against him. In 1524, the governor of Punjab invited Babur to invade India and assume sovereignty. Babur, who had been unable to reestablish a Timurid empire in its homeland, hardly needed convincing to create an empire somewhere else.

The Battle of Panipat

Soon, Babur led an army into India, meeting Ibrahim Lodi’s forces at Panipat, and Babur’s heavily outnumbered forces won. According to Abu’l Fazl, the vizier and biographer of Babur’s grandson, the Emperor Akbar, “Sultan Ibrahim was killed ignominiously in an obscure corner…[and near him] five of six thousand men lay slain.” Fazl viewed Babur’s conquest of India an achievement that surpassed those of the previous three great Islamic invaders of India, Mahmud of Ghanzi, Muhammad of Ghor, and Timur, because Babur defeated Sultan Ibrahim’s “hundred thousand cavalrymen and a thousand war elephants” with “twelve thousand” men.

Of course, Babur’s victory was neither a fluke nor a miracle, because he had a distinct military advantage over his enemies: his army was one of the first in Indian history to deploy gunpowder weapons, having acquired them from the Ottoman Turks.

Noting in his autobiography, the Baburnama, that “this difficult affair was made easy for us,” having won the battle in only a half-day, Babur wrote that some of his troops in the center flank “made good discharge of firingi shots” while those in his left flank “made excellent discharge of zarbzan shots.” A firingi refers to either a small anti-personnel cannon of Portuguese origin or a small Ottoman gun. Zarbzans, also of Ottoman origin, were field cannons that became the most popular guns in India. They had “funnel-shaped mouths,” were “mounted on two-wheeled carts with spoke-less wheels” and “drawn by four pairs of oxen.”

With Ibrahim Lodi slain, soon Delhi and Agra fell into Babur’s hands. Thus, the Mughal Empire was founded, a state that would steadily expand over most of the subcontinent over the next two centuries during the reigns of Babur’s successors Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb.

While the First Battle of Panipat is an interesting historical event in its own right, leading to the creation of a major state, its legacy is more enduring than most battles because the Mughal Empire transformed the Indian subcontinent in deep ways that impacted the region for centuries, shaping the present-day.

First, the Mughal victory at Panipat was the beginning of a military revolution for India. Firearms and cannon gave the Mughals a decisive edge. Soon, most Indian armies would adopt gunpowder weapons and field artillery divisions. Armies would find that they could no longer succeed if they did not use the new technology.

The Mughal forces of Babur followed up their victory at Panipat with another victory over a much larger Rajput army at the Battle of Khanwa in Rajasthan. Babur wrote of that battle that “we imitated the ghazis of Rum [the Ottomans] by posting matchlockmen (tufanchian) and cannoneers (ra‘d-andazan) along the line of carts which were chained to one another in front of us.” Elephants, formerly the “tanks” of Indian warfare, proved to be useless because of their slowness and because cannonfire panicked them. The future lay with more mobile forces.

The incentive to adapt to the new military environment of India was obvious: states that used cannon succeeded on the battlefield and grew, whilst those that didn’t, were destroyed. In South India, the five Deccan sultanates endured decades of defeat by the Hindu power of Vijayanagara. Although Vijayanagara had made use of Portuguese mercenaries with matchlock guns, its rivals, especially the Sultanate of Bijapur invested heavily in cannon technology, adopting many ideas from the Ottomans. The five sultanates crushed Vijayanagara’s forces at the Battle of Talikota in 1565 because of their deployment of gunpowder weapons. According to the historian Richard M. Eaton, the sultanates’ forces “fastened together 600 cannon of different calibres in three rows, with 200 heavy cannon in the front row, intermediate cannon in the middle and swivel cannon at the back….when the infantry [of Vijayanagara] came within close range.…the gunners fired two devastating volleys: the first with cannon balls, the second with copper coins that functioned like shrapnel. This repulse decided the outcome.”

But while gunpowder would initially favor Muslim states in the subcontinent — who had borrowed the technology from the Ottoman Empire — its widespread adoption eventually favored those states, often Hindu, that were willing to mobilize their large, native populations, and provide them with guns. Everywhere in the world, this changed the balance of power. Gunpowder negated the power of trained warriors, knights, and horsemen. Any peasant with a musket could kill an armored, mounted enemy. This led to the decline of feudalism in Europe. In Japan, peasant mobilization with guns was felt to be so threatening to the social order that the Tokugawa Shogunate eventually confiscated most guns and only permitted samurai to carry weapons.

In India, groups that mobilized their peasants gunpowder — enabling people to go........

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