Although the Mongols constantly threatened South Asia, and despite the fact that Changhadaid raids led to a brief occupation of Delhi, much of the subcontinent remained free from Mongol subjugation. The region’s engagement with the Mongol world of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was multilayered and complicated. It involved military skirmishes and diplomatic exchanges with multiple Mongol khanates; the circulation of people, knowledge, and technologies; extensive commercial exchanges; and cultural exchanges associated with Buddhism and Islam. This chapter focuses on several facets of these encounters and interactions in order to demonstrate the intricate links between South Asia and the various Mongol khanates that significantly contributed to transforming Eurasian connections through both overland and maritime routes.

This chapter looks at specific evidence of political violence and massacres during the medieval Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526), for most of which period roughly the whole of the Indian Subcontinent was ruled from Delhi by powerful Sultans with Turkish antecedents and exposure to Persianate political culture of Central Asia and Iran. In view of the abundant material in contemporary sources, the focus is on genocidal massacres under three most despotic rulers who brooked no criticism, resistance or protest against their rule, which tended to be arbitrary and in complete disregard of existing conventions of politics and governance. They were Sultan Ghiyas-ud-Din Balban (ruled 1266-86), Sultan Ala-ud-Din Khalji (ruled 1296-1316), and Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq (ruled 1325-51). Historian Ziya-ud-Din Barani’s mid-14th century discussion of their reigns show not only that opponents resisting their conquests or regimes were brutally killed in large numbers during armed combat, but also that many of those captured alive were later massacred in cold blood. The women and children of soldiers from the other camp were not only imprisoned and enslaved, but also bodily harmed, often killed; women were also raped as punishment for alleged crimes of their male relatives.

Chapter two covers the extension of Ghurid authority over much of north India and the subsequent growing authority of the early rulers of the Delhi Sultanate including Iltutmish, Raziya, and Balban. Monuments such as the Qutb Minar and their messages are discussed. The role of leading Sufis in Indian society is evaluated as well as the poetry of the Indian Persian poet Amir Khusrau. The subsequent rise to power of the Khalji and Tughluq sultans is also explored. The Delhi Sultanate’s expansion into south India is examined as well as its political decline in the late fourteenth century. A consideration of the impact of the Delhi Sultanate and the place of India in a growing world system concludes this chapter.

Alexander played an important role in medieval Islamic philosophy and Persian literature, serving as a vehicle for discussions of the ‘ideal king’ in Mirror for Princes literature. This chapter explores the background to one particular work, Amir Khusraw’s Mirror of Alexander (1299), in which the king consults the philosopher Plato for advice on rulership before embarking on his submarine voyage to explore the nature of the universe. Plato’s characterisation as a mystical sage is contrasted in medieval Islam with the wisdom of Aristotle, Alexander’s teacher. In Amir Khusraw as in Nizami, Alexander is as much a philosopher as a king.

This chapter traces the establishment, and evolution of military slavery in north India between ca. 1000-1500. It will moreover investigate the interaction between war and society when it involves enslavement of captured civilians. Lastly, it will argue that the expansion of agriculture and the rise of a large peasant population that served as a potential source of mercenaries that eventually competed with slaves as a source of recruitment.

The years around 1200 ce mark a significant turning point in the history of warfare in India, due to the decisive campaigns waged in northern India by the Ghurids of Afghanistan and the concomitant introduction of new forms of military culture from the eastern Islamic world. While limited parts of India’s periphery had been under Islamic rule long before this time, it was only under the Ghurids that Islamic control was established in the core region along the Ganga and Yamuna rivers (the “Ganga-Yamuna Doab”). A series of decisive battles was carried out here between 1192 and 1206, under the direction of Quṭb al-Dīn Aybeg, a Turkish slave commander (ghulām) in the service of the Ghurid sultan Mu‘izz al-Dīn Muḥammad bin Sām. Even after Mu‘izz al-Dīn’s death in 1206, Aybeg remained in India controlling the newly acquired Ghurid territories from his base in Lahore in the Punjab.