The story
In September 1398 Timur, the Central Asian conqueror who ruled from Samarkand, crossed the Indus with a large army and marched on Delhi. On December 17 he defeated the Tughlaq sultan Nasir al-Din Mahmud Shah and his minister Mallu Iqbal outside the city. Delhi was then sacked over several days. Timur's own memoir and later chroniclers describe mass killings and the removal of large amounts of treasure, and they say he took skilled craftsmen back to Samarkand.
The sultanate was an easy target. The Tughlaq dynasty had been losing control of its provinces since the 1350s, with governors in Bengal, Gujarat, Jaunpur and the Deccan acting as independent rulers, and civil war within the court. Timur was already fighting across Persia, Anatolia and Russia, and Delhi's wealth made it a prize. Timur's chroniclers claimed that about 100,000 prisoners were killed before the battle, though historians treat such numbers with caution. Timur left in early 1399, leaving no governor, and the Tughlaq line staggered on for years before Khizr Khan, whom Timur had named his deputy in Multan, took Delhi in 1414 and founded the Sayyid dynasty.
Why it mattered
- The Tughlaq dynasty never recovered, and effective power in northern India split among regional sultanates.
- The sack of Delhi emptied the capital of people and wealth for years, and the city was repeatedly raided afterwards.
- The sultanate shrank to a small regional state under the Sayyid and Lodi dynasties, until Babur's invasion in 1526 ended it.
- Timur's descendants kept a claim to India, which Babur used to justify founding the Mughal Empire.
Sources
- Sack of Delhi (1398) Britannica
- Sayyid dynasty Britannica
- Tughlaq Dynasty World History Encyclopedia
Drafted by AI (Claude) from the sources above and checked against them by AI; no historian has reviewed this page. Spot a mistake? Suggest a correction. How pages are made
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