Who won the First Battle of Panipat?
Babur won the First Battle of Panipat in April 1526, defeating and killing Ibrahim Lodi, the Sultan of Delhi. Babur's own memoirs put the battle on Friday 8 Rajab, which corresponds to 20 April; many accounts give 21 April. Though vastly outnumbered, Babur used field guns and matchlocks behind a line of carts, together with cavalry parties that wheeled round both flanks, to shatter the Lodi army in half a day. The victory founded the Mughal Empire, which would rule much of the subcontinent for three centuries.4
On the plain of Panipat in 1526, a Timurid adventurer named Babur faced the vast army of the Sultan of Delhi with a fraction of its numbers, but with guns the sultan had never faced. By the afternoon Ibrahim Lodi was dead and a new empire, the Mughal, was born.5
Part of Battles of India · Before: Second Tarain, 1192 · Next: Second Panipat, 1556
A prince without a kingdom
Babur was descended from both Timur and Genghis Khan. He inherited the small kingdom of Fergana, in what is now Uzbekistan, lost it, and spent years trying and failing to hold Samarkand, Timur's old capital, against the Uzbeks. Driven out of Central Asia, he took Kabul and made it his base. With no hope of recovering his homeland, he turned his eyes to India.6
He also left a record of his life in his own words. The Baburnama, his memoir, describes his campaigns and his doubts with striking frankness, and for Panipat it gives an almost hour-by-hour account from the winner's side.7
The Sultan of Delhi
The Delhi Sultanate was ruled by Ibrahim Lodi, an Afghan sultan who had come to the throne in 1517. He tried to build a centralized state in which he held absolute power, and in doing so he alienated his own Afghan nobles. Some historians describe him as militarily capable but lacking in tact and moderation. Powerful chiefs turned against him, among them Daulat Khan Lodi, governor of the Punjab, and Ibrahim's own uncle Alam Khan, and both looked to Babur for help.8
The fifth invasion
Babur had raided into the Punjab four times between 1519 and 1524 without gaining a secure foothold. In November 1525 he set out from Kabul again. When his army crossed the Indus that December, the officers counted it and wrote it down as 12,000 men, great and small, fighting men and followers together. Garrisons and allies in the Punjab added to it on the march, but it remained far smaller than the force it was going to meet.9
On the way Babur's son Humayun, in his first action, defeated a Lodi force near Hisar-Firuza in late February 1526, and on 2 April a detachment beat another part of Ibrahim's army across the Yamuna. Ibrahim was coming north from Agra toward Delhi with an army that Babur called "a lak," a hundred thousand men, and about 1,000 elephants. Other sources give figures as low as 40,000, perhaps counting only the fighting men.10
Seven hundred carts
Babur prepared his ground with care. He ordered every man to bring in carts, and 700 were collected. His master gunner, Ustad Ali Quli, was told to join them "in Ottoman fashion," but with ropes of raw hide instead of chains, with five or six mantlets between each pair of carts for the matchlockmen to stand behind. At intervals of an arrow's flight, gaps were left wide enough for 100 to 200 horsemen to sally out.11
On 12 April the army reached Panipat. A council of war decided to anchor the right on the town itself, with its crowded houses and suburbs, to cover the front with the carts and mantlets, and to protect the left with ditches and felled branches. Babur admits that some of his men were badly frightened. They were two or three months' march from home, he wrote, among a people whose language none of them knew.12
A week of waiting
For seven or eight days the armies faced each other. Small parties of Babur's men rode up to Ibrahim's camp, shot arrows into his massed troops and brought back heads, but the sultan would not move. Babur then sent 4,000 to 5,000 men on a night attack, which went wrong in the dark: the columns lost touch, and at dawn they found themselves exposed outside the enemy camp as Ibrahim's troops came out with elephants. Humayun rode out to cover them and they got away without loss. That night a false alarm set Babur's whole camp in an uproar.13
Babur's verdict on his opponent was scathing. Ibrahim had the treasure of two generations, he wrote, and could have hired another one or two hundred thousand men if he had paid out money as Indian rulers did in such times. Instead he hoarded it, and "he provided nothing for his military operations, he perfected nothing."14
The battle
At first light on Friday, word came that the enemy was advancing in battle array. Babur's men armed and mounted. His army stood in a right, left and center, with an advance guard, a reserve and, at the tip of each wing, a turning party, the tulughma, whose task was to wheel round to the enemy's rear as soon as he came close. Humayun commanded the right.15
Ibrahim's army came on fast and straight toward them until it saw the line of carts. Then, Babur wrote, it pulled up as if asking itself whether to stand or to advance, and could do neither. The turning parties swept round both flanks and began to rain arrows into the rear. The wings closed in from the sides. From the center Ustad Ali Quli fired his guns, and on the left of the center the gunner Mustafa did the same.16
Hemmed in on every side, the Lodi wings were pushed back on the center until the whole army was so crowded that it could neither come forward nor find a way to run. The fighting had begun when the sun was spear-high, and by noon it was over. "In one half-day," Babur wrote, "that armed mass was laid upon the earth." In the afternoon one of his officers found Ibrahim's body in a heap of the dead and brought in the sultan's head.17
Historians still argue over the guns. Britannica emphasizes the artillery and the carts; John Rickard points out that Babur's own text clearly mentions only a few pieces and gives much of the work to the archers of the turning parties. Either way, it was the combination that won: a fortified line the enemy could not break, and mobile horsemen who closed the trap behind him.18 › Second Battle of Tarain, 1192
Counting the dead
Babur reckoned that five or six thousand men fell in one place close to Ibrahim and that 15,000 to 16,000 lay dead across the field, but he added that he later heard in Agra that 40,000 or 50,000 might have died. Britannica gives the same range, from 15,000 to 50,000. Babur does not record his own losses. Elephant drivers came in to offer whole herds of elephants, and many Lodi nobles were taken.19
Why Panipat founded an empire
On the day of the battle Babur sent Humayun riding fast to Agra to secure the treasury and another force to Delhi. A few days later he visited the tombs of Delhi's saints and sultans, and on 27 April the Friday prayer was read in his name in the city. Unlike Timur before him, he did not take his plunder and go home. He stayed and founded the Mughal Empire, which became the main power in India for the next three centuries.20
His hold was fragile at first, limited to the Punjab, Delhi and Agra, and he ruled only until 1530. His son Humayun lost the throne to the Afghan Sher Shah Sur and won it back only shortly before his death, which is why a second battle had to be fought on the same plain in 1556. A third, in 1761, would decide the fate of the Marathas.21 › Second Battle of Panipat, 1556
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