Mughal Empire History: Rulers, Administration and Legacy

Most accounts of Mughal Empire history begin on 21 April 1526, on the plain of Panipat north of Delhi. That day a Central Asian prince named Babur, with field guns and matchlock men, defeated Sultan Ibrahim Lodi and ended the Delhi Sultanate. His descendants would rule from Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Lahore and Delhi for more than three centuries, until the British sent the last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, into exile after the revolt of 1857.

The real power of the dynasty lasted a shorter time, roughly from Akbar’s accession in 1556 to Aurangzeb’s death in 1707. In those 150 years the six “great Mughals” built a state with a professional nobility, a measured land tax and a court culture that mixed Persian, Central Asian and Indian ways. This guide goes emperor by emperor, then explains how the administration worked, what to look for in Mughal buildings, and why the empire came apart so fast after 1707.

Mughal Empire history at a glance

If you are revising for an exam, these are the dates to fix first:

Babur (r. 1526-1530): wins the First Battle of Panipat (1526) and the Battle of Khanwa (1527).
Humayun (r. 1530-1540 and 1555-1556): loses to Sher Shah Suri at Chausa and Kannauj (1539-1540), spends about fifteen years in exile, returns in 1555.
Akbar (r. 1556-1605): Second Battle of Panipat (1556), mansabdari system, Todar Mal’s revenue reforms, Fatehpur Sikri.
Jahangir (r. 1605-1627): Nur Jahan’s influence, the high point of Mughal painting.
Shah Jahan (r. 1628-1658): Taj Mahal, Red Fort, Jama Masjid of Delhi.
Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707): conquest of Bijapur and Golconda, the long Deccan wars, jizya reimposed in 1679.
Later Mughals (1707-1857): Nadir Shah’s sack of Delhi (1739), Plassey (1757), the revolt of 1857.

Babur: how the Mughal Empire began (1526-1530)

Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur was born in 1483 in Andijan, in present-day Uzbekistan. On his father’s side he descended from Timur, and on his mother’s side from Genghis Khan. The name “Mughal” comes from the Persian word for Mongol, though Babur himself thought of his family as Timurid.

He inherited the small kingdom of Fergana at about twelve, after his father’s death. He took and lost Samarkand more than once before he was twenty. With Central Asia closed to him, he looked south. Between 1519 and 1524 he led several raids into north India, learning the ground and the politics of the Lodi sultanate, which was by then weak and divided.

Panipat and Khanwa

At the First Battle of Panipat on 21 April 1526, Babur’s army of perhaps 12,000 men faced Ibrahim Lodi’s much larger force, often put at around 100,000. Babur used field artillery and matchlocks behind a line of carts, and his cavalry struck the flanks. Ibrahim Lodi was killed on the field, and with him the Delhi Sultanate came to an end.

Winning Delhi and Agra was one thing; holding them was another. The most serious challenge came from Rana Sanga of Mewar, who led a Rajput confederacy against him. Babur defeated Sanga’s larger army at Khanwa in 1527, and that victory did more than Panipat to settle Mughal control of the north.

Babur died in 1530, only four years after Panipat. His memoir, the Baburnama, written in Chagatai Turkish, is one of the best sources we have for him. It is frank about his defeats and full of his observations on India’s plants, animals and people, and on how much he missed the melons and gardens of Kabul.

Humayun: losing the empire and winning it back

Humayun, Babur’s eldest son, came to the throne in 1530 with a thin hold on new territory. His brothers wanted their share, Afghan nobles were restless, and the rulers of Gujarat and Bengal tested him. The man who beat him was Sher Shah Suri, an Afghan noble with a sharp military and administrative mind.

Sher Shah defeated Humayun at Chausa in 1539 and at Kannauj in 1540, and drove him out of India. Humayun wandered through Sindh and Rajasthan and finally took refuge with Shah Tahmasp of Persia. That stay mattered later: Humayun came back with Persian troops, Persian painters and a taste for Persian court culture that his son would build on.

After Sher Shah’s death in 1545 the Sur dynasty broke up, and in 1555 Humayun recaptured Delhi and Agra. Six months later, in January 1556, he fell down the stairs of his library in Delhi and died. His widow later built Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi, completed around 1572, which set the pattern for the great Mughal garden tombs.

Akbar: building a lasting state (1556-1605)

Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar was thirteen when he became emperor in 1556. Within months, Hemu, the general of the Sur rulers, had taken Delhi and crowned himself. At the Second Battle of Panipat in November 1556, Mughal forces under the regent Bairam Khan defeated and killed Hemu. Bairam Khan ran the government for the next few years, until Akbar dismissed him in 1560 and began to rule in his own name.

Conquests and the Rajput alliances

Over the next two decades Akbar brought Gujarat, Bengal and Kashmir under Mughal rule and pushed into the northern Deccan. With the Rajputs he used both war and marriage. Several Rajput rulers, including the Kachhwahas of Amber, gave daughters in marriage and entered imperial service, and men like Raja Man Singh became senior commanders. Mewar was the major holdout, which is the background to Maharana Pratap’s resistance and the Battle of Haldighati.

By about 1580 the empire held most of north and central India. The Deccan sultanates and the kingdoms of the far south were still independent.

Religion: from the Ibadat Khana to Din-i-Ilahi

Akbar abolished the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims, and appointed Hindus to high office. Raja Todar Mal ran the revenue department and Raja Birbal was one of his closest companions. In the Ibadat Khana (House of Worship) at Fatehpur Sikri he hosted debates between Muslim scholars, Brahmins, Jains, Zoroastrians and Jesuit priests from Goa.

Out of these discussions came the idea of sulh-i-kul, peace with all, and a small devotional order known as Din-i-Ilahi. It had only a handful of members among the courtiers and never became a popular religion. Historians now tend to read it as a bond of personal loyalty to the emperor rather than a new faith.

Fatehpur Sikri and Akbar’s court

Akbar built Fatehpur Sikri near Agra and used it as his capital from 1571 to 1585. The usual explanation for leaving it is a shortage of water, though his need to be in Lahore to watch the north-west frontier was probably just as important. The Buland Darwaza, the Panch Mahal and the palace called Jodha Bai’s Mahal mix Islamic, Hindu and Jain building traditions.

Later tradition speaks of Akbar’s Navratnas (Nine Jewels), a group that includes the singer Tansen, the poet Abdul Rahim Khan-e-Khana, Birbal and Todar Mal. His painting workshop produced the Hamzanama, an illustrated romance of about 1,400 large paintings, which did much to set the Mughal painting style.

How the Mughal administration worked: mansabdari and land revenue

The two systems below are the part of Mughal Empire history that examiners ask about most, and both took their mature form under Akbar.

The mansabdari system

Every noble and senior officer held a mansab, a numerical rank. From Akbar’s later years the rank had two parts. The zat fixed the holder’s personal status and pay, and the sawar fixed how many cavalrymen he had to maintain for the emperor. A mansabdar was paid either in cash or, more often, through a jagir, an assignment of the revenue of a particular area.

Ranks were granted, raised and cut by the emperor, and jagirs were transferred every few years so that nobody could put down roots in one place. This tied the nobility to the throne rather than to a region or a family estate. The system worked as long as there was enough good land to hand out. When the number of mansabdars outgrew the revenue available, especially under Aurangzeb, the shortage of jagirs became a serious problem.

Land revenue: Todar Mal’s dahsala

Land revenue was the main income of the state. Under Akbar, Raja Todar Mal worked out the dahsala system. Land was measured, the average produce and prices of each crop over ten years were worked out for each area, and the state’s share, usually about one-third of the produce, was fixed in cash.

This gave the peasant a known demand and the treasury a predictable income, at least in the core provinces where it was applied. Other methods, such as crop-sharing, continued elsewhere. Several features of Mughal revenue practice, including detailed land records, were later taken over by the British.

For governance, the empire was divided into provinces called subas, each with a governor (subadar) and a separate revenue officer (diwan), so that the two could keep a check on each other.

Jahangir and Nur Jahan (1605-1627)

Prince Salim took the title Jahangir (“World Seizer”) when he succeeded Akbar in 1605. He faced a rebellion from his own son Khusrau early in the reign and another from Prince Khurram, the future Shah Jahan, near its end. In between, the empire was largely stable and Akbar’s broad religious policy continued.

Jahangir’s wife Nur Jahan became the real power at court in his later years. Coins were struck in her name, and her relatives, including her father Itimad-ud-Daulah, held high office. Her father’s tomb at Agra, finished in white marble with inlay, comes before the Taj and is worth seeing for that reason.

Jahangir cared more about painting than conquest. Under him, Mughal miniatures moved from crowded narrative scenes towards close portraits and studies of birds, animals and flowers. Ustad Mansur’s animal and plant studies are the best-known examples. His memoir, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, is unusually candid, including about his drinking and his troubles with his sons.

Shah Jahan: the builder emperor (1628-1658)

Shah Jahan (“King of the World”) is remembered mostly for buildings. When his wife Mumtaz Mahal died in childbirth in 1631, he began the Taj Mahal at Agra. Work ran from 1632 to about 1653, with more than 20,000 workers by the usual estimate. The white marble is inlaid with semi-precious stones, and the tomb sits at the river end of a large four-part garden rather than in its centre.

In 1639 he began a new capital at Delhi, Shahjahanabad, with the Red Fort as its palace. The Diwan-i-Am was for public audience and the Diwan-i-Khas for private meetings; the jewelled Peacock Throne, reportedly far costlier than the Taj itself, stood in the Diwan-i-Khas. The Jama Masjid of Delhi, completed in 1656, is one of the largest mosques in India, with a courtyard said to hold about 25,000 people. He also rebuilt parts of Agra Fort in marble.

All this was expensive, and so were his failed campaigns to win back Balkh and Badakhshan in Central Asia. When Shah Jahan fell ill in 1657, his four sons fought for the throne. Aurangzeb won, killed his brother Dara Shikoh, and kept his father confined in Agra Fort from 1658. Shah Jahan died there in 1666 and was buried beside Mumtaz Mahal in the Taj.

Aurangzeb: the largest empire, and the strain (1658-1707)

Aurangzeb Alamgir ruled for almost fifty years, and under him the empire reached its greatest size. He annexed the Deccan sultanates of Bijapur (1686) and Golconda (1687), taking Mughal rule further south than ever before. Estimates put the empire at around 4 million square kilometres and perhaps 150 million people at its peak.

The Deccan wars

The conquests did not bring peace. The Marathas, first under Shivaji and then his successors, fought a long guerrilla war that Mughal armies could not finish. Aurangzeb spent the last quarter-century of his life in the Deccan, away from the north. The campaigns drained the treasury, and many Deccani nobles brought into imperial service had to be given jagirs that did not exist, which deepened the crisis in the mansabdari system.

Religious policy

Aurangzeb was an orthodox Sunni who wanted the state run according to Islamic law. He reimposed the jizya in 1679, stopped some court customs that went back to Akbar, and ordered the destruction of a number of temples. How many, and for what reasons, is still argued over by historians. Some see a consistent religious policy; others point out that many temples also received grants in his reign and that some destruction was aimed at rebellious chiefs.

What is clear is that he lost the goodwill of many Rajput and Hindu nobles whose families had served the Mughals since Akbar. He lived simply, discouraged music at court and is said to have paid for his own needs by copying the Quran and stitching caps. His reign marks both the Mughal Empire’s largest extent and the start of its unravelling.

Mughal architecture: what to look for

Mughal buildings are easy to recognise once you know the main features:

Red sandstone to white marble: early buildings like Humayun’s Tomb and Fatehpur Sikri are mostly red sandstone with marble trim; under Jahangir and Shah Jahan, white marble took over.
Double domes and pointed arches: a tall bulbous outer dome over a lower inner one, as at Humayun’s Tomb and the Taj.
Pietra dura: flowers and vines made from cut stones such as lapis lazuli, jade, coral and turquoise set into marble.
Charbagh gardens: a garden divided into four by water channels, a Persian idea that Babur brought to India.
Symmetry: buildings and gardens laid out on a strict axis, with matching gateways, pavilions and pools.

Babur’s Ram Bagh at Agra is among the earliest Mughal gardens in India. In Kashmir, Jahangir laid out the Shalimar Bagh on the shore of Dal Lake, later extended by Shah Jahan, and the Nishat Bagh was built nearby. Both use terraces and running water down the hillside.

Several Mughal sites are UNESCO World Heritage Sites: the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort, Fatehpur Sikri, Humayun’s Tomb and the Red Fort Complex. Every year on Independence Day, the Prime Minister speaks from the ramparts of the Red Fort.

Painting, music and food at the Mughal court

Mughal painting began with Persian masters such as Abd al-Samad, who came with Humayun from Persia, and quickly took in Indian painters. Akbar’s workshop had over 100 artists, and he had them sign their work, which is why we know names like Daswanth and Basawan. Under Jahangir, European prints brought to court influenced shading and perspective.

Tansen of Akbar’s court is the best-known musician of the period and is still credited with several ragas in Hindustani music. Kathak, one of India’s classical dance forms, developed at Mughal and later regional courts, which is where its costumes and some of its style come from.

Mughal kitchens refined dishes such as biryani, pulao, korma and kebabs, using saffron, nuts and dried fruit in Persian fashion with Indian spices. Persian was the language of the court and government throughout, and Urdu grew out of the mixing of Persian, Arabic and Turkish with the Hindavi spoken around Delhi.

Why did the Mughal Empire decline after 1707?

Aurangzeb died in 1707, and within about forty years the emperor’s real authority barely reached beyond Delhi. Historians usually point to several causes working together:

Succession wars: there was no fixed rule of succession, so every death led to a fight among princes. Bahadur Shah I, Jahandar Shah and Farrukhsiyar followed one another quickly between 1707 and 1719.
The jagir crisis: too many mansabdars chasing too little good land, which pushed nobles to squeeze peasants and to build their own power.
Breakaway provinces: governors in Hyderabad, Bengal and Awadh became rulers in all but name.
The Marathas and Sikhs: the Marathas expanded across central and north India, and the Sikhs grew strong in Punjab.
Invasions: Nadir Shah of Persia defeated the Mughal army in 1739 under Muhammad Shah, sacked Delhi and carried off the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor. Afghan raids under Ahmad Shah Abdali followed.

The British takeover and 1857

The British East India Company won Bengal after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and used its revenues to expand. By the early nineteenth century the Company controlled most of India directly or through subsidiary alliances, and the Mughal emperor lived on a Company pension in the Red Fort.

In May 1857 rebel sepoys reached Delhi and proclaimed the elderly Bahadur Shah Zafar their leader. After the British retook the city, he was tried in 1858 and exiled to Rangoon in Burma, where he died in 1862. India passed to direct rule by the British Crown. Zafar, himself a poet in Urdu, is buried in Yangon, where his shrine can still be visited.

Frequently Asked Questions

What language did the Mughal emperors speak?

Their family language was Chagatai Turkish, the language Babur wrote his memoir in. Persian was the language of the court, poetry and government records. By the later Mughal period, Urdu was widely used in Delhi, and Bahadur Shah Zafar wrote poetry in it.

Was the Mughal economy really a quarter of the world’s?

The often-quoted figure of about 25% of world GDP comes from economic historians’ long-range estimates for India around 1700. Such numbers are rough reconstructions, but they do reflect how large and productive the empire’s farming and textile trade were.

What happened to the Peacock Throne?

Nadir Shah took it from Delhi in 1739. It was broken up in Persia in the years after his death, and no complete throne survives today.

Who was the last powerful Mughal emperor?

Aurangzeb, who died in 1707, is usually counted as the last of the great Mughals. Emperors continued for 150 more years, but after Muhammad Shah (r. 1719-1748) none of them had real control outside the Delhi region.