Babur lost Samarkand three times, then founded the Mughal Empire instead
Babur became a king at eleven because his father's dovecote collapsed into a ravine with him in it. The boy spent the next decade winning and losing cities, above all Samarkand, which he held for only 100 days. Only after repeated failure did he look south and found an empire in India.
Born Zahir ud-Din Muhammad in Andijan, in the Fergana Valley of today's Uzbekistan, on 14 February 1483, he descended from Timur on his father's side and Genghis Khan on his mother's. His army found the Arabic name awkward, so the nickname Babur, from a Persian word for tiger or panther, stuck. Hostile uncles and nobles backing his younger brother tried to unseat him, and his maternal grandmother Aisan Daulat Begum did much to keep him on the throne.
At fifteen he took Samarkand after a seven-month siege, then fell gravely ill while a revolt about 350 kilometres away cost him Fergana. Marching home, he gave up Samarkand and ended with neither. A second capture in 1500 to 1501 collapsed when the Uzbek leader Muhammad Shaybani besieged him, and Babur had to hand over his sister Khanzada as a bride to get out alive. For a time he wandered the Central Asian mountains among hill tribes, then lived poor and unwelcome with an uncle in Tashkent.
His luck turned in October 1504, when he crossed the snowbound Hindu Kush and seized Kabul. A visit to Herat, then the cultural capital of the eastern Muslim world, introduced him to the poetry of Mir Ali Shir Nava'i, who championed Chagatai as a literary language; Babur later wrote his memoirs, the Baburnama, in it. With Safavid help he regained Samarkand in 1511, only to lose it once more.
Turning to India, he defeated Delhi's sultan, Ibrahim Lodi, at Panipat in 1526, then crushed Rana Sanga's Rajput and Afghan coalition at Khanwa with clever troop placement and gunpowder. A keen gardener, he brought the formal charbagh garden to the northern Indian plains. He died in Agra in 1530; Humayun succeeded him, and his body was later carried to Kabul for reburial as he had wished.
Source: Babur
