Appearance
6.9 — The Turkic Invasions and the Delhi Sultanate
In 1192, at Tarain near Thanesar, an army under Muhammad of Ghor defeated a Rajput coalition led by Prithviraj Chauhan. Prithviraj had beaten the same commander on the same field the previous year and let him withdraw.
That detail is the whole chapter in miniature. The Rajput system won battles and did not destroy enemies; the Turkic system took territory and kept it. Within fourteen years there was a permanent sultanate at Delhi, and northern India had a ruling dynasty of Central Asian origin for the next six hundred years.
This chapter covers what happened, and it is written to a standard the subject needs: what the sources actually say, who wrote them and why, and where the popular versions on both sides depart from the evidence.
A note on the sources, stated first
The main sources are Persian chronicles written by court historians for the rulers they served, and their reliability has a specific and predictable shape.
They exaggerate in a particular direction. A chronicler praising a sultan's piety inflates the number of idols broken, temples destroyed, infidels killed and captives taken, because those were the achievements his patron wanted recorded. The numbers in these texts are frequently impossible — armies of a million, captives beyond any plausible logistics.
This cuts both ways in modern argument. Those inflated figures are quoted by people who want the destruction maximised, and dismissed entirely by people who want it minimised. Neither is the right response. The correct method is to treat the chronicles as evidence that campaigns and destructions happened, to cross-check against archaeology, inscriptions and independent accounts, and to treat the arithmetic as rhetoric.
Where archaeology confirms a chronicle, we can be confident. Where a chronicle stands alone with an implausible number, this book says so.
Mahmud of Ghazni
Between roughly 1000 and 1027 CE, Mahmud of Ghazni raided India around seventeen times. He did not attempt to rule it beyond Punjab.
The purpose was plunder, and it is important to say so plainly and to say why it matters. Ghazni was a state in Afghanistan whose army was expensive and whose own territory was poor. India was the richest region within reach, and its wealth was concentrated in temples, which functioned as treasuries holding centuries of accumulated donations in gold, jewels and votive images.
So the temples were the targets, and the ideology was available to justify it. Iconoclasm — the destruction of images — is a genuine strand in the Islamic tradition, and Mahmud's chroniclers presented him as an idol-breaker, which brought prestige from the Caliph and religious standing at home. Both motives were real. The plunder was the operational objective and the iconoclasm was the ideological frame, and separating them entirely is as misleading as collapsing them.
Somnath, in 1026, is the case everyone knows. The temple on the Gujarat coast was sacked, the image destroyed, and enormous treasure taken. The event is attested in multiple sources and is not in doubt. The number of defenders killed varies wildly between accounts.
What Mahmud did not do is conquer. He annexed Punjab and left the rest. The raids were extractive, they were devastating to the places hit, and they did not change who ruled India.
They did do two other things. They demonstrated that northern India could be entered and beaten repeatedly by a smaller professional force. And they moved an enormous quantity of Indian wealth to Ghazni, which funded a court that patronised, among others, the scholar al-Biruni.
Al-Biruni deserves his own paragraph because his book on India, written around 1030, is the best outside description of the subcontinent from the entire medieval period. He learned Sanskrit, read Indian mathematical and astronomical texts, described Indian philosophy accurately and sympathetically, compared Indian and Greek astronomy, and criticised Indian scholars for insularity and his own side for ignorance. He also wrote that Mahmud's raids had scattered Indian scholarship and made Hindus hostile to all Muslims — a contemporary Muslim observer making exactly that observation.
Muhammad of Ghor and the establishment of rule
Muhammad of Ghor came for territory, not plunder.
First battle of Tarain, 1191: Prithviraj Chauhan's coalition defeated him. Second battle of Tarain, 1192: Ghor returned, and won — by the accounts, using mounted archers to harass and exhaust the heavy Rajput cavalry before committing his reserve.
Chapter 6.15 does the military analysis in full, but the elements are already visible: mounted archery against heavy cavalry, a unified command against a coalition, a professional standing army against a feudal levy, and a strategic objective of holding ground rather than winning a field.
By 1206 Ghor was dead and his general Qutb-ud-din Aibak — himself of slave origin — was ruling from Delhi. The Delhi Sultanate had begun, and it ran through five dynasties until 1526.
The five dynasties, briefly
The Mamluk or Slave dynasty (1206–1290). Founded by Aibak; its most capable ruler was Iltutmish, who consolidated the state, and it included Raziya Sultana, the only woman to rule Delhi in her own name, who reigned about four years before being deposed and killed — the chroniclers noting that she was an able ruler and that her being a woman was intolerable to the nobility.
The Khalji dynasty (1290–1320). Alauddin Khalji is the most consequential. He conquered Gujarat, Rajasthan's major forts including Chittor and Ranthambore, and sent his general Malik Kafur deep into the Deccan and as far as Madurai. He also ran the most interventionist economic policy of any pre-modern Indian state, discussed below.
The Tughlaq dynasty (1320–1414). Muhammad bin Tughlaq is the most notorious, for two decisions. He moved the capital from Delhi to Daulatabad in the Deccan — a strategically defensible idea, executed by compelling the population to march roughly 1,100 kilometres, with heavy mortality, and then reversing it a few years later. And he issued token currency: bronze and copper coins declared to have the value of silver.
The token currency failure is worth understanding, because it is a real economic lesson. The state could not control minting, so forgery became universal — chroniclers say every household became a mint. The coins collapsed in value, the treasury had to redeem them at face value in real metal, and the fiscal damage was severe. The principle it illustrates — that fiat money requires the state to control issuance and to be trusted — is Chapter 9.7's subject.
The Sayyid dynasty (1414–1451), a weak period following Timur's devastating sack of Delhi in 1398, in which the city was destroyed and the population massacred over several days by an invader who then left.
The Lodi dynasty (1451–1526), Afghan rather than Turkic, ended by Babur at Panipat.
Administration: what the Sultanate actually was
It was a military state governing through an army, and its structure reflects that.
Land revenue was the base, assessed as a share of the crop and collected through iqta assignments — a commander was assigned the revenue of a territory in exchange for maintaining a stated number of troops. The critical design feature was that the iqta was transferable and not hereditary, which was a deliberate attempt to avoid the devolution problem of Chapter 6.8.
It worked while the centre was strong and failed when it was not. Assignees repeatedly sought to make holdings hereditary, and Chapter 6.11 shows the Mughals fighting the same battle.
Alauddin Khalji's controls are the most striking administrative episode. To maintain a very large standing army cheaply — needed against Mongol invasions — he fixed the prices of grain, cloth, horses, slaves and other goods by decree; established state granaries; registered merchants; posted inspectors in markets; and set up a system of informers reporting on compliance. Contemporary chroniclers report that it worked for the duration of his reign, which makes it one of the few pre-modern price-control regimes reported as effective. It required an enforcement apparatus of great severity and it did not outlive him.
Taxation of non-Muslims. The jizya was a poll tax levied on non-Muslims in Islamic states, in principle in exchange for exemption from military service and for protected status. Its application in the Sultanate was inconsistent — sometimes levied strictly, sometimes largely on urban populations, often not collected from cultivators in practice, and periodically waived. It was a real fiscal and legal disability and it was not uniform.
The honest ledger
This is the section the subject requires.
Destruction
Temple destruction happened and it is documented by the destroyers themselves. Persian chronicles record it as achievement; inscriptions record rebuilding; and archaeology confirms specific cases.
The Qutb complex in Delhi is the clearest physical evidence. The Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, begun by Aibak in 1192, was built on the site of a temple complex, using columns and carved stone from demolished Jain and Hindu temples, with the figural sculpture defaced — and this is visible today. The inscription on the site states that the material came from twenty-seven temples.
The motives, honestly separated. Some destruction was religious iconoclasm. Some was straightforwardly political — a temple was a symbol of the defeated dynasty's legitimacy, and destroying it was how a conqueror announced that the previous ruler's authority was gone. This is important because Indian rulers did it to each other too: there are documented cases of Hindu kings sacking rival kingdoms' temples and carrying off their principal images as trophies. The historian Richard Eaton's work assembled these cases, and the pattern is that state temples associated with an enemy dynasty were targeted while ordinary temples generally were not. And some was plunder, since temples held treasure.
All three motives are real and they overlap. A treatment that assigns everything to religious hatred is wrong; a treatment that assigns everything to political convention is also wrong, and the chroniclers' own religious framing is evidence against it.
The scale is where the argument is fiercest and where the evidence is weakest. Claims of tens of thousands of temples destroyed rest on chronicle rhetoric. Eaton's detailed survey of the sources found around eighty instances he could document with reasonable confidence between 1192 and 1760. His figure is a count of well-documented cases, not a claim that no others occurred, and it has been criticised on that basis. The honest statement: destruction was real, repeated, and concentrated on politically significant temples; the total is not knowable; and both the very high and the very low figures in public argument are asserted rather than established.
Nalanda and the Bihar monasteries were destroyed in this period (Chapter 6.8), with consequences for Buddhism in India that were terminal.
And the human cost of the campaigns was severe — cities sacked, populations enslaved, and Timur's sack of Delhi in 1398 among the worst single episodes in the city's history.
Construction
And the same period built a great deal.
Architecture. The true arch and the dome entered Indian building — Indian architecture had used corbelled construction, where stones are stepped inward, which limits spans. The arch transfers load in compression and permits far larger spaces (Chapter 5.4). Combined with Indian stone-carving traditions and craftsmen, this produced the Indo-Islamic style: the Qutb Minar, the tombs of the Lodis and Tughlaqs, and eventually everything in Chapter 6.11.
Cities and infrastructure. Delhi was rebuilt repeatedly on adjacent sites, with major waterworks including the Hauz Khas reservoir. Firoz Shah Tughlaq built canals, including one bringing Yamuna water westward, and repaired older works — and moved two of Ashoka's pillars to Delhi, where they still stand.
The Mongols were kept out. This is genuinely important and is usually omitted. Baghdad fell to the Mongols in 1258 and the Abbasid Caliphate was destroyed. The Delhi Sultanate faced repeated Mongol invasions through the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and defeated them, chiefly under Balban and Alauddin Khalji. India was not incorporated into the Mongol empire, and the Sultanate's army is why.
Language and culture. Persian became the language of administration and high culture for six centuries — a status it kept until English replaced it in 1837. Hindustani emerged from the contact between Persian and the local speech of the Delhi region, and it is the direct ancestor of both modern Hindi and Urdu, which share a grammar and a core vocabulary and differ in script and in learned vocabulary.
Music. Amir Khusrau, poet and musician at the Delhi court around 1300, is associated by tradition with the development of qawwali and with instruments and forms that fed into Hindustani classical music. How much is his and how much is later attribution is uncertain; the fusion itself is real, and Hindustani classical music is a genuinely synthetic tradition in a way Carnatic music is not.
Sufism. The Sufi orders — Chishti above all — established themselves across northern India in this period, and their shrines became devotional centres visited by Hindus and Muslims alike, which they still are. Nizamuddin Auliya's shrine in Delhi and Moinuddin Chishti's at Ajmer are the major examples.
And the Bhakti movement's northern phase overlaps and interacts with this. Kabir, a weaver from Varanasi in the fifteenth century, rejected both temple and mosque, both Brahmin and Mullah, in verses that are still sung — and he is claimed by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Guru Nanak, born 1469, comes out of the same milieu (Chapter 6.14).
Where this shows up in your life
Your language, if you speak Hindi or Urdu. The words for court, market, paper, chair, table, government, police, address, news and thousands more came in through Persian in this period.
The buildings. Every dome and arch in Indian architecture, and the whole tradition that leads to the Taj Mahal.
And the argument itself. The politics of this period is live in India today — over monuments, over textbooks, over disputed sites. This book's position is the one stated in the source note: read what the chroniclers wrote and note that they were boasting; check against archaeology and inscriptions; separate the documented from the asserted; and refuse both the version that makes six centuries entirely a catastrophe and the version that makes it entirely a synthesis. Chapter 6.12 applies the same method to the Mughals, where the argument is even sharper.
What the next page covers
While Delhi expanded south, two large states rose in the Deccan that fought each other for two centuries and produced one of the greatest cities of the medieval world. Chapter 6.10 covers Vijayanagara and the Bahmani sultanates — how a southern empire held the Sultanate's expansion at the Krishna river, what foreign visitors said about a city they compared to Rome, the battle of Talikota and its aftermath, and what the ruins at Hampi actually show.