Founding of the Gupta Empire
Roughly five centuries after the Mauryan Empire's collapse into the Shunga dynasty and subsequent fragmentation (see event:pushyamitra_shunga_coup:-185), North India had splintered into numerous regional kingdoms with no dominant power. Chandragupta I, ruling a comparatively modest territory in Magadha (the same core region that had anchored the earlier Mauryan Empire), transformed his position through marriage to Kumaradevi, a princess of the powerful Lichchhavi clan -- a union prominent enough that Gupta coinage commemorated it explicitly, suggesting the alliance's importance to the dynasty's founding legitimacy. Chandragupta I took the title Maharajadhiraja ('great king of kings') around 320 CE, and used the combined resources and prestige of his own Gupta lineage and his wife's Lichchhavi connections to begin the territorial consolidation his son Samudragupta would complete with an aggressive campaign of conquest across virtually the entire Gangetic plain, and which his grandson Chandragupta II would bring to its cultural and political peak.
- Year: 320 CE
- Category: Diplomacy
