Who were the Mughals?
Panipat, 1526: a new dynasty rides into India — and builds the richest state on earth, where Persian verse met Indian craft.
Last updated: October 2026
In 1526, at Panipat north of Delhi, a Central Asian prince with field guns and fast cavalry destroyed the Sultan of Delhi in a single day — and founded an empire that would become the richest state on earth. The Mughals ruled India for three centuries, and at their height they held roughly a quarter of the world’s wealth.
The Mughal Empire was founded by Babur (1483-1530), a prince of Central Asia who was descended from Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane, on his father's side and from Genghis Khan on his mother's. Babur inherited a small kingdom at Ferghana, in what is now Uzbekistan, lost it, and spent years as a wandering prince before capturing Kabul in 1504. From Kabul he looked south toward the rich plains of Hindustan. In 1526, at the First Battle of Panipat, north of Delhi, his army, perhaps twelve thousand strong, met the far larger army of Ibrahim Lodi, the Sultan of Delhi. Babur's field guns and his cavalry tactics, including the tulughma, a flanking maneuver learned from Central Asian warfare, destroyed the Sultan's army in a single day, and Ibrahim Lodi was killed. Babur took Delhi and Agra, and the following year he defeated a confederation of Rajput princes at Khanwa. The Mughal Empire was born.
Babur's son Humayun (1508-1556) nearly lost everything. Driven out of India by the Afghan ruler Sher Shah Suri in 1540, he spent years in exile at the Safavid court of Persia before returning to reclaim Delhi in 1555. He died the next year after a fall in his library. His son Akbar, who came to the throne at thirteen in 1556, would make the empire real. The name Mughal itself comes from the Persian word for Mongol, a reminder of the dynasty's Central Asian ancestry, though the Mughals were culturally Persianate and Turkish in speech and custom, and they ruled an overwhelmingly Indian empire.
Akbar (1542-1605) reigned for nearly half a century and transformed a fragile north Indian kingdom into a subcontinental empire. He expanded relentlessly, conquering Gujarat, Bengal, Kashmir, Sindh, and parts of the Deccan, and he built an administration to hold it together. His central instrument was the mansabdari system, a graded hierarchy of officials who were ranked, paid, and transferred by the emperor, and who owed him military service. The empire's revenues came from land taxation, assessed with the help of his finance minister, Raja Todar Mal, whose revenue settlements measured and classified cultivated land. Akbar also built a new capital at Fatehpur Sikri, a red sandstone city of palaces and mosques, occupied for only about a decade before the court returned to Agra, for reasons scholars still debate, with water supply among the leading explanations.
Akbar is also remembered for his policy of religious tolerance, known as sulh-i kul, peace with all. He abolished the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims, and the pilgrim tax, married Rajput princesses and brought Rajput nobles into the highest ranks of his service, and appointed Hindus to senior offices. He built an ibadatkhana, a House of Worship, at Fatehpur Sikri, where scholars of different faiths, including Jesuit missionaries from the Portuguese settlement at Goa, debated theology before him. In his later years he promulgated a court-centered ethic known as the Din-i Ilahi, the Religion of God, whose exact nature is debated: some scholars treat it as a new religion, others as a loyalty cult centered on the emperor, and still others as a philosophical program rather than a faith. What is not debated is that Akbar's policies made it possible for a Muslim dynasty to rule a Hindu-majority empire with the cooperation of its Hindu elites. The historian's verdict on Akbar is unusually favorable, but the empire he built depended on his personal authority, and later emperors would govern differently.
Akbar's successors presided over an empire of extraordinary wealth and splendor. Jahangir (1569-1627) continued his father's policies, patronized painting, and left a memoir, the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, that is one of the great autobiographical works of the period. Shah Jahan (1592-1666) built the Taj Mahal at Agra, a white marble mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631, and rebuilt Delhi as Shahjahanabad, with the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid as its centerpieces. Mughal painting, blending Persian, Indian, and European influences, produced some of the finest miniature art in the world, and Mughal architecture, from the Taj Mahal to the forts of Lahore and Agra, remains among the most admired building in the world. The empire's economy was one of the largest on earth: India produced a large share of the world's textiles, and European traders, above all the English and Dutch East India Companies, came to buy them.
Shah Jahan's reign ended in civil war. In 1658, his son Aurangzeb seized the throne, imprisoned his father in Agra Fort, and defeated his brothers in a war of succession. Aurangzeb (1618-1707) reigned for nearly fifty years and expanded the empire to its greatest territorial extent, pushing deep into the Deccan. His policies are the most debated of any Mughal emperor's. He reimposed the jizya in 1679, ordered the destruction of some Hindu temples while protecting others, and banned court music in his later years. Historians disagree about his motives: some read his reign as a turn toward Islamic orthodoxy, others argue that his decisions were driven by fiscal pressure, warfare, and the politics of empire, and point out that Hindus continued to serve in large numbers in his administration. What is clear is that his endless Deccan campaigns drained the treasury, and that the Marathas, a rising Hindu power in western India under Shivaji and his successors, proved impossible to subdue.
The decline of the Mughal Empire was multi-causal, and no single explanation is sufficient. After Aurangzeb's death in 1707, the empire's succession wars, fiscal strain, and over-extension all took their toll. Provincial governors carved out effectively independent states: Hyderabad, Bengal, Awadh, and others. The Marathas expanded across central India, and the Sikhs built their own power in Punjab. In 1739, the Persian conqueror Nader Shah invaded India, defeated the Mughal army at Karnal, and sacked Delhi, carrying off the Peacock Throne and a vast treasure. The Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani invaded repeatedly in the following decades. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Mughal emperor's effective authority barely extended beyond Delhi, and the real contest for India was between the Marathas, the regional states, and the British East India Company, which built a territorial empire of its own after its victories in Bengal in the 1750s.
The end came with the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, an elderly poet-king, was proclaimed emperor by the rebels in Delhi. The British suppressed the rebellion, tried Zafar for treason, and exiled him to Rangoon in Burma, where he died in 1862. The empire was formally abolished in 1858, and India passed under direct British rule. The Mughal legacy survived the empire: the Urdu language, which took shape in the Mughal camps and courts; Mughal cuisine, which shaped the cooking of north India and Pakistan; Mughal gardens, textiles, and architecture; and the Taj Mahal, which draws millions of visitors every year. The Mughals were conquerors from Central Asia who became Indian, and the India they left behind still carries their imprint in its languages, its cities, and its food.
- Stephen Dale, Babur: Timurid Prince and Mughal Emperor, 1483-1530 (Cambridge University Press).
- Abraham Eraly, The Mughal Throne (Weidenfeld and Nicolson) — the saga of the great emperors.
- John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge University Press) — the standard volume in the New Cambridge History of India.
- Satish Chandra, Medieval India (Har-Anand) — on the administration and economy of the empire.
- Audrey Truschke, Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King (Stanford University Press) — a revisionist account of the debated emperor.
- Abul Fazl, Akbarnama (translated by H. Beveridge) — the official history of Akbar's reign.
- UNESCO World Heritage listings for the Taj Mahal, Humayun's Tomb, Fatehpur Sikri, and the Red Fort.