Ibrahim Lodi

Ibrahim Lodi was the last sultan of Delhi, and he lost his throne, his life and three centuries of the Delhi Sultanate in a single morning at Panipat. He succeeded his father Sikandar in 1517 over a kingdom that was already a coalition rather than a state: the Lodi dynasty was Afghan, and Afghan nobles regarded their sultan as the first among equals rather than as a sovereign. He took the opposite view and set about breaking them, imprisoning and executing senior amirs, humiliating others, and driving the survivors into open revolt. His uncle Alam Khan and the governor of the Punjab, Daulat Khan Lodi, both invited Babur of Kabul to invade. Babur had already raided India four times and needed no encouragement. They met at Panipat on 21 April 1526, where Ibrahim had perhaps 100,000 men and a thousand war elephants against Babur's 12,000 or so. Babur chained seven hundred carts across his front, left gaps for his field artillery, and put mounted archers on both wings to wheel around and take the mass in the flank and rear - the Ottoman tactic, used in India for the first time. The elephants panicked at the guns and went back through their own infantry. The Lodi army was too densely packed to deploy or to run. Ibrahim was killed on the field with around 20,000 of his men, which was rare enough that Babur remarked on it: Indian kings did not usually die in their own defeats. He is the only Delhi sultan to have done so. The Mughal empire dates from that morning.

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