Ahmad Shah Durrani went from a conqueror's bodyguard to empire builder
Legend says Nader Shah of Persia clipped the ear of a young Afghan officer and told him the mark would remind him of Nader once he became a king. When Nader was assassinated in 1747, that officer, Ahmad Khan, rode to Kandahar, was crowned, and spent 25 years building the Durrani Empire.
Ahmad was born between 1720 and 1722 into the Abdali tribe of Pashtuns; sources disagree on whether his birthplace was Herat or Multan. His father, the ruler of Herat, died when he was an infant. After Nader Shah defeated his brother around 1731, the two became prisoners of the Hotak king in Kandahar until Nader took the city and freed them. Ahmad then served Nader, accompanying his invasion of India in 1738 and 1739, joining his personal staff in 1744 and raising a contingent of three to four thousand Durrani tribesmen.
In June 1747, convinced his guards were plotting against him, Nader ordered Ahmad to arrest them, but the plotters struck first and killed the shah in his tent at Quchan. Ahmad fought his way out and headed for Kandahar, capturing on the way a convoy carrying Sindh's annual tribute, valued anywhere from 3 to 260 million rupees. A later legend has a tribal assembly choosing him unanimously; in reality a nine-man military council raised him to power over the objections of the Barakzai chief. He took the epithet Pearl of Pearls, and his tribe became the Durrani.
From 1748 he invaded Mughal India again and again over 24 years, annexing Punjab and Kashmir, sacking Delhi in 1757, and destroying the Maratha armies at Panipat in the biggest clash of that century. He also campaigned in Khorasan and Afghan Turkestan, fighting more than fifteen major campaigns and rarely losing; historians rank him among the great commanders of his age. His campaigns also brought massacres, pillage and mass enslavement, leaving northern India in chaos.
Governing was harder than conquering. With no administrative experience, he copied Mughal and Safavid absolutism, made his tribal council hereditary, relied on literate Qizilbash officials, exempted his own tribe from tax and auctioned revenue collection, driving many landholders into debt. Still, Afghans call him Ahmad Shah Baba, Ahmad Shah the Father, and regard him as the founder of modern Afghanistan. He died in October 1772.
Source: Ahmad Shah Durrani
