Five dynasties made Delhi a three-century Indo-Islamic capital
Founded in 1206 on Ghurid conquests, the Delhi Sultanate ruled large parts of the Indian subcontinent for over three hundred years through Mamluk, Khalji, Tughlaq, Sayyid, and Lodi dynasties. It pulled North India into wider Islamic networks—and was among the rare powers to blunt Mongol assaults.
Muhammad Ghori’s 1192 victory near Tarain over Prithviraj Chauhan’s Rajput coalition reversed an earlier defeat and opened the door; Turkic slave-generals of the Ghurids then carved principalities, with Delhi emerging supreme. Persian chroniclers spoke of the Empire of Delhi; Ibn Battuta, visiting under Muhammad bin Tughlaq, simply said Hind and Sind.
The sultanate fostered Hindustani speech and Indo-Islamic building styles while linking the subcontinent to multicultural trade. It also briefly elevated Razia as a rare female Muslim sovereign. Nomadic Turkic military slavery—mamluk careers rising from steppe captivity—was the wider Asian pattern that made such regimes possible as caliphates fragmented after the ninth century.
When Muhammad of Ghor was assassinated in 1206, his Turkic slave Qutb ud-Din Aibak, of Cuman-Kipchak origin, became the first sultan, ruling until 1210 and earning the nickname Lakhbaksh for his generosity. He began the Qutb Minar, which his son-in-law Iltutmish finished. Iltutmish seized power in 1211, took Multan, Bengal and Ranthambore, and ruled until 1236; his death opened a stretch of weak rulers and rebellious nobles, though his daughter Razia held the throne from 1236 to 1240.
The Turko-Afghan Khaljis took over in 1290. Jalal ud-Din Firuz came to the throne at about seventy and was murdered in 1296 on the orders of his nephew, who ruled as Ala ud-Din Khalji. Ala ud-Din pushed into southern India through generals such as Malik Kafur, whose Warangal plunder included the Koh-i-Noor diamond, lifted agricultural taxes from 20 to 50 per cent and imposed price controls. Historians see him as a tyrant who wiped out whole families of suspected rivals. The last dynasty, the Lodis, fell in 1526.
Source: Delhi Sultanate
