Daulat Khan Lodi

Daulat Khan Lodi was the governor of the Punjab who invited Babur to invade India and was imprisoned by him for his trouble. He was a powerful Afghan noble of the Lodi establishment, governing the richest and most exposed province of the Delhi Sultanate from Lahore, and his quarrel with Sultan Ibrahim was the ordinary quarrel of that dynasty: the Afghan nobility regarded the sultan as first among equals, Ibrahim regarded himself as a sovereign, and he had been imprisoning and executing the amirs who disagreed. Daulat Khan sent his son to Kabul in 1523 to propose that Babur, who had already raided the Punjab several times, come and remove Ibrahim - the assumption being that a Timurid prince would take the plunder and go home, leaving the governor in a stronger position. Babur came in 1524, found that Daulat Khan had changed his mind about the terms, and took Lahore anyway. The final invasion of 1526 ended at Panipat, where Ibrahim was killed, and Babur stayed. Daulat Khan submitted, was pardoned, revolted again in his seventies wearing two swords, and was captured. He died on the way to prison at Bhera. His invitation is one of the more consequential misjudgements in Indian history. His son Dilawar Khan had been imprisoned by Ibrahim and shown the dungeons where the sultan's opponents were held, which is the detail the sources give for why the family turned. Babur's own memoir, the Baburnama, describes the negotiations with a certain amusement. The Punjab governorship went to a Mughal appointee, and the Lodi nobility spent the next thirteen years trying to reverse Panipat before Sher Shah Suri briefly managed it.

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