The Mughal Military Machine: A Comprehensive Guide

Quick facts

Period covered: 1526–1857

Largest single arm: cavalry (mounted archers and matchlockmen)

Backbone: the mansabdari system, 66 ranks from 10 to 10,000+ zat

Tactical doctrine: the Central Asian tulughma envelopment, combined with the araba wagon-laager and field artillery

Other arms: war elephants (the fauj-i-fil), artillery (topkhana), infantry (banduqchis), and a riverine navy under the mir bahr

Founding victory: the First Battle of Panipat, 21 April 1526

Greatest disaster: the sack of Delhi by Nadir Shah, 1739

Final act: suppression of the Indian Rebellion of 1857

For more than two centuries, the armed forces of the Mughal Empire were the most formidable military instrument in South Asia and, by the reckoning of many contemporary European observers, the most powerful standing army in the Eastern Hemisphere. At its seventeenth-century peak, the imperial mobilization reportedly placed several hundred thousand cavalry in the field under the banner of the Padshah, supported by tens of thousands of matchlock-bearing infantrymen, several hundred war elephants, hundreds of heavy cannon, a network of riverine flotillas, and a dense lattice of regional forts and provincial garrisons that projected Mughal authority from the Hindu Kush to the Bay of Bengal. The army that fought the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 and the army that reeled before the Afghan and Maratha onslaughts of the eighteenth century were recognisably the same institution, yet they were also profoundly different in composition, doctrine, and effectiveness.

The Mughal military machine was never a single, uniform force. It was rather a layered system in which the household cavalry of the emperor, the contingents of the great mansabdari nobles, the feudal levies of the Rajput and Afghan chiefs, the artillery park of the imperial topkhana, the elephant corps of the fauj-i-fil, the matchlock infantry recruited by individual commanders, the river boats of the mir bahr, and the garrison troops of provincial forts all coexisted in a deliberately redundant hierarchy of obligation and reward. To understand the empire is to understand this hierarchy, for the army was simultaneously an instrument of conquest, the principal consumer of imperial revenue, the source of noble status and political power, and the framework within which the dynasty’s most ambitious administrative experiment, the mansabdari system, was articulated.

The Military Foundations of the Empire

The Mughal state was a conquest empire, and its military origins shaped its institutions for the next three centuries. Babur, the dynasty’s founder, was the heir of two of the most aggressive warrior lineages of the medieval Eurasian steppe: the Timurid house of his father and the Chinggisid descent of his mother. He had spent two decades fighting for oasis kingdoms in Transoxiana and Afghanistan before turning his gaze southward toward the plains of Hindustan, and the army he brought with him into India in the 1520s was, in its core composition, a Central Asian Turko-Mongol force. Its backbone was the mounted archer and matchlock-armed cavalryman; its tactical doctrine was the classic steppe tulughma; and its leadership cadre was composed largely of Timurid, Uzbeg, and Qizilbash officers whose loyalty was rooted in personal kinship and the promise of plunder.

This Central Asian inheritance was the indispensable foundation, but it was almost immediately supplemented by Indian military resources. The Afghan and Rajput polities that Babur confronted at Panipat and Khanwa in 1526 and 1527 were not backward; they commanded substantial cavalry and infantry resources of their own, and the war elephants, the heavy cavalry lancers, and the entrenched fortified positions of the Indian adversaries forced the Mughals to develop new tactics and to recruit new categories of soldier. Within a generation, the Central Asian kernel had been surrounded by a much larger Indian periphery.

Three features of the Mughal military tradition stand out from the beginning. First, the army was overwhelmingly cavalry-based; even in the late seventeenth century, the official returns of the mansabdari system counted men, horses, and beasts of transport rather than infantrymen and cannon. Second, the army was essentially a cavalry aristocracy in which rank, pay, and the right to command were defined by the number of sawars a nobleman could put into the field. Third, the army was parasitic upon the land: the jagir system, in which officers were assigned the right to collect the revenue of specified tracts of land in lieu of cash salary, was the principal mechanism by which the imperial household and the noble cavalry were paid.

Babur’s Military Innovations and the Tulughma

The First Battle of Panipat in 1526 is conventionally treated as a turning point in Indian military history because it demonstrated, for the first time on the subcontinent, the devastating combination of steppe cavalry tactics with gunpowder weaponry. Babur brought with him into India a small but technically sophisticated army, perhaps twelve to fifteen thousand men, in which the central striking force was a corps of mounted matchlock-armed cavalry supported by carts (araba) lashed together to form field works, by field artillery pieces that could be moved with the army, and by Uzbeg and Ottoman gunners recruited specifically for their expertise in the use of gunpowder weapons.

The tactical doctrine that Babur deployed at Panipat was the classic Central Asian tulughma, sometimes translated as “the encirclement” or the “divisionary attack.” The Mughal army was divided into several columns, the qulam (vanguard), the qarawal (right wing), the jawwal (left wing), and the reserve, with the additional deployment of tulughma columns whose task was to swing wide of the enemy’s flanks and fall upon his rear at a designated moment in the battle. The disciplined use of this doctrine required careful rehearsal, exact timing, and a commander capable of orchestrating a complex manoeuvre under fire, and Babur’s display of these qualities against a much larger Lodi army was military performances of the early modern world.

Equally important was Babur’s use of the araba, the wagon-laager. The carts, drawn by oxen and each carrying a small swivel gun or a matchlock team, were lashed together with ropes and chains to form a defensive perimeter within which the gunners could reload and fire in relative safety. The wagon-laager had been used in late medieval Europe by the Hussites, and Babur almost certainly derived the idea, directly or indirectly, from Ottoman examples. At Panipat, the araba permitted the outnumbered Mughal centre to hold the Lodi elephant charge and cavalry rush while the tulughma columns completed their envelopment.

Babur’s other lasting innovation was the deliberate integration of gunpowder weapons into a cavalry-based army. The Central Asian tradition had long treated the matchlock as a useful supplement to bow and sabre, but Babur, in the words of one later chronicler, “made the matchlock the king’s weapon.” He reorganised his cavalry to carry matchlocks as well as bows, recruited specialist gunners from the Ottoman and Uzbeg realms, and acquired a small but well-served park of field artillery. The result was a force that could both skirmish and shock, and that could deliver a sustained infantry-style volley from horseback before launching the decisive close-combat charge. The same combination, with refinements, would carry Akbar to the conquest of Gujarat in 1572–73 and the suppression of the eastern Afghan revolt in 1574–76.

The Mansabdari System as a Military Framework

The most important institutional innovation of the Mughal military system was the mansabdari system developed under Akbar and elaborated by his successors. The system assigned every imperial officer, from the highest commander to the lowliest cavalry trooper in the official rolls, a numerical rank (mansab) on a scale that ran from ten to, in rare cases, ten thousand or higher. The rank determined the noble’s place in the imperial hierarchy, his salary, the size of the contingent he was required to maintain, and the type and number of horses and elephants for which he would receive a separate allowance.

The military implications of the system were profound. The mansabdari establishment was, in effect, a vast register of the cavalry resources of the empire, and the emperor could at any moment audit the returns of his officers, transfer them from one province to another, or reduce their ranks for failure to produce the required number of horsemen. The system was, in its ideal form, a mechanism for preventing the emergence of independent regional power bases: by posting officers far from their homelands and rotating them frequently, the court ensured that no mansabdari noble could convert his official command into a hereditary territorial principality.

For the army itself, the mansabdari system was both a strength and a weakness. Its strength lay in the theoretical mobilisation it permitted: Akbar’s court claimed to be able to place several hundred thousand cavalry in the field through the mansabdari register, and the actual peacetime establishment of the empire, even allowing for inflation of the rolls, dwarfed the standing armies of contemporary Safavid Iran, Ottoman Turkey, or Ming China. Its weakness lay in the chronic gap between the official returns and the real fighting strength of the contingents. Mansabdari officers had a powerful incentive to overstate the number of their sawars in order to claim larger jagirs, and chroniclers from the time of Akbar onward complained that the cavalry actually present on campaign often fell far short of the paper establishment. The later seventeenth-century crisis of the system, in which the jagirs on offer were insufficient to support the mansabdari ranks already in existence, is examined on the mansabdari system page.

Cavalry, the Backbone of the Mughal Army

Mughal warfare was, throughout the dynasty’s history, primarily cavalry warfare, and the Mughal cavalry is treated in detail on its own page. The standard trooper was a lightly armoured horseman armed with a bow, a sabre, and increasingly, from Akbar’s reign onward, a matchlock. He was supported by a varying number of mounted retainers, the sawar and bashaqi ranks, who formed the household following of a mansabdari noble and who were themselves equipped at the noble’s expense. The cost of a single mounted trooper, including his horse, his arms, his maintenance, and the cost of his retinue, was substantial, and the system tended to favour nobles of considerable private means.

The cavalry was divided, by the time of Akbar, into several distinct categories. The dakhili cavalry were those maintained from the revenues of jagirs assigned within the officer’s own province; the ahadi were a class of household cavalry directly maintained by the emperor; and the walashah or qasabah contingents were hereditary tribal levies, particularly Afghan and Rajput, that were incorporated into the imperial system on a largely traditional basis. To these official categories must be added the great feudal contingents of the Rajput and Pathan chiefs, whose support was secured by treaties, marriage alliances, and the grant of mansabs and jagirs, and whose contingents, though not always under direct imperial discipline, formed an essential component of every major Mughal army.

The Rajput cavalry deserves special mention. From the submission of the Mewar chief Rana Pratap in the 1580s onward, and especially from the reign of Jahangir, the Rajput princes of Mewar, Marwar, Amber, and Bikaner provided substantial contingents of heavy cavalry whose distinctive characteristic was the lance charge, in contrast to the lighter, more mobile tactics of the Turko-Mongol horsemen. The Rajput cavalry was particularly valuable in close combat and in operations against other Indian powers, and the political marriage alliances that bound the Rajput houses to the imperial house are mirrored in the military integration of their contingents into the imperial army. The Afghan contingents, drawn primarily from the Yusufzai, Ghilzai, and other eastern Afghan tribes, were similarly retained in the imperial service and provided much of the light cavalry used in the northwestern frontier campaigns. The treatment of the Mughal cavalry cluster examines the recruitment, equipment, tactics, and deployment of these forces in greater depth.

Artillery, Matchlocks, and Firearms

The history of Mughal artillery and firearms begins with Babur and reaches its technical apogee in the seventeenth century, before stagnating and ultimately declining in the eighteenth. Babur’s artillery park at Panipat and Khanwa was small but well served, and included both light field pieces and heavy cannon. The matchlock-armed cavalry, an innovation Babur had developed in his Central Asian campaigns, was used to devastating effect against the Lodi and Rajput forces, whose traditional armaments had not yet integrated firearms on a comparable scale.

Under Akbar, the imperial artillery was rapidly expanded. The emperor established a formal topkhana, or artillery establishment, with its own bureaucratic hierarchy, foundries, and ammunition works. The principal imperial foundries were located at Agra, Delhi, Lahore, and Jaunpur, and the larger pieces produced in these foundries included the heavy mahi cannon of the court, the zarb-zan siege guns, and a wide range of lighter field pieces. Akbar’s military architects were also adept at exploiting the gunpowder technology for siege warfare: the famous siege of Chitor in 1568 and the siege of Asirgarh in 1601 were both conducted with substantial artillery trains.

The seventeenth century saw the height of Mughal artillery production. Shah Jahan’s reign in particular was marked by the casting of enormous ceremonial and siege cannon, including the famous Zarb-i-Sultan of the Agra arsenal. The matchlock also reached its mature form in this period: the long-barrelled, heavy-calibre toradar was a formidable weapon in the hands of a trained infantryman, and the bow, while never entirely abandoned, was increasingly relegated to the hunt and the parade ground. The integration of matchlock-armed infantry with cavalry and artillery produced the combined-arms tactics that would be tested in the Deccan campaigns of Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb.

The limits of Mughal artillery became increasingly apparent in the eighteenth century. The Mughal foundries continued to produce heavy cannon, but the technical sophistication of the pieces did not keep pace with developments in Ottoman, European, and even Maratha artillery. The Marathas, who had been at the receiving end of Mughal siege warfare in the 1670s and 1680s, developed their own gunpowder arm and were able to deploy light, mobile artillery pieces that proved devastating in the guerrilla warfare of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The cluster page on Mughal artillery examines the development of firearms, the organisation of the topkhana, and the role of gunpowder weapons in siege and battle.

War Elephants in Mughal Warfare

The war elephant had been a standard feature of Indian armies since at least the time of the Mauryas, and the Mughals inherited a long tradition of elephant warfare from the Sultanates of Delhi, the Bahmani successor states, and the Vijayanagara empire. The Mughal elephant corps is treated in detail on its own page. The elephant was used in battle primarily as a shock weapon, in the charge or counter-charge, and as a mobile fighting platform from which a mahout and a small complement of musketeers could deliver fire. The animal’s thick hide offered considerable protection against arrow and sword, and a charging line of war elephants could disrupt even the most disciplined cavalry or infantry formation.

The Mughal court maintained a substantial elephant establishment, headed by the mir-i-fil or master of the elephant corps. The imperial elephant stables at Agra housed several hundred animals at any one time, and the animals were carefully bred, trained, and maintained by hereditary mahout and handler families. The animals used in war were typically the smaller, more agile Indian elephant rather than the larger, more placid Ceylonese variety, and the breeding stock was drawn from the forested regions of Assam, Bengal, the Deccan, and the central Indian hill tracts.

Elephants played a notable role in several of the great battles of the dynasty. At the First Battle of Panipat, the Lodi army deployed a substantial elephant corps, and the Mughals’ success against it depended in part on the use of araba carts and concentrated matchlock fire to panic the animals and turn them back on their own lines. At the Battle of Khanwa in 1527, the Rajput confederacy under Rana Sanga similarly relied on its elephants, and at the Battle of Haldighati in 1576, Rana Pratap’s small Rajput army included a famous elephant contingent. The Mughal armies of Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan all maintained substantial elephant establishments, and the animals were used both in battle and in the heavy labour of siege operations and the transport of artillery.

The tactical significance of the elephant declined over the course of the seventeenth century, as firearms became more accurate and the dangers to elephants from sustained matchlock and artillery fire became apparent. Aurangzeb’s Deccan campaigns of the late seventeenth century saw the last major employment of war elephants in Mughal warfare, and the Mughal war elephants page examines the organisation, breeding, training, and tactical deployment of the elephant corps in greater detail.

The Mughal Navy and Riverine Warfare

The Mughal Empire was, in its geographical extent, a predominantly land-based power, and its naval arm has received much less attention from historians than its cavalry, artillery, and elephant corps. Yet the empire was, for most of its history, dependent on maritime and riverine transport for the movement of bulk cargo, the projection of force in Bengal, the suppression of piracy in the western Indian ports, and the conduct of operations against the Portuguese, the English, the Dutch, and other European competitors in the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. The Mughal navy is treated in detail on its own page.

The Mughal naval establishment, such as it was, took several institutional forms. The mir bahr, or admiral, was an office held by nobles appointed directly by the emperor, and the holder of the office was responsible for the imperial war fleet and for the coordination of provincial naval forces. The actual vessels of the imperial fleet were relatively small by European standards, typically galleys or grabs of one to two hundred tons, and the personnel were drawn from the seafaring communities of Gujarat, the Konkan, Malabar, and Bengal. The fleet’s principal operational areas were the western Indian ports of Cambay, Surat, and Diu, where the Mughals sought to control the maritime trade and to defend against European encroachment, and the eastern ports of Bengal, where the fleet was used to suppress Arakanese and Portuguese pirates and to support the military operations that brought Bengal securely under Mughal control in the 1570s and 1580s.

Riverine warfare was, in many respects, more important than blue-water operations in the Mughal context. The great rivers of the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Indus, and the Narmada served as the principal arteries of bulk transport, and the imperial military expeditions in the Deccan and in the eastern provinces relied heavily on flotillas of boats to move men, supplies, and artillery. The river fleets were typically composed of locally recruited boatmen and were commanded by officers drawn from the mansabdari ranks. The seventeenth century saw a significant expansion of the eastern flotilla in connection with the operations against the Ahom kingdom of Assam.

The later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a relative decline in the Mughal naval arm, as the European trading companies, particularly the English East India Company and the Dutch VOC, expanded their own naval power and the Mughal court became increasingly preoccupied with the continental crises of the Deccan and the northwest. The Maratha naval forces, which had been built up under the leadership of the Angrias and other admirals in the late seventeenth century, came to dominate the western Indian coast, and the Mughal provincial governors in Bengal and Gujarat found themselves unable to prevent European seizures of imperial territory in the 1740s and 1750s. The cluster page on the Mughal navy traces these developments in greater detail.

Infantry, Peasant Levies, and Auxiliary Forces

Infantry was, in the Mughal army, the poor relation of the cavalry. Official returns of the mansabdari establishment counted horsemen, horses, and elephants; infantrymen were, with the exception of the matchlock-armed qarabardars in the artillery park, generally not separately enumerated. Yet infantry was present in substantial numbers, and its role in battle and siege grew steadily over the course of the dynasty’s history. The standard categories of Mughal infantry included the matchlock-armed banduqchis recruited into the artillery park; the rahdars or road guards recruited for the security of the imperial highways; the garrison troops of provincial forts; the household retainers and personal guards of the mansabdari nobles; and the peasant levies of the regions through which the army passed.

The peasant levy, or bildar tradition, is of particular interest. The Mughal army was typically preceded by a substantial force of camp followers and labourers who constructed roads, bridges, field works, and siege works. These men were drawn from the peasantry of the regions traversed by the army and were paid, when they were paid at all, in cash or in grain. The treatment of the peasantry by passing armies was a perennial source of complaint in the Ain-i-Akbari, and the imperial government issued repeated orders designed to limit the abuses of the bildars. Yet the system was indispensable to the operational effectiveness of the army.

Auxiliary forces, including the contingents of tributary Rajput and Afghan chiefs, the tribal levies of the northwestern frontier, and the Jat and Maratha militias that served the empire on a contractual basis, were a third important category. The integration of these forces into the imperial system was uneven, but their cumulative contribution to the imperial military effort was substantial. The cavalry and battles pages examine the deployment of these forces in particular campaigns.

The Logistics of the Mughal Army: Supply, Transport, and Quartering

The operational reach of the Mughal army depended on a logistical apparatus whose sophistication has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves. The imperial establishment maintained a network of supply depots, granaries, and staging posts along the principal routes of military movement, and the mansabdari system was, in part, a logistical system: by ensuring that officers were responsible for the maintenance of their own contingents, the imperial government reduced the burden on the central treasury and forced each noble to manage the supply of his own men.

The principal logistical problem of the army was the supply of forage for the horses and elephants. The standard cavalry mount required approximately ten to fifteen kilograms of grain and a similar quantity of fodder per day, and a single mansabdari contingent of five hundred horsemen required an extraordinary quantity of feed. The solution was a combination of the bhangar or commissariat system, under which local revenue officials were required to provide specified quantities of grain and fodder to passing troops; the nankar allowance, a small percentage of the land revenue set aside for the personal expenses of the local governor or commandant; and the private arrangements made by individual officers with local merchants and farmers. The system worked reasonably well in the heartland of the empire, where the density of cultivation permitted large bodies of troops to be sustained, but it broke down in the more remote regions of the Deccan, the northwest frontier, and the eastern hill tracts, where the local agricultural base was inadequate to support the imperial forces.

Transport was a second major logistical consideration. The Mughal army relied on a combination of bullock carts, pack oxen, camels, elephants, and river boats, and the relative proportions of each mode of transport varied with the terrain. The bullock cart was the workhorse of the army on the plains of Hindustan; the camel dominated the western and northwestern regions; the elephant was reserved for siege operations, the transport of heavy artillery, and the most difficult terrain; and the river boat was indispensable in the Deccan and in Bengal. The imperial government maintained a separate department of transport, headed by the mir-i-manzil or master of quarters.

Quartering was a third major logistical problem. The Mughal army was typically accompanied on campaign by an enormous encampment of tents, kitchen establishments, and supply magazines, and the encampment of a single major army could extend over many kilometres. The rules of quartering, particularly the prohibition of unauthorised billeting on the local population, were a constant subject of imperial decree, and the enforcement of these rules depended on the vigilance of the qiladar of the local fort and the faujdar of the local district. The logistical strain of quartering and supplying the imperial army was sources of peasant unrest in the late empire.

Military Recruitment, Training, and Discipline

The recruitment of the Mughal army was largely informal. The mansabdari system relied on the household retainers of individual nobles, and the men were typically drawn from the kinship networks, religious communities, and tribal groupings of the noble in question. The result was a high degree of personal loyalty and a corresponding difficulty in transferring men from one noble to another, and the imperial government found it difficult to enforce a uniform standard of recruitment, training, or equipment across the army as a whole.

The training of the cavalry trooper was, in the classical Mughal tradition, the responsibility of the household noble. The young cavalryman was expected to learn to ride, to manage his horse, to shoot with bow and matchlock, and to handle the sabre and the lance, and the standard training cycle included a substantial component of physical exercise, horsemanship, and weapon drill. The matchlock-armed infantryman in the artillery park was trained separately, and the gunner in the imperial foundries underwent a long apprenticeship in the casting, finishing, and handling of cannon. The training of the war elephant and its mahout was a separate tradition, transmitted within hereditary mahout families and centred on the imperial elephant stables at Agra.

Discipline within the Mughal army was maintained by a combination of personal loyalty to the commander, the promise of plunder and reward, and the formal codes of military justice administered by the mir bakhshi or paymaster-general. The bakshi and his subordinates were responsible for the muster of troops, the verification of the rolls, the deduction of pay for absent or under-equipped men, and the punishment of disciplinary offences. The codes of military justice were severe: desertion, cowardice, and theft from comrades were punishable by death, and the codes also prescribed specific punishments for the unauthorised killing of civilians, the looting of protected property, and other offences against the civilian population.

Fortifications and Siege Warfare

The Mughal Empire inherited a rich tradition of fortification from the Sultanates of Delhi, the Bahmani successor states, the Rajput kingdoms, and the Vijayanagara empire. The principal Mughal fort was, in essence, a fortified palace complex, a regional administrative centre, and a military installation all at once, and the great forts of the empire, including Agra Fort, the Red Fort of Delhi, the Lahore Fort, the fort of Fatehpur Sikri, the forts of Gwalior, Ajmer, and Ranthambore, and the great Deccan forts of Daulatabad, Bidar, and Gingee, were constructed or rebuilt on a monumental scale. The architectural and administrative aspects of these forts are treated in the architecture section; their military functions are addressed here.

The classic Mughal fort was built on a high site, often on a rocky ridge or a hilltop, and consisted of a series of concentric walls, each higher than the last, with bastions, towers, and gateways designed to allow the defenders to deliver flanking fire along the face of the wall. The principal building material was red sandstone, often combined with rubble masonry and lime mortar, and the walls were typically of great thickness, in places as much as ten or twelve metres at the base. The gateways were the most heavily defended points, with multiple doors, narrow passages, and guard chambers, and the principal gateways were often further protected by outworks, barbicans, and ditches.

Siege warfare was the most demanding form of military operation in the early modern Indian context, and the Mughals developed a sophisticated siegecraft that combined artillery bombardment, mining, blockade, and assault. The siege of Chitor in 1568, conducted personally by Akbar, is the classic example: the emperor deployed a substantial artillery train, conducted a sustained bombardment of the walls, and eventually stormed the breach after a prolonged blockade. The siege of Ranthambore in 1569 was conducted on similar lines, and the sieges of the Deccan campaigns of the late seventeenth century, particularly the sieges of Golconda, Bijapur, and the Maratha hill forts, pushed the technique to its limits. The Mughal battles page examines the great sieges of the dynasty in greater detail.

Forts as Military and Administrative Centers

The fort was not merely a military installation; it was also the principal seat of provincial administration and the symbolic centre of imperial authority in each region. The qiladar, or fort commandant, was typically a high-ranking mansabdari noble, and the garrison of a major fort could include several hundred cavalry, a substantial infantry contingent, and a small artillery park. The fort also housed the provincial treasury, the official records, the workshops of the provincial mint, and the residence of the provincial governor.

The Maratha hill forts of the western ghats, though built by a hostile power, exercised a profound influence on Mughal military thinking in the late seventeenth century. The capture of the Maratha forts of Raigad, Sinhagad, and Torna in the 1670s and 1680s was an enormously costly undertaking, and the resilience of the Maratha fortifications helped to break the momentum of Aurangzeb’s Deccan campaigns and contributed to the long-term attrition of the imperial army. The Maratha tradition of guerrilla warfare, examined on the Mughal battles page, was closely tied to the defensive potential of these hill forts.

Major Campaigns and Conquests

The major military campaigns of the dynasty, treated in detail on the Mughal battles page, define the chronological and territorial development of the empire itself. The founding campaigns of Babur, the First Battle of Panipat in 1526, the Battle of Khanwa in 1527, and the Battle of Chanderi in 1528, established the dynasty in northern India and broke the power of the Lodi Sultanate and the Rajput confederacy. Humayun’s reign, dominated by the struggle with Sher Shah Suri, was largely a period of military setback, although the Second Battle of Panipat in 1556 re-established Mughal control of the Ganges plain and prepared the ground for Akbar’s consolidation.

Akbar’s military career was the most extensive of the dynasty. The campaigns of the 1560s and 1570s extended Mughal control over Rajasthan, Gujarat, Bihar, Bengal, and the northwest frontier, and the campaigns of the 1580s and 1590s added Kashmir, Sind, Orissa, and the frontier regions of Baluchistan and Afghanistan. The famous Battle of Haldighati in 1576, in which Rana Pratap of Mewar was defeated but not destroyed, marked the limits of Akbar’s effective control over Rajputana and inaugurated a long guerrilla war that was only resolved in the early seventeenth century.

Jahangir and Shah Jahan continued the expansion of the empire into the Deccan, the consolidation of Mughal control over Bengal, and the projection of imperial influence into the frontier regions. Shah Jahan’s reign saw the great Deccan campaigns of the 1630s, the unsuccessful sieges of Qandahar in 1649 and 1652, and the long struggle with the Portuguese at Hooghly in 1632. Aurangzeb’s military career of nearly fifty years reached the geographical apogee of the empire with the conquest of Bijapur in 1686 and Golconda in 1687, and ended in the long, grinding, ultimately unsuccessful struggle with the Marathas, the Sikhs, and the Jat peasantry that drained the imperial treasury and accelerated the political and military collapse of the dynasty.

Military Technology and Weaponry

The Mughal army employed a wide range of weapons, of which the principal categories were the sword, the lance, the bow, the matchlock, and the cannon, together with a range of secondary weapons including the axe, the mace, the dagger, and various forms of pole arm. The personal weapons of the emperor and the highest nobles were often of extraordinary craftsmanship: the jade-hilted daggers, the watered-steel talwars, and the gold-mounted matchlocks of the imperial court were as much works of art as weapons, and the surviving examples in the museums of South Asia, Europe, and North America testify to the technical sophistication of the imperial armourers.

The military technology of the Mughals was, by the standards of the early modern world, advanced but not static. The dynasty maintained an active relationship with the weapons industries of Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Central Asia, and, increasingly, Europe. The introduction of the matchlock into the Mughal army is conventionally attributed to Babur’s contact with Ottoman practice, and the development of the heavy field artillery of the seventeenth century owes much to the influence of European and Ottoman models. The exchange was not one-directional: the Indian steel of the period, particularly the watered steel of the Damascus tradition, was exported to Persia and the Middle East, and Indian swords, daggers, and matchlocks were prized possessions in the arsenals of the Mughal princes and their contemporaries.

The limits of Mughal military technology became increasingly apparent in the eighteenth century. The European trading companies and the successor states developed their own arms industries, often in deliberate imitation of European models, and the technological gap between the Mughal army and the better-organised forces of the British, the French, the Marathas, and the Sikhs widened steadily through the period. The Maratha light cavalry, equipped with the sword and the matchlock and operating in dispersed formations, proved devastatingly effective against the more cumbersome Mughal army of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the British artillery and infantry of the eighteenth century benefited from the technical improvements that the Mughal arsenals had not been able to match. The Mughal artillery page examines the technical development of firearms and cannon in greater detail.

War Elephants, Horses, and Animal Logistics

The animal component of the Mughal army extended well beyond the war elephant. The imperial establishment maintained large stables of horses, camels, bullocks, and mules, and the acquisition, training, and maintenance of these animals was a major component of imperial military expenditure. The horse was the most prestigious and most expensive of the imperial animals, and the quality of a noble’s cavalry was judged in large part by the quality of his horses.

The principal source of high-quality cavalry horses was Central Asia, particularly the breeding grounds of the Uzbek, Turcoman, and Arabian strains. The Mughals maintained a network of horse traders in Kabul, Qandahar, Bukhara, and other Central Asian centres, and the annual horse caravans from these regions were a vital part of the imperial military supply system. The Arabian horse, prized for its endurance and its quality, was imported in substantial numbers through the port of Surat, and the Persian and Turcoman strains were preferred for the heavy cavalry of the imperial guard.

The animal component of the army was a major consumer of imperial revenue, and the system of animal allowances was among the most detailed provisions of the Ain-i-Akbari. The sawari allowance for horses, the sufi allowance for elephants, the ushtur allowance for camels, and the gai allowance for bullocks were all carefully calibrated to the rank of the recipient and the type of service expected.

The Cost of Empire: Military Finance

The Mughal army was the single largest consumer of imperial revenue, and the financial crises of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were in large measure a consequence of the unsustainable cost of the military establishment. The mansabdari system, which had originally been designed to be self-financing through the jagir assignment, became increasingly expensive as the ranks multiplied and the available jagirs failed to keep pace. The crisis came to a head in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the jagir assignments had to be reduced, the bejagir or landless mansabdari rose in number, and the disaffected nobles began to transfer their allegiance to regional powers.

The financial strain of the long Deccan campaigns of Aurangzeb’s reign was the proximate cause of the crisis. The emperor’s insistence on personally directing the campaigns in the Deccan from 1682 until his death in 1707 placed an intolerable burden on the imperial treasury, and the simultaneous need to maintain the army in the northwest, in Rajasthan, in Bengal, and in the Deccan stretched the financial system to its limits. The crisis was further exacerbated by the decline of agricultural productivity in the late seventeenth century, the disruptions of the periodic famines, and the disruption of the long-distance trade routes by the Maratha and Sikh incursions.

The breakdown of the mansabdari-jagir system is the central financial story of the late Mughal period, and the Mughal decline page examines this story in greater detail. The Mughal land revenue system page also addresses the financial dimensions of the military crisis. The two stories are closely linked: the inability of the revenue system to support the mansabdari establishment was both a cause and a consequence of the army’s loss of effectiveness in the late empire.

The Army in the Late Empire: Decline and Disintegration

The eighteenth-century Mughal army was a recognisable descendant of the great force that had campaigned under Akbar and Shah Jahan, but it had been transformed in composition, effectiveness, and political significance. The mansabdari system, which had been the backbone of the imperial military, was by the early eighteenth century increasingly a hollow framework. The jagirs available to support the mansabdari ranks had shrunk, the bejagir or landless mansabdari had risen in number, and the imperial court found itself unable to enforce the discipline and rotation on which the system’s effectiveness had depended.

The result was the progressive disintegration of the imperial army into a collection of regional and factional forces. The great mansabdari nobles of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including the Nizam-ul-Mulk of the Deccan, the Nawab of Bengal, the Nawab of Awadh, and the Saadat Khan of the Carnatic, built up their own independent military establishments and increasingly conducted their own foreign and domestic policies. The Maratha Confederacy, the Sikh Misls, the Jat polity of Bharatpur, and the Rajput kingdoms of Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Udaipur all maintained substantial armies that were nominally subordinate to the emperor but were in practice independent forces.

The Mughal decline page examines this long process in greater detail. The military aspects are addressed in part on the Mughal battles page, which includes treatments of the disastrous invasion of Nadir Shah in 1739, the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, and the long series of engagements with the Marathas, the Sikhs, the British, and the other regional powers that characterised the late empire. The eventual destruction of the imperial army in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 marked the formal end of the Mughal military tradition, although echoes of the tradition persisted in the regional armies of the post-Mughal states into the twentieth century.

The Legacy of Mughal Military Organization

The Mughal military machine left a substantial legacy in the armies, fortifications, and tactical doctrines of the post-Mughal states of South Asia. The Maratha army of the eighteenth century, despite its very different social composition and tactical doctrine, incorporated many of the logistical and administrative lessons of the Mughal campaigns against it. The Sikh Misls, the Jat polity of Bharatpur, the Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan, and the successor states of Hyderabad, Awadh, Bengal, and the Carnatic all maintained armies that combined Mughal organisational forms with local traditions.

The British Indian army of the colonial period also bore the imprint of the Mughal military tradition, although it has often been obscured by the more visible European influence. The cantonment system, the use of regimental nomenclature, the discipline and the regimental structure, the integration of cavalry, artillery, and infantry, and many of the logistical procedures of the colonial army can be traced, directly or indirectly, to the Mughal institutional inheritance. The Indian army of independent India and the armies of Pakistan and Bangladesh have inherited many of the same traditions, and the toponymy, the regimental histories, and the ceremonial practices of these armies continue to carry the imprint of the Mughal military past.

The historiographical legacy of the Mughal military tradition is also substantial. The reconstruction of the mansabdari system, the documentation of the great campaigns, the analysis of the logistical apparatus, and the study of the late imperial crisis have all been major preoccupations of South Asian historians from the time of Jadunath Sarkar and Satish Chandra to the present. The cluster pages linked throughout this overview offer deeper treatment of the cavalry, the artillery, the war elephants, the navy, and the great battles of the dynasty, and these pages in turn connect to the broader themes of the history, administration, culture, and decline of the empire.