Between the early thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth century, Delhi was ruled by five successive Turkic and Afghan dynasties — the Mamluk, Khalji, Tughlaq, Sayyid and Lodi — known together as the Delhi Sultanate. The sequence began in 1206, when Qutb al-Din Aibak, a former slave commander of Muhammad Ghori, established himself at Delhi after Ghori’s death.
The sultanate extended Islamic rule across the northern plains and built the city’s earliest monumental architecture: the Qutb Minar, begun by Aibak and carried further by Iltutmish; the Alai Darwaza and the unfinished Alai Minar of Alauddin Khalji; the fortress city of Tughlaqabad and the shifting capitals of Muhammad bin Tughlaq. Its armies pushed as far south as the Deccan, and under Muhammad bin Tughlaq briefly moved the capital to Daulatabad before returning it to Delhi.
Its authority was never uniform. Large parts of the subcontinent remained under independent Rajput, regional and local rulers, and the sultanate’s control over the countryside was negotiated through revenue intermediaries rather than administered directly. The Khalji and Tughlaq periods saw repeated Mongol incursions turned back, and the Sayyid and Lodi periods saw the sultanate’s effective reach contract toward the Ganga-Yamuna plain.
The period ended on 21 April 1526, when Babur defeated Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat and founded the Mughal empire. The sultanate’s administrative inheritance — the iqta revenue system, Persian as the language of court and record, and a fiscal apparatus built on measured land — outlasted it and was absorbed by the empire that replaced it.
