First Battle of Panipat and the Fall of the Delhi Sultanate
By the early 16th century the Delhi Sultanate, then ruled by the Lodi dynasty, had weakened considerably through internal factional conflict among its Afghan nobility. Babur, ruler of a small Central Asian kingdom centred on Kabul and a direct descendant of both Timur and Genghis Khan, had already been repeatedly driven from his ancestral territory around Samarkand before turning his ambitions toward India. At Panipat in April 1526, Babur's numerically smaller force faced Sultan Ibrahim Lodi's much larger army, but deployed tactics almost entirely new to Indian battlefields: field artillery (matchlock guns and cannon, protected behind a barricade of tied-together carts in Ottoman-influenced tulughma style) combined with mobile cavalry wings that enveloped the Lodi flanks while Ibrahim's forces, including war elephants, were channelled into the artillery's killing zone. Sultan Ibrahim Lodi died on the battlefield along with a large portion of his army. Babur's victory opened Delhi and Agra to occupation within days, ending the Delhi Sultanate's three-century rule (1206-1526) and founding the Mughal Empire, which -- despite a temporary interruption when the Afghan Sher Shah Suri briefly expelled Babur's son Humayun -- would dominate the Indian subcontinent for the next two centuries under Babur's grandson Akbar and his successors.
- Year: 1526 CE
- Category: Military
