Ghazni, near Kabul in modern day Afghanistan, had been seized by Mahmud from the Persian Abbasid caliphs through mutiny. In 998 CE after succeeding as sultan he began a series of campaigns deep in the Gangetic plains and Gujarat. Notoriously, he destroyed the Shiva idol in Kathiawar, carrying of this vast treasure of gold in 1025, and beautifying his capital, Ghazni, with it. These spectacular conquests were the result of the superior military might of the Ghaznavid soldiers against both Muslim and non-Muslim enemies. The prospect of loot for each victorious invading Muslim horseman assured that the casualties of this hazardous activity could easily be replaced by new recruits and their numbers were increased by ambitious Indian converts of lowly status. This new breed of warrior had arisen in the lands of Islam, during the later periods of the crusades. The Turkish ‘slave’ officer’s, or Mamluk’s ranks were composed of men, who had been sold as children into military service. Such men rose to high positions on the basis of skill, and from their ranks came arose the ‘Slave Dynasty’, who ruled from Delhi between 1206 and 1290.

The Mamluks were given military training for service against the Mongols, who were the great scourge of the time for Muslims as well as for the Chinese and Europeans. All of these older civilisations had to contend with the breakout of nomads from the Eurasian steppe, beginning with the Scythians raids against southern Russian peasant communities and culminating in the Mongol devastation of ancient Eurasian states in the thirteenth century. At the time of his death in 1227 CE, Genghis Khan, the most famous of the Mongol marauders, had formed a powerful confederation whose encampments were established on India’s frontiers, from which attacks as far into the interior as Punjab were launched. Survival required skills and ruthlessness equal to those of the Mongol horsemen, and these began to develop in the Islamic world. Among the few people spared the devastations of the Mongol hordes were those Muslim steppe communities whose fighters determinedly matched Mongols skills on horses and general ferocity. These Turkic warriors may have saved India from the horrors that other Eurasians suffered at the hands of the Mongols.

The ease with which the Muslim horsemen pillaged northern India during the eleventh century has been put down to arrogance. Indians viewed each other with distrust and the wider world with indifference. Indeed whilst Mahmud of Ghazni terrorized the north-west for seventeen years, the contemporary Indian rulers, the Cholas seemed blissfully unaware. The Turkic ‘slave warriors’ had no choice but to remain in India because their way back home to central Asia lay in the hands of the Mongols. This remained the case until some of the Mongols reverted to Islam to become the Mughuls in the sixteenth century.

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