Mahmud of Ghazni Invades India
In 1001, Mahmud of Ghazni, the ruler of a growing Turkic-led empire based in what is now eastern Afghanistan, began a series of military campaigns into the Indian subcontinent. Over roughly the next quarter century, traditionally counted as seventeen expeditions, he defeated several regional rulers and carried off enormous quantities of treasure. The raids did not create a lasting empire in India, but they reshaped the politics of the northwest and left a contested memory that is still debated today.
Mahmud inherited power in 997 from his father Sabuktigin, a former slave-soldier who had built a state at Ghazni under the nominal authority of the Samanid dynasty of Central Asia. As Samanid power collapsed, Mahmud gained independence and extended his rule across Khurasan and Afghanistan. His army, drawn from Turkic cavalry and supplemented by war elephants and Indian contingents, was costly to maintain. The wealthy temples and towns of northern India offered a tempting source of funds, and campaigning there also gave him prestige as a champion of Sunni Islam, a status that mattered to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, whose recognition he sought.
His first major clash came in 1001 near Peshawar, where he defeated Jayapala, ruler of the Hindu Shahi kingdom that controlled the passes into the subcontinent. Later expeditions struck Multan, Thanesar, Mathura, Kannauj and Kangra, among other places. The Shahis were gradually destroyed, and the Punjab came under Ghaznavid control. The most famous raid took place around 1025-1026, when Mahmud marched across the Thar Desert to attack the temple of Somnath on the Gujarat coast, a rich and widely venerated Shaiva shrine. Sources agree that the temple was plundered and its idol destroyed, though accounts of the booty and the death toll vary and are often exaggerated.
The raids weakened the Hindu kingdoms of the northwest and brought Lahore and the Punjab into a Muslim-ruled state that outlasted Mahmud, surviving until the later twelfth century. Wealth from India funded Ghazni's mosques, libraries and court, which attracted scholars such as the polymath al-Biruni, who accompanied the campaigns and wrote a remarkable study of Indian science, religion and customs. The poet Firdausi also composed the Persian epic Shahnameh in this period, though his relationship with Mahmud was famously strained.
Historians continue to debate Mahmud's motives and legacy. Persian chroniclers praised him as a holy warrior, while many later Indian and British writers portrayed him chiefly as a plunderer and iconoclast. Modern scholars often stress that plunder, politics and prestige were intertwined, and that Mahmud also attacked Muslim rivals and employed Hindu officers. The Ghaznavid incursions did pave the way for the later Ghurid conquests and the Delhi Sultanate.