Lecture 17: 1526 & 1556 Panipat—Babur & Akbar in India

1526 & 1556 Panipat—Babur & Akbar in India

Lecture 17

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ertain places seem fated to be battlegrounds—locations where

major battles were fought, often hundreds of years apart. Usually,

the reason is that the site constitutes a strategic crossroads, where

invaders naturally would encounter defenders. Geographic determinism

seems to be why the undistinguished little town of Panipat, about 80 miles

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1526, 1556, and 1761—each arguably decisive. The First and Second

Battles of Panipat took place between local rulers and two of the earliest and

most famous of the Mughal emperors, Babur and Akbar, and these battles

established Mughal domination over the Indian subcontinent that would last

until the arrival of the British.

Babur

x On June 8, 1494, in the fortress city of Akhsi, in the modern

province of Ferghana, Uzbekistan, a local chieftain named Mirza

was killed, leaving an 11-year-old son named Babur. Through his

father, Babur could claim to be an heir of Tamerlane, and on his

mother’s side, he could trace his ancestry to the greatest of all

Mongols, the mighty Genghis Khan himself. Despite his youth,

Babur was already dreaming of becoming a great conqueror.

x Babur had a literary bent and, from an early age, wrote a diary that

would survive and grow into a charmingly frank autobiography of

his deeds, known as the Baburnama. In it, he describes how, after

his father’s death, he attempted to take control of Ferghana and

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x His youth and the treachery of others combined against him,

however, and within three years, Babur had lost not only Samarkand

but Ferghana and had been deserted by nearly all of his retainers.

Undaunted, he rebounded from this low point, seizing the city of

Kabul and making it the base for his operations.