Who ruled Lahore?

Lahore stands on the left bank of the Ravi River in the Punjab, the fertile land of five rivers that stretches from the Indus to the plains of north India. It lies on the main road between Kabul and Delhi, so almost every invader who came through the north-western passes had to take or pass it. For a thousand years Lahore was the capital of the Punjab under a long series of dynasties, and its Mughal mosques, gardens and fort make it one of the great monumental cities of South Asia. Today it is the second-largest city in Pakistan.

A Hindu tradition says the city was founded by Lava, a son of the god-king Rama, but its early history is obscure. The first reliable written mention comes from a Persian geography of 982, the Hudud al-Alam, which describes it as a town with temples and markets. Around 1020 Mahmud of Ghazni took the Punjab from the Hindu Shahi kings, and Lahore became the main eastern city of the Ghaznavid Empire, a centre of Persian poetry and Sufi learning; the Sufi saint Ali Hujwiri, known as Data Ganj Bakhsh, settled and was buried here. After Ghazni itself fell, Lahore served as the last Ghaznavid capital until the Ghurids took it in 1186.

Qutb ud-Din Aibak, the first sultan of Delhi, was crowned in Lahore in 1206, but the city soon lay on the exposed frontier of the Delhi Sultanate. Mongol raiders sacked it in 1241, and it was attacked again by Central Asian armies in the following century and by Timur's forces in 1398. For long periods Lahore was a provincial town under governors from Delhi or Multan.

Babur captured Lahore in 1524, and under the Mughal Empire it entered its golden age. Akbar held court here from 1584 to 1598, enlarging the fort and building a brick city wall. His son Jahangir is buried at Shahdara across the river, and Shah Jahan, who was born in Lahore, added marble palaces to the fort and the Shalimar Gardens on the city's edge. The Wazir Khan Mosque, covered in tile mosaic, was built in the 1630s, and in 1673 Aurangzeb completed the Badshahi Mosque, then the largest mosque in the world.

As Mughal power weakened in the 18th century, Lahore was repeatedly invaded by the Iranian ruler Nader Shah and the Afghan Ahmad Shah Durrani, and fought over by Sikh military bands. In 1799 Ranjit Singh took the city and made it the capital of the Sikh Empire, which stretched from the Khyber Pass to Kashmir. After his death in 1839 the state fell into turmoil, and following two wars the British annexed the Punjab in 1849.

Under British rule Lahore became the capital of the province of Punjab and grew beyond its walls, with railway workshops, a cantonment and colleges in a blend of Mughal, Gothic and Indian styles. It was also a centre of politics and journalism. On 23 March 1940 the All-India Muslim League, meeting in Lahore, passed the resolution calling for independent states for the Muslim-majority regions, a key step towards Pakistan. During the partition of India in 1947, Lahore was assigned to Pakistan; terrible violence followed, and most of its Hindus and Sikhs left for India while Muslim refugees poured in.

Lahore is now the capital of Punjab province, with about 13 million people, and the cultural and educational centre of Pakistan.