Second Battle of Tarain
Muhammad of Ghor beat Prithviraj Chauhan at Tarain in 1192 and Muslim rule in northern India dates from it. The two had met on the same ground the previous year, and Prithviraj had won: the Rajput cavalry broke the Ghurid centre, Muhammad was wounded and carried off the field by a soldier, and the invaders withdrew to Afghanistan. The Rajputs did not pursue, on a convention of warfare that treated a defeated enemy as finished, and did not garrison the frontier. Muhammad came back a year later with some 120,000 men and a different method. He offered negotiations and used them to delay, attacked at dawn while the Rajput army was at its morning devotions, and — the decisive part — refused a general engagement all day, sending mounted archers in relays against the flanks of a heavier, slower force and withdrawing whenever it charged. By afternoon the Rajput army had been on its feet for hours in armour, and a reserve of 12,000 heavy cavalry was sent in against a centre that had nothing left. Prithviraj was captured and killed. Delhi and Ajmer fell within months, and Muhammad's slave general Qutb al-Din Aibak took Benares and the Ganges plain and founded the Delhi Sultanate on his master's death in 1206. The battle is remembered in Indian tradition through a Rajput epic composed long afterwards, which is more concerned with chivalry than with the tactics that lost it. The two battles together are the standard illustration of the difference between winning an engagement and winning a war. Prithviraj beat the same enemy on the same field a year earlier and treated the victory as final, and the Delhi Sultanate lasted 320 years.
- Year: 1192 CE
- Category: Military
