Timur's invasion and sack of Delhi
- Date
- 1398 CE
- Category
- Military & conflict
- Region
- North India (Delhi Sultanate)
- Era
- Post-Classical / Medieval
- Significance
In 1398 the Central Asian conqueror Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane, led a massive army from his capital Samarkand across the Indus into northern India, claiming to punish the Delhi Sultanate's tolerance of its Hindu subjects.
After crossing the river on 30 September, he advanced on Delhi, defeating the forces of Sultan Nasir-ud-Din Mahmud Tughlaq in a battle on 17 December in which he neutralised the defenders' war elephants. The capture of Delhi was followed by several days of catastrophic massacre and plunder; chroniclers describe tens of thousands slain or enslaved and the city left depopulated and ruined for a generation. Timur withdrew laden with spoils and skilled craftsmen, carried off to beautify Samarkand, the splendid imperial capital he was adorning with mosques and palaces. The sack shattered the power of the Tughlaq dynasty and accelerated the fragmentation of the Delhi Sultanate into regional successor states, reshaping the political map of the Indian subcontinent. Timur's career of conquest across Persia, the Caucasus, Anatolia and India, modelled on the legacy of Genghis Khan, made him the last of the great Eurasian steppe conquerors and a figure whose Timurid descendants would later found the Mughal Empire.
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Empires active in 1398 CE
- Kanem-Bornu Empire700 CE – 1900 CE
- Ming Dynasty1368 CE – 1644 CE
- Ottoman Empire1299 CE – 1922 CE
- Solomonic dynasty1270 CE – 1974 CE
- Byzantine Empire330 CE – 1453 CE
- Majapahit1293 CE – 1527 CE
Related military & conflict events
- The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople29 May 1453 CE
- Mongol sack of Baghdad ends the Abbasid Caliphate10 February 1258 CE
- Joan of Arc and the lifting of the siege of Orleans1429 CE
- Sack of Angkor and Abandonment of the Khmer Capital1431 CE
- Second Battle of Bach Dang: Dai Viet destroys the Yuan-Mongol fleet9 April 1288
- Mongol Invasions Topple the Pagan Empire of Burma1277-1287 CE (Pagan collapse, 1287)
Further reading
The wider story
India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765
Masterful, readable synthesis of the sultanate era.
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