Muhammad of Ghor
Muhammad of Ghor was the conqueror whose campaigns established lasting Muslim rule in northern India. Born in the Ghor region of what is now central Afghanistan, he ruled from around 1173 in partnership with his elder brother Ghiyath al-Din, who held the western territories while Muhammad took the east — an unusually durable arrangement between brothers. The Ghurids had destroyed the Ghaznavid empire, and Muhammad took Ghazni in 1173 and Lahore in 1186, ending the Ghaznavid line and giving him a base in the Punjab. His first attempt on the Indian plains failed. At the first battle of Tarain in 1191 he was defeated by a Rajput confederacy under Prithviraj Chauhan and was wounded, carried from the field by a young soldier. He returned the following year with a larger and better-organised force. At the second battle of Tarain in 1192 he used mounted archers to harass the Rajput army through the day, feigned a withdrawal, and then committed his heavy cavalry against a disordered and exhausted enemy. Prithviraj was captured and killed, and northern India lay open. His generals completed the conquest. Qutb al-Din Aibak, a Turkish slave commander, took Delhi and Ajmer; Bakhtiyar Khalji overran Bihar and Bengal, destroying the great Buddhist monastic university at Nalanda. His reliance on slave officers is what made the conquest permanent. Having no surviving sons, he is said to have remarked that he had thousands of sons — his Turkish slaves — and on his assassination in 1206, probably by Ismaili agents or Khokhars, Aibak took Delhi and founded the sultanate that ruled for three centuries.
- Lived: 1149 CE – 1206 CE
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: monarch, military_leader
