The Mughal Empire

Zahiruddin Babur, a Chagatai prince driven from Samarkand, won the First Battle of Panipat (1526) — where his field artillery and the tulughma flanking tactic destroyed Ibrahim Lodi's army and founded an empire in a single morning — then broke the Rajput champion Rana Sanga at Khanwa (1527). His Baburnama, written in Chagatai Turkish, is history's most honest royal memoir.

His son Humayun lost everything to the Afghan Sher Shah Suri and spent fifteen years in exile. Yet Sher Shah's five-year rule (1540–45) bequeathed the empire its skeleton: the silver rupiya, the Grand Trunk Road with sarais, and land-revenue assessment by measurement — institutions Akbar would inherit. Humayun returned in 1555 and died months later on his library stairs.

Akbar (1556–1605) came to the throne at thirteen; at the Second Battle of Panipat (1556) his guardian Bairam Khan destroyed Hemu's bid for Delhi. Akbar then built empire by conciliation: he married Rajput princesses, appointed Rajput generals like Man Singh, abolished the pilgrim tax (1563) and the jizya (1564), and stopped converting his subjects to policy instead of faith.

His system was the mansabdari — every officer held a rank (mansab) fixing his salary and cavalry quota — set on the revenue settlement of Raja Todar Mal, assessed on ten-year average yields. In the Ibadat Khana at Fatehpur Sikri he summoned all faiths, and in 1582 announced the Din-i-Ilahi, a rationalist cult of the emperor that died with him. Abul Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari and Akbarnama remain the fullest statistical portrait of any pre-modern Indian state.

Jahangir (1605–27), remembered for his chain of justice and his wine cup, ceded power to Nur Jahan whose junta ruled in his name; his reign saw Mughal painting reach its naturalist perfection and the first English traveller, Thomas Roe, beg a farman for trade. Shah Jahan (1628–58) made architecture the empire's autobiography — the Taj Mahal for Mumtaz Mahal, the Red Fort and Jama Masjid of Shahjahanabad, and the Peacock Throne in whose canopy the Koh-i-Noor burned — while his treasury strained under war in the Deccan and on the north-west frontier.

Aurangzeb Alamgir (1658–1707) imprisoned his father, executed his brother Dara Shikoh, and ruled the widest empire of any Mughal. But he reimposed the jizya (1679), alienated the Rajputs by the succession war in Marwar, and spent his last twenty-six years in the Deccan fighting the Marathas. He died in 1707 at Ahmadnagar, a pious old man who had won nearly all India and lost the loyalty of its peoples — 'I came alone and I go as a stranger.' Within fifty years his empire would be a fiction.