Babur and the founding of the Mughal Empire

As the Delhi Sultanate weakened, Babur, a Turkic–Mongol ruler and military planner, turned to India after being thrown out of Samarkand (in modern-day Uzbekistan).

He was a descendant of Timur, the conqueror who had wrecked Delhi more than a century earlier.

In 1526 he defeated Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat, in what was later called the First Battle of Panipat.

How he won matters: the victory depended heavily on gunpowder, field artillery (cannons) and matchlock guns, which had only recently come into warfare in India. A new technology decided the battle.

That defeat ended the Delhi Sultanate for good and laid the foundation of the Mughal Empire.

Babur also left something rare: an honest autobiography, the Baburnama. Thanks to it, we can read a conqueror describing himself.

In it he comes across as cultured and curious: he loved architecture, poetry, animals (birds especially, listed in detail) and plants, especially fruit trees. And the same man was a brutal, ruthless conqueror who killed whole populations of cities, enslaved women and children, and was proud of building 'towers of skulls' from the people of plundered cities.

He missed Central Asia and found India a 'country of few charms'. Yet he wrote: "Hindustan is a large country and has masses of gold and silver … There are countless artisans and workmen of every sort in Hindustan." Perhaps for those reasons, especially India's wealth, he stayed and built his empire here instead of going back.