Second Battle of Tarain
In 1191 Muhammad of Ghor advanced into the Punjab and was defeated at Tarain by a coalition under Prithviraj Chauhan, the Chahamana king of Ajmer and Delhi; wounded, he was carried from the field. He returned the following year with a reorganised army. The accounts, chiefly Minhaj-i Siraj's Tabaqat-i Nasiri written some decades later, describe a battle decided by mobility. The Ghurid force was built around mounted archers who harassed the Rajput formations without closing, declined to accept a general engagement through the day, and committed a reserve of heavy cavalry only when the opposing army — larger, slower, and including war elephants — had lost cohesion. Prithviraj was captured and killed. Delhi and Ajmer fell within two years. Muhammad returned to Ghur and left conquest to his Turkic slave commanders, above all Qutb ud-Din Aibak; when he was assassinated in 1206 without a surviving heir, Aibak took the Indian territories and founded the Delhi Sultanate. The main Indian tradition about the battle, the Prithviraj Raso, is a bardic epic composed centuries afterwards whose historical value is very limited, though its version has shaped how the battle is remembered far more than the chronicles have.
- Year: 1192 CE
- Category: Military
