Two brothers split an Afghan empire, one facing west and one east
For thirty years the Ghurid realm had two rulers at once. The elder brother, Ghiyath al-Din, governed the west from Firozkoh and wrestled with Central Asian rivals, while the younger, Muhammad of Ghor, pushed east from Ghazni into the Indian plains. The younger brother's conquests outlasted the dynasty itself, growing into the Delhi Sultanate.
Muhammad was born around 1144 in Ghur, in west-central Afghanistan, and lost his father while still a child. His youth was hard: an uncle who suspected the brothers' ambitions locked them in the castle of Gharjistan, and they were freed only after his death in 1161. When Ghiyath al-Din took the throne in 1163 he gave Muhammad a minor post, and the unhappy younger brother left for a season at the court of Sistan before being coaxed back to govern the southern provinces. After beating the Oghuz Turks, the pair took Ghazni in 1169, and Muhammad was crowned there in 1173.
His eastward campaigns began in 1175, when he crossed the Indus through the Gomal Pass and seized Multan from the Qarmatians, a blow from which their power there never recovered. An attempt to reach Gujarat across the Thar Desert ended in defeat near Mount Abu, where a Rajput coalition under the Chaulukya king Mularaja wounded him. He changed routes, took Peshawar in 1179, drove out the Ghaznavids by 1186 and secured the Khyber Pass.
The turning point came at Tarain. In 1191 a Rajput confederacy under Prithviraj Chauhan defeated and wounded him, but a year later he returned with a huge force of mounted archers and won decisively on the same field. Afterwards he left Indian operations largely to trusted slave commanders, who carried Ghurid influence to Bihar and Bengal. The chronicler Juzjani reported a treasury in Ghazni holding some 60,000 kg of jewels.
When Ghiyath al-Din died in 1203, Muhammad became sole sultan, but a heavy defeat by the Khwarazmians at Andkhud soon cost him most of Khurasan. He was assassinated by Isma'ili agents at Dhamiak on the Indus on 15 March 1206 while at evening prayer. The western lands fell to Khwarazm by 1215, while in India his commander Qutb ud-Din Aibak built the Delhi Sultanate.
Source: Muhammad of Ghor
