First Battle of Panipat

21 April 1526 · in Battle View, played out step by step on the ground where it was fought

Babur defeated Ibrahim Lodi, the last Delhi sultan, using field artillery and cavalry tactics.

The sides

States that fought: Lodi Dynasty, Mughal Empire, Timurid Empire.

How it went

  1. First Battle of Panipat

    Babur, a Timurid prince driven out of Central Asia, has made himself king of Kabul. Now he comes down into India against Ibrahim Lodi, sultan of Delhi, with a small army and a weapon India has hardly seen: guns.

  2. Behind the carts

    Babur rests his right on the town of Panipat and his left on ditches and felled trees. Across his front he lashes 700 carts together with rawhide, the Ottoman way, with gaps for horsemen and guns and matchlocks behind them. For a week Ibrahim will not attack.

  3. Ibrahim advances

    At last, at dawn on 21 April, the Lodi army comes on, elephants in front. As it nears the carts its front narrows and its ranks crowd together.

  4. Round the flanks

    Babur's flanking parties, the tulughma, ride round both wings and shoot into the Lodi army's sides and rear, and the wings push in. Ibrahim's men are packed tighter and tighter.

  5. The guns

    Then the guns and matchlocks open up from behind the carts. The noise and the shot panic the elephants, which turn and trample their own men.

  6. Ibrahim falls

    By noon the Lodi army is a crowd hemmed in on three sides. Ibrahim Lodi is killed with some 15,000 of his men, the only sultan of Delhi to die on the battlefield.

  7. Panipat

    Babur takes Delhi and Agra within days. The empire he founds, the Mughal empire, rules most of India for the next two centuries.

Babur's own memoir, the Baburnama, gives Ibrahim 100,000 men and 1,000 elephants; modern estimates are far lower. The site is the plain east of the old town of Panipat.

People and wars

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