First Battle of Panipat and the founding of the Mughal Empire
- Date
- 21 April 1526
- Category
- Military & conflict
- Region
- Northern India
- Era
- Early Modern
- Significance
On 21 April 1526 Babur, a Timurid prince from Central Asia, defeated Sultan Ibrahim Lodi of Delhi at Panipat in northern India.
Though heavily outnumbered, Babur deployed field artillery and matchlock gunners behind a barricade of carts, combined with the encircling tulughma cavalry tactic, to rout the much larger Lodi army; Ibrahim and tens of thousands of his men were killed. The battle was among the earliest in South Asia to be decided by gunpowder weapons. Babur's victory ended the Delhi Sultanate and founded the Mughal Empire, which would rule much of the Indian subcontinent for over two centuries. Under Babur's successors the Mughals built one of the wealthiest and most populous states in the early modern world, fusing Persianate, Turkic and Indian traditions into a distinctive imperial culture whose architecture, painting and administration shaped South Asia for generations.
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Empires active in 21 April 1526
- Songhai Empire1464 CE – 1591 CE
- Ming Dynasty1368 CE – 1644 CE
- Inca Empire1438 CE – 1533 CE
- Ottoman Empire1299 CE – 1922 CE
- Solomonic dynasty1270 CE – 1974 CE
- Mughal Empire1526 CE – 1857 CE
Related military & conflict events
- Defenestration of Prague and the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War23 May 1618
- Fall of Beijing and the Ming–Qing transition1644
- Battle of Mohács and the Ottoman conquest of Hungary29 August 1526
- First Ottoman Siege of Vienna27 September – 15 October 1529
- Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire1532–1533
- Fall of Tenochtitlan and conquest of the Aztec Empire13 August 1521
Further reading
The wider story
The Mughal Empire
The standard scholarly survey (New Cambridge History of India).
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