Mughal Conquest of North India

On 21 April 1526, the Central Asian prince Babur, who had already conquered the Kabul region in 1504, led an invading army of only about 12,000 troops to a decisive victory over Ibrahim Lodi, the Sultan of Delhi, at the First Battle of Panipat, near the town of Panipat in present-day Haryana. Although Ibrahim commanded a far larger force of 50,000 to 70,000 soldiers backed by around 1,000 war elephants, Babur's use of gunpowder weapons, including matchlock muskets and 15 to 20 cannons, combined with a defensive line of roughly 700 wagons lashed together as a barricade for his musketeers, panicked the Sultan's elephants and broke his numerical advantage; Ibrahim and an estimated 20,000 of his soldiers were killed in the battle. The victory marked the beginning of Mughal rule in India and one of the earliest significant uses of gunpowder weaponry on the Indian subcontinent, though Babur still needed further victories, over the Rajput ruler Rana Sanga in 1527 and over eastern Afghan forces in 1529, to secure his new territory. The Mughal Empire founded by this conquest went on to govern large parts of the Indian subcontinent for more than two centuries.