Babur’s Early Life in Central Asia
Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur was born on 14 February 1483 in the city of Andijan, in the Fergana Valley of what is now Uzbekistan. His early life in Central Asia, marked by the loss of his patrimony in Transoxiana, the seizure of a new base in Kabul, and a slow apprenticeship in the arts of war and statecraft, was the formative period in which the conqueror of Hindustan was made. The full arc of his career is treated in the broader account of Babur and the founding of the Mughal Empire, and the political and military consequence of his later Indian campaigns is examined in the First Battle of Panipat 1526 and Battle of Khanwa 1527 pages.
Birth and Family Heritage
Babur was born into the senior branch of the Timurid dynasty, the family that had ruled the Central Asian world for nearly a century and a half since the conquests of Timur. His father, Umar Sheikh Mirza, was the ruler of the small Timurid principality of Fergana, in the upper Syr Darya basin, and was himself a great-grandson of Timur. On his mother’s side, Babur was descended from the line of Chinggis Khan through the Chagatai Khans. The combination of these two lineages, Timurid and Chinggisid, gave him the most prestigious genealogical claim in the Turco-Mongol political world of the late fifteenth century.
The Loss of Samarkand
For nearly a decade, the young prince waged an almost continuous series of campaigns to recover Samarkand, the ancestral Timurid capital, and to secure his position in the wider political world of Central Asia. He briefly held the city in 1497, lost it, recaptured it in 1501 with the help of the Shaybanid defector to a different faction, and lost it definitively to the rising Uzbek khan Muhammad Shaybani Khan. These reverses taught him lessons that would prove decisive when, two decades later, he turned his gaze southward toward the plains of Hindustan. The campaigns of this period are treated in greater detail in the broader account of Babur and the founding of the Mughal Empire.
The Seizure of Kabul 1504
The young Babur inherited the throne of Fergana in 1494, at the age of eleven, on the death of his father. Almost immediately he was drawn into the long and ultimately unsuccessful struggle to recover Samarkand, the ancestral Timurid capital in Transoxiana. The campaigns of the 1490s and early 1500s against the Shaybanid Uzbeks under Muhammad Shaybani Khan occupied the first decade of his adult life. He held Samarkand briefly in 1497, lost it, recaptured it in 1501, and lost it definitively in the same year.
Seizure of Kabul 1504
In 1504, having lost Fergana for the second time, Babur marched southeast with a small body of followers and seized Kabul from its Arghunid governor, Mukim Beg Arghun. He was twenty-one years old. Kabul was not the rich prize that Samarkand had been, but it was strategically invaluable: it controlled the eastern approaches to the Hindu Kush and offered a staging ground from which a determined commander could raid into the Punjab and beyond.
From this base, Babur spent the next two decades consolidating his hold over the mountain regions, conducting periodic expeditions into the Punjab, and cultivating the military, literary, and administrative talents that would eventually carry him into the heartland of Hindustan. The political situation in North India at the time of his arrival is examined on the Mughal Empire overview page, and the events leading to the First Battle of Panipat are treated in the related article on the First Battle of Panipat 1526.
His Early Poetry and the Baburnama
It was during these Kabul years that Babur began the autobiographical work that would become the Baburnama, memoirs in world literature. Written in a vivid, sometimes racy Turki prose, it records not only his campaigns and political anxieties but his passionate interest in gardens, in the layout of formal landscapes, and in the natural history of the lands through which he passed. The Baburnama is, among other things, a founding document of Mughal aesthetics, and its description of the gardens of Hindustan shaped the literary conventions of Mughal garden writing for the next two centuries.
Babur’s poetry, much of it composed during the Kabul years, occupies a special place in the literary traditions of Chagatai Turki. The verses are often short, direct, and marked by a characteristic use of the natural world as a vehicle for personal feeling. The literary background of the Baburnama is examined in greater detail on the Mughal literature page, and the wider aesthetic of the early Mughal court is treated on the Mughal culture and society and Mughal gardens pages.
Relations with the Uzbeks, Safavids, and Ottomans
The political world in which the young Babur operated was shaped by three great powers: the Shaybanid Uzbeks to the north, the Safavids of Iran to the west, and the Ottomans to the far west. Each of these powers was a serious military and political actor, and Babur’s diplomatic and military dealings with all three occupied much of his early career. He fought the Uzbeks repeatedly, was for a time an ally of the Safavids under Shah Ismail, and cultivated a correspondence with the Ottoman sultans that survived the vicissitudes of the 1510s and 1520s.
The diplomatic framework within which Babur operated is examined on the Mughal diplomacy page, and the political history of the late Timurid world is set in its broader context on the Mughal Empire overview and the later Mughals pages.
The Personality of Babur
The principal sources for the personality of Babur are the Baburnama itself, which is unusually candid for a memoir of the period, and the testimony of his contemporaries. The emperor emerges from these sources as a man of great courage, considerable literary cultivation, and consuming personal ambition, but also subject to bouts of melancholy and ill health. He was, by contemporary Central Asian standards, abstemious, and he explicitly recoiled from the opium use that was common among his courtiers.
His religious practice was eclectic and personal. He was a Sunni Muslim by upbringing and remained so throughout his life, but he was notably unsympathetic to the strictures of formal jurisprudence. He had an unusually good opinion of Hindu religious practice for a Muslim of his period, and his Baburnama contains several passages in which he praises Hindu piety and the integrity of Hindu religious teachers. This relative openness of religious sensibility is examined in greater detail on the Hindu-Muslim relations page and in the context of the religious policies of his grandson, Akbar the Great.
The Move Toward Hindustan
The decision to invade Hindustan was not taken in a single moment. It was the result of a slow accumulation of opportunity, in which the decline of the Lodi state, the disaffection of the Afghan nobility, and the relative weakness of the Rajput confederacy combined to make an invasion feasible. The political situation in North India in the 1520s is examined on the Mughal Empire overview and the later Mughals pages, and the actual course of the invasion is treated in the related articles on the First Battle of Panipat 1526 and the Battle of Khanwa 1527.
The early years of Babur’s reign in India, in which the work begun in Central Asia reached its political fulfilment, are treated in the broader account of Babur and the founding of the Mughal Empire, and the institutional innovations of his reign are examined on the Mughal administration overview and the Mughal land revenue systems pages.
Sources
- Babur, Baburnama, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston (1993).
- Stephen F. Dale, The Garden of the Eight Paradises (2004), pp. 1–84.