On 21 April 1526, the armies of Babur and the Lodi sultan Ibrahim met on the field at Panipat, about ninety kilometres north of Delhi. Babur had lost his ancestral kingdom of Ferghana and had held Kabul since 1504; his claim to the Punjab rested on Timurid descent, and he had been invited to intervene by disaffected nobles of the Lodi court.
The disparity in numbers was heavily against him, and the disparity in method was heavily in his favour. Babur anchored his line on the town of Panipat on one flank and a ditch on the other, and strung between them a defensive front of carts tied together with leather ropes, behind which matchlockmen and cannon were placed. The Lodi army’s cavalry and war elephants, advancing against a prepared position, were funnelled into the gap between the cart line and the town.
Ibrahim Lodi was killed in the fighting and his army broke. Within days Babur occupied Delhi and Agra, and the Mughal empire — which would grow to rule most of the subcontinent over the following two centuries — was founded. The victory did not settle the north on its own: Babur faced the Rajput confederacy under Rana Sanga at Khanwa the following year, and the Afghans remained a threat for decades.
The battle is conventionally read as a demonstration that field artillery and disciplined missile fire, used from a prepared position, could defeat a much larger conventionally organised force — a lesson that recurred at Panipat twice more, in 1556 and 1761. What mattered as much as the guns was the choice of ground: Babur refused the open cavalry battle his opponent wanted, and made the battlefield suit his own armament.
