Over the thirteenth century, Mongol armies repeatedly assaulted the Indian subcontinent yet
struggled to impose their rule on the lands east of the Indus River. Previously in this series,
we have covered how the Western and Eastern Europeans, the Mamluks,
and Chinese dynasties defended against the Mongols. In this episode on how to
defend against the Mongols, we look at how the rulers of northern India,
namely the Sultanate of Delhi, managed to defend against the horsemen of the Great Khan.
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From the thirteenth century until the early sixteenth, the dominant power in North India
was the Delhi Sultanate, an Islamic empire in the midst of smaller Islamic and Hindu states.
Throughout the Sultanate’s history, the majority of its agricultural and economic base was various
Hindu peoples and minor kingdoms recognizing the Sultan as overlord, its administrative
personnel largely Persian-speaking Muslims and its military and rulers made up of a variety
of Turkic and Afghan peoples, a bewildering array of ever-changing linguistic, ethnic and religious
factions and alliances. Born from the ruins of the Ghurid Sultanate, the Delhi Sultanate
was originally but one successor in the Ghurid’s North Indian territory, each ruled by a Ghulam, or
mamluk, a Turkic slave soldier. The late-Ghurids purchased many Turkic-Qipchaq nomadic children
from the Eurasian steppes, converted them to Islam, and trained them in the arts of war.
Like their distant cousins who usurped power in Egypt in the 1250s, these mamluks were the elite
of the Ghurid army and happy to seize power after the assassination of the last Ghurid Sultan. For
the thirteenth century, almost every single Delhi Sultan came from a Qipchaq-Mamluk background.
The Delhi Sultanate was a middling power until it received aid from an unexpected direction:
the Mongols. When Chinggis Khan’s armies destroyed the Khwarezmian Empire,
the Khwarezmian Prince Jalal al-Din Mingburnu fled over the Indus River.
This Mongol-Khwarezmian conflict in India weakened Delhi’s rivals in the northwest, and Delhi Sultan
Iltutmish, over the late 1220s and 1230s, absorbed the post-Ghurid powers up to the Indus River.
By Sultan Iltutmish’s death in 1236, Delhi was the great power of northern India and
the Gangetic plain, from the Indus to Bengal, with recognition from the Caliph as the only
Muslim sovereign in India, and indeed, one of the mightiest Muslim rulers in the world.
But how did Delhi avoid an attack by Chinggis Khan himself? Despite the claims of some popular online
videos, they had nothing to do with Buddhism. Several sources, such as Juvaini, Juzjani, and the
memorial to Chinggis Khan’s adviser Yelü Chucai, record that Chinggis wanted a route through India
he could use to strike his enemies in China from the south. However, these sources record Chinggis’
shamans finding only bad omens for a march through India; Yelü Chucai’s memorial biography memorably
has the adviser interpret the sighting of a rhinoceros—an animal never-before-seen by
the Mongols— as a fortuitous warning from Heaven against further forays into India.
Some of these sources include the Delhi chronicler Juzjani, a record that Chinggis
also sent envoys to Sultan Iltutmish. There is no information on what they discussed, but it
seems implied by later sources that Iltutmish initiated friendly contacts with the Khan.
Several important factors were in place by the end of Iltutmish’s life.
Firstly was Delhi Sultan’s willingness to engage in talks and diplomacy with the Mongols,
and seemingly even an appreciation of Mongol military ability and destiny of world conquest—
much to the chagrin of chroniclers like Juzjani, a refugee who had fled the Mongols to Delhi.
Juzjani was but one of the many Persian scholars, tradespeople, or Turkic tribes who fled to
Delhi lands to escape the Mongols, growing the Sultanate’s Islamic element and its military base.
The 1230s also marked the Punjabi lands becoming the frontier of the
Delhi and Mongol Empires as the Mongols steadily tightened their grip over today’s Afghanistan.
Relations remained cordial until Iltutmish’s death, as his sons and daughters fought for
the throne. By the close of the 1230s, the Mongols removed the final buffer state between the Mongols
and Delhi; raiding parties began to probe the frontier in the Punjab and into Kashmir.
By 1241 the Mongols took Lahore, though they soon abandoned it. In 1245 Multan and
Uch were captured. Sindh and the Punjab were largely under Mongol control by the 1250s.
For the next 60 years, Mongol raids on Delhi territory became nearly annual affairs, wreaking
great destruction and carrying off prisoners every year. India’s general heat and humidity meant
most of these campaigns were limited to cooler winter months and were short, bloody affairs.
The Sultans were firstly fortunate not to feel the weight of a full Mongol invasion. Most
attacks were carried out by garrison forces called tamma, stationed on the Mongol Empire’s border.
They aimed to destabilize and make small gains but not wash away a state in a sea of blood. This was
fortuitous, for Delhi was regularly crippled by fierce succession struggles that hamstrung any
response. After Iltutmish’s death, only one other Sultan died of natural causes in the thirteenth
century, and it took until 1324 for a sultan to be smoothly succeeded by their designated heir.
In the 1250s, Grand Khan Möngke sent a general, Sali Noyan, to the Delhi frontier, accompanied by
an exiled son of Iltutmish, tasked with enthroning him as the new, compliant Sultan of Delhi.
Though they never succeeded, it was a sign of the existential threat the Mongols could pose.
From 1249 until 1287, the Sultanate was led by the powerful, keen-eyed Ghiyath al-Din Balban.
Initially a Qipchaq Mamluk of Iltutmish, Balban made the last of Iltutmish’s sons his puppet from
1249 until seizing the throne himself in 1266, after the Sultan and his children all conveniently
died. Even before then, Balban had led Delhi’s policy to the Mongols. The initial policy rested
on the defenses of the border cities - Multan, Lahore, and Uch; while the Mongols were held
up in the sieges of these cities, Balban would advance with the army from Delhi.
Generally, the Mongols fled the scene before the larger Delhi forces arrived,
and Balban would arrive in time to survey the destruction they left behind. While it prevented
further penetration of Delhi lands, it was hardly the most effective strategy and was expensive too:
to pay for these mobilizations, Balban urged the conquest of
Hindu powers in the Doab to use the loot from these campaigns to cover the costs.
Important but often overlooked, is the stiffness of these local sieges. Inhabitants of Multan,
Lahore and other cities, whether Hindu or Muslim, put up spirited defenses,
often falling only after heavy losses, with Mongol commanders having to throw themselves into the
fray to rally their troops for the task— resulting in many Mongol generals killed or injured.
Though the fortifications were pounded down by Mongol catapults, they prolonged each siege and
raised the risk of being caught before the Delhi army. Traps were employed: a notable
example comes from a siege of Uch in the 1240s. The Mongols breached the walls, and at night a
Mongol officer led his men through the gap. But the defenders had dug a deep ditch behind the gap,
and filled it with mud and water; upon stepping onto it, the Mongol officer sank and disappeared.
Though the Mongols took the city in the end and massacred the inhabitants,
they did so after many casualties. Upon taking these cities, the Mongols undermined the walls; a
constant feature of Delhi's reclamations of these cities was having to rebuild the fortifications.
Sometimes the Mongols held the sites, resulting in the rare occasions where the Mongols were
the defenders against an enemy army. The Mongols would shoot so many arrows from
the walls that “no bird could have flown by,” in the words of the Delhi chronicler Barani.
Sadly, we are not told how the Delhi troops actually reclaimed these forts when this happened.
While vizier Balban recognized the value of diplomacy and had more success here than on the
battlefield. Generally, this focused on treating Mongol envoys well or frightening them with
Delhi’s might. On one occasion, Balban ordered 200,000 footmen and 50,000 horsemen, with all
their armour and banners, to greet Mongol envoys as they approached Delhi. In Juzjani’s telling,
the trumpeting of the elephants spooked the Mongols’ horses and threw the envoys into the mud.
But Delhi’s return envoys to Hülegü were favorably received, and likely brought with them expensive
gifts, for Hülegü then gave the order for the frontier forces under Sali Noyan to cease their
attacks on Delhi, perhaps a reflection of his interest in new allies after Möngke Khaan’s
death in 1259. It gained a few years of peace, but with the break-up of the Mongol Empire in the
early 1260s, the raiders attacking the Indian frontier were no longer under imperial power,
but the Mongol garrisons and stragglers left in Afghanistan, known variously as the Qara’unas or
Negüderis. Sandwiched between the Ilkhanate and Chagatai Khanates, the Qara’unas resumed
raiding the lands of Hindustan. After he became Sultan in 1266,
Balban proved an energetic monarch. After many years in the viceroyalty, Balban had moved his
allies and friends into prominent positions of power, and thus held the throne securely,
helping him act more aggressively towards the Mongols. Like his contemporary in Egypt, Baybars
al-Bunduqdari, Balban understood the importance of putting his kingdom on war footing against the
Mongols. On his order, the Sultanate retook Multan and Lahore by force, and resettled people there.
Balban worked to secure the border with new forts garrisoned by various mountain tribes.
After the death, possibly on Balban’s order, of the governor of the northwestern frontier,
Balban placed his capable, oldest, favoured son Muhammad Sultan in Multan to protect the region,
who oversaw the repairing of forts and city walls, and of responding to Mongol incursions.
Further, Balban welcomed Mongols, Persian, and Central Asian refugees fleeing the Mongol civil
wars of the 1260s and gave many military positions, thereby improving the Sultans’
knowledge of the Mongolian military. Like the Mamluks of Egypt, Mongol refugees were
valuable immigrants, and their flight was welcomed, provided they converted to Islams.
These “New Muslims,” as the Delhi chroniclers somewhat derisively call them,
quickly became an influential political and military component in the Sultanate.
Entire neighborhoods in Delhi were formed by the Mongols, who fled there and soon commanded armies
and held powerful positions close to the Sultan. Balban understood the threat he faced well;
the Delhi chronicles show great anxiety in the capital over the Mongols and present it as
the most important task of the Sultan to defend against them. In the fourteenth century chronicle
of Ziya’ al-Din Barani, Balban lamented that he could not take up jihad against the Hindus,
for he feared the moment his army was occupied elsewhere, the Mongols would overrun the frontier.
Though few field battles are recorded between the Mongols and Delhi troops in Balban’s period,
he did not overlook his army. He further expanded the Sultanate’s already considerable cavalry
arm of both Turks and Hindu horsemen, while fearsome elephants were the stars of the army,
even though few records of their use in battle against the Mongols survive.
However, Balban’s efforts received a major blow when a Mongol attack in 1285 resulted in the
death of his favored son and heir. The loss broke Balban, and he died two years later. The next few
years again saw protracted succession struggles. The most famous defender of Delhi against the
Mongols was Sultan Alauddin Khalji, who overthrew his own uncle in 1296. Over his twenty-year reign,
Alauddin managed, at times narrowly, to repel some of the most serious Mongol assaults on India.
A man whose courage was equaled only by his cruelty, Alauddin’s defense system was more
dynamic than Balban’s. He took stronger control of the army and knew he needed not just a great
and well-armed host but one always at the ready, given a yearly salary by the state.
Yet this would have bankrupted the Sultanate, so to finance it, Alauddin Khalji enacted strict
price controls on food stuff and other supplies. If life for these soldiers and their families was
more affordable, the state could pay a smaller wage while still providing for their needs.
So, alongside building vast-store houses to control grain distribution in lean or good years
while violently punishing those who stockpiled their own goods, Alauddin Khalji and his advisers
developed an effective, if complicated, means to keep a great army at a relatively low cost. While
the system broke down towards the end of his life, it proved effective for a few critical years.
Alongside a growing spy network and bans on the nobility from socializing, Alauddin Khalji secured
his internal power from rivals and revolt, allowing him to focus against the Mongols.
He better equipped his horsemen and elephants; like the Mongols, he relied mostly on mobile
horse archers, lightly equipped with a powerful center of heavy cavalry. The frontier cities like
Samana and Dipalpur were given large, permanent garrisons and improved catapults and ballista.
He heavily fortified the main route via Multan, repairing old forts and building new ones, while
also improving and expanding the walls of Delhi and other cities. The iqtas, or land grants along
the Multan route he gave to able-bodied men and generals so that they could quickly raise forces
to offer local resistance when the Mongols struck. Despite these efforts, Alauddin Khalji could not
dismiss the Mongol threat. The Delhi chroniclers provide few details on the
tactics of specific battles, and often simply attribute a victory to divine intervention.
Still, the famous victory Alauddin claimed at Kili in 1299 owed more to the sacrifice of his
subordinate, Zafar Khan, than any maneuver on the Sultan’s part, and only 4 years later, the
Mongols laid siege to Delhi itself. Had the siege lasted a month longer before the Mongols withdrew,
Delhi would have surely fallen, according to the chronicler Ziya’ al-Din Barani. Many of Alauddin
Khalji’s reforms were launched in reaction to the near-disaster of the Delhi siege in 1303.
Still, Alauddin learned his lessons carefully. Keeping his troops on a constant campaign against
Hindu powers built their experience and cohesion, and Alauddin’s victories steadily became more
decisive. His treatment of Mongol prisoners became ever more horrendous: crushed beneath elephants,
their blood sprinkled into the mortar of buildings, and towers of their skulls built
outside Delhi’s gates: the chronicler Barani reported that some of these skull towers still
stood in his time, almost 50 years later. On hearing rumors of a plot by the Mongol
inhabitants of the Sultanate, Alauddin responded with massive slaughter: killing some 20-30,000
of the Islamized Mongols in his realm and looting their property. Alauddin’s efforts may have
dissuaded Mongol raiders, or at least convinced them to turn back when his armies approached. With
the death of Du’a Khan of the Chagatai Khanate in 1307 and the start of a prolonged succession
crisis there, annual raids on India ceased, which Alauddin was happy to claim credit for.
But raiding still occurred, with period attacks from the 1320s to the 50s; one of these resulted
in the near destruction of everything in Kashmir, and contributed to the rise of Muslim power there.
In the end, despite considerable loss and destruction, the Delhi Sultans managed to prevent
a Mongol conquest. At times narrow victories, but victories nonetheless; for the Sultans of Delhi,
on more than one occasion Heaven offered its divine favor to them rather than the Mongols.
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