Ghurid Sultanate

A mountain dynasty from central Afghanistan that conquered northern India and then vanished, leaving its slaves in charge of the result. The Ghurids were an obscure eastern Iranian family from the highlands of Ghor, converted late to Islam and long subordinate to the Ghaznavids, whom they destroyed in the 1150s - Ala al-Din Husayn earned the epithet the World-Burner for razing Ghazni. Under the brothers Ghiyath al-Din and Muizz al-Din the dynasty ruled an empire stretching from eastern Iran to Bengal. Muizz al-Din, usually called Muhammad of Ghor, is the figure who matters for India: defeated by Prithviraj Chauhan at Tarain in 1191, he returned the following year, won, and opened the Gangetic plain to permanent Muslim rule rather than the raiding of Mahmud of Ghazni's generation. His generals took Delhi, Bengal and Bihar within a decade, destroying the Buddhist monastic universities at Nalanda and Vikramashila in the process. The empire depended on Turkic military slaves, and when Muizz al-Din was assassinated in 1206 without a son, those slaves simply divided the realm - Aibak taking Delhi, Yildiz Ghazni, Qabacha Sindh. The Khwarazmians absorbed the Afghan heartland within a decade. The Ghurid state lasted barely sixty years at its height. The Qutb Minar was begun under its authority. The Minaret of Jam, in a remote Afghan valley, is the dynasty's most spectacular surviving monument. Firuzkuh, its summer capital, has never been securely located. Persian was its court language despite its highland origins. The Ghurids are the reason Delhi rather than Lahore became the capital of Muslim India.

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