Mahmud of Ghazni

Mahmud, who ruled from Ghazni in present-day Afghanistan between 998 and 1030, built the Ghaznavid Empire into a military power reaching from north-western Iran to the Punjab and Khwarazm. He is best known for his repeated raids into northern India, including the sack of the Somnath temple, which brought enormous wealth to his capital. Those raids still divide opinion: he is celebrated as a hero by many in Pakistan and remembered as a destroyer of temples in India.

Mahmud was born at Ghazni on 2 October 971. His father, Sabuktigin, was a Turkic former slave soldier who had founded a dynasty at Ghazni in 977 as a subordinate of the Samanids, the rulers of Khorasan and Transoxiana; his mother came from a local landowning family. As a youth Mahmud fought beside his father against the Hindu Shahi king Jayapala and in Khorasan. When Sabuktigin died in 997 he named a younger son, Ismail, as heir, but Mahmud defeated his brother and took the throne in 998, at about twenty-seven.

Mahmud quickly turned on his weakening Samanid overlords, defeating their army near Merv in May 999, after which their state collapsed under pressure from the Kara-Khanids to the north. Mahmud now ruled in his own right while acknowledging the spiritual authority of the Abbasid caliph, who granted him the title Yamin al-Dawla. He is often described as the first ruler to be widely styled sultan. Over the next decades he took Sistan, beat back a Kara-Khanid invasion in 1008, annexed Khwarazm in 1017 and campaigned in Transoxiana in 1024 and 1025.

From 1000 onwards Mahmud led a long series of expeditions into the Indian subcontinent, traditionally counted as seventeen. He broke the Hindu Shahi kingdom in a string of battles from 1001 and eventually annexed the Punjab, with Lahore as its centre. Further raids reached Nagarkot, Thanesar, Mathura and Kannauj, where cities were plundered, temples destroyed and many people killed or enslaved; he twice failed to break into Kashmir. Several Indian rulers became tributary vassals rather than being removed. In 1025 to 1026 he sacked the temple of Somnath in Gujarat. Modern estimates of the human cost vary widely, and historians also debate his motives. Some stress plunder to fund his armies and political strategy, others his self-presentation as a holy warrior for Sunni Islam.

Mahmud took his role as a champion of Sunni orthodoxy seriously at home too. He suppressed Ismaili Shia communities, massacring Ismailis at Multan, and executed a Fatimid envoy. At the same time his army included large numbers of Indian soldiers, many presumably Hindu, under their own commanders, who served him loyally. Contemporaries describe a hard-working ruler who closely supervised his officials but was suspicious of his ministers.

The wealth of the Indian raids transformed Ghazni into one of the great cities of the eastern Islamic world, with mosques, palaces, gardens and colleges. Mahmud gathered poets and scholars, even demanding that the court of Khwarazm send its learned men to Ghazni. His Indian campaigns prompted the scholar al-Biruni to write a study of India, which records the deep hostility the raids left behind. The poet Ferdowsi presented his Persian epic, the Shahnameh, to Mahmud, though medieval stories say the sultan showed it little interest.

In his last years Mahmud defeated Seljuk Turkmen he had allowed to settle in Khorasan, and in 1029 took Ray from the Buyids. Weakened by long illness, he died at Ghazni on 30 April 1030 and was buried in his favourite garden. His dynasty lasted another century and a half, but the Seljuks soon took its western lands, and the Ghurids finally ended it in 1187. Mahmud is widely seen as having laid the foundations of later Muslim rule in the Indian interior, which is why his memory remains so politically charged today.

Our 1000 map shows the region at the start of his reign, and the 1100 map shows the smaller Ghaznavid realm that survived after the Seljuks took its western provinces.