Sack of Delhi (1398)

In December 1398 the Central Asian conqueror Timur, also known as Tamerlane, defeated the army of the Tughlaq sultan Nasir-ud-Din Mahmud Shah outside Delhi and then plundered the city. Delhi was then among the richest cities in the world, and its devastation, with tens of thousands killed and many more enslaved, left the Delhi Sultanate broken and northern India divided for decades.

Timur had taken power in Transoxiana around 1370 and spent the following decades campaigning across Persia, Iraq, the Caucasus and the steppe. By the 1390s the Tughlaq dynasty, which had ruled Delhi since 1320, was in steep decline. Provincial governors had broken away, and from 1394 two members of the family each claimed the title of sultan: Mahmud Shah in Delhi and Nusrat Shah in nearby Firozabad. Their factions fought one another almost continuously. Timur, aware of this weakness and of the wealth of the north Indian plains, prepared an invasion. Historians generally agree that he came for plunder rather than to build a lasting Indian empire.

With an army of around 90,000, Timur crossed the Indus on 30 September 1398. He sacked Tulamba and killed its inhabitants, while his grandson Pir Muhammad had already been besieging Multan, which fell to him. Much of the local nobility submitted without a fight. Timur overcame a small force on the Sutlej, destroyed the fort of Bhatner and killed or captured large numbers of Jat villagers who harried his columns. The Delhi government did little to slow his advance.

Before engaging the sultan, Timur is reported to have had some 100,000 captives taken earlier in the campaign put to death, for fear that they would rise against him during the fighting. The battle was fought on 17 December 1398. Mahmud Shah and his minister Mallu Iqbal fielded war elephants, said to have been armoured in mail, which unsettled Timur's troops. According to the traditional accounts, Timur had trenches dug in front of his lines and sent camels loaded with burning hay and wood towards the elephants, which panicked and turned back into their own ranks. His cavalry then broke the Delhi army, and the sultan fled, eventually reaching Gujarat.

Timur's forces entered the city, and over the following days it was looted. When inhabitants resisted the occupiers, the response was a general massacre; chroniclers describe towers of heads and corpses left unburied in the streets. Accounts of the duration vary, from three or four days to more than a week, and the dead in Delhi are commonly put at around 100,000. Large numbers of men, women and children were enslaved, skilled craftsmen in particular, and carried back with the loot to Timur's capital, Samarkand.

Timur did not stay. Within months he had turned west again, towards wars with the Mamluks and the Ottomans that culminated at the Battle of Ankara in 1402. Mahmud Shah later returned to Delhi as a figurehead, but the dynasty never recovered, and Gujarat, Malwa and Jaunpur became independent sultanates. Khizr Khan, said to have been appointed by Timur as his governor, entered Delhi in 1414 and founded the Sayyid dynasty, at first ruling nominally as a Timurid vassal. Delhi took close to a century to recover. More than a century later Timur's descendant Babur invaded India, won the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 and founded the Mughal Empire.

Our 1300 map shows the Delhi Sultanate near its greatest extent, and our 1400 map shows northern India just after the invasion, alongside the vast Timurid Empire.