First Battle of Panipat and the Fall of the Delhi Sultanate
Babur beat a Delhi Sultanate army several times his size at Panipat in April 1526 and founded the Mughal empire. He was a Timurid prince from Ferghana who had lost Samarkand three times, taken Kabul as a consolation, and turned to India because there was nowhere else to go. He had perhaps 12,000 men against Ibrahim Lodi's 40,000 or more and a hundred elephants. What he had that they did not was field artillery and matchlocks, obtained from the Ottomans, and a way of using them. The formation is the interesting part. He drew up with some 700 carts chained together across his front with gaps for the guns, on the Ottoman model, dug ditches and piled branches on the flanks, and left his flanking cavalry free to swing round on the tulughma manoeuvre once the enemy was committed against the centre. Ibrahim's army advanced into the front, was held, and then found itself enveloped and too tightly packed to manoeuvre. The elephants panicked at the gunfire and went back through their own lines. The battle lasted about half a day. Ibrahim was killed on the field, which is unusual and decisive. Babur took Delhi and Agra within days, and with them the Koh-i-Noor. He then had to fight the Rajput confederacy at Khanwa the following year to keep it. He died in 1530, and his grandson Akbar built the empire properly. Babur's memoir, the Baburnama, describes the battle and everything else in a first-person Turkish prose that is unlike anything else written by a conqueror. He complains at length about the Indian climate, the food and the lack of good melons.
- Year: 1526 CE
- Category: Military
