Babur
Babur founded the Mughal empire after losing his own kingdom three times. Born in 1483 in the Ferghana valley, he was descended from Timur on his father's side and Genghis Khan on his mother's, and inherited the small principality of Ferghana at eleven when his father died in a pigeon-house that collapsed off a cliff. He took Samarkand at fifteen, held it for a hundred days, and lost Ferghana while doing it. He took it again and lost it again, and spent years as a wandering prince with a few hundred followers, at one point sleeping rough in the mountains. He turned south, took Kabul in 1504, and ruled Afghanistan for two decades. He invaded India five times. At Panipat in April 1526 he faced Ibrahim Lodi, the Sultan of Delhi, with perhaps twelve thousand men against a much larger force with war elephants. He lashed carts together across his front to break the charge, placed matchlock men behind them, and sent cavalry round both flanks — Ottoman tactics combined with Mongol manoeuvre, and the first substantial use of field artillery in India. He beat the Rajput confederacy under Rana Sanga at Khanwa the following year by the same method. He disliked India and said so at length — the heat, the absence of good horses, ice, melons, running water and baths. The Baburnama, his memoir in Chagatai Turkic, is candid about his defeats, his drinking and his attachments, and is among the first true autobiographies in Islamic literature. He died at Agra in 1530. He asked to be buried in Kabul, and was, nine years later.
- Lived: 1483 CE – 1530 CE
- Nationality: Mughal
- Roles: ruler, general, poet
