Third Battle of Panipat checks Maratha expansion
- Date
- 14 January 1761
- Category
- Military & conflict
- Region
- Panipat, northern India
- Era
- Early Modern
- Significance
On 14 January 1761 the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani, allied with the Rohillas and the Nawab of Awadh, crushed the Maratha army under Sadashivrao Bhau at Panipat north of Delhi.
The Marathas, then the foremost power in India, had pushed into the Punjab in pursuit of dominance over the declining Mughal heartland, but their forces, encumbered by some 200,000 non-combatants and cut off from supplies, were starving by the time battle was joined. The defeat was catastrophic: contemporary estimates suggest around 100,000 Marathas, soldiers and camp followers, died during and after the engagement, including many of their ablest commanders. Panipat halted Maratha designs on the northwest and left a power vacuum in northern India that neither the exhausted Afghans nor the fractured Marathas could fill. The Maratha confederacy recovered partially but was weakened at a critical moment, easing the path for British East India Company expansion in the decades that followed.
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Empires active in 14 January 1761
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- Mughal Empire1526 CE – 1857 CE
Related military & conflict events
- Fall of Beijing and the Ming–Qing transition1644
- Battle of Plassey and the rise of British power in Bengal23 June 1757
- Qing conquest of the Dzungars and the creation of Xinjiang1755–1759
- Nadir Shah sacks Delhi and shatters Mughal powerMarch 1739
- The Treaty of Paris ends the American Revolutionary War3 September 1783
- Defenestration of Prague and the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War23 May 1618
Further reading
The wider story
The Mughal Empire
The standard scholarly survey (New Cambridge History of India).
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