Mughal Empire

Akbar Shah II (r. 1806-1837) was the penultimate Mughal emperor, ruling a Delhi court stripped of real power and increasingly hemmed in by the East India Company. He tried and failed to make his favourite son, Mirza Jahangir, heir apparent in place of his eldest son, the future Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Aurangzeb Alamgir (1618-1707 CE) was the sixth Mughal emperor, ruling nearly fifty years over the empire at its greatest extent. He commissioned the Fatawa-i Alamgiri, annexed Bijapur and Golconda, and spent his last decades campaigning in the Deccan.

Babur (1483-1530), a Timurid prince who lost his Central Asian homeland, conquered Kabul, and founded the Mughal Empire in India after his victory at Panipat in 1526 — equally renowned as a warrior, poet, and memoirist whose Baburnama is a masterpiece of world literature.

Bahadur Shah Zafar (r. 1837-1857) was the last Mughal emperor, a calligrapher and celebrated Urdu poet reigning over a Delhi court stripped of real power. Reluctantly made figurehead of the 1857 Uprising, he was tried and exiled to Rangoon, where he died in 1862, ending the Mughal dynasty.

Humayun (1508-1556), the second Mughal emperor, inherited Babur's unconsolidated conquests in 1530, lost them to Sher Shah Suri by 1540, spent some fifteen years in exile including refuge with the Safavids, and recovered Delhi in 1555 months before his death.

Jahangir (r. 1605-1627) succeeded his father Akbar as the fourth Mughal emperor. His reign is remembered for the flourishing of Mughal painting, his marriage to Nur Jahan, the memoir he kept of his own reign, and the steady growth of European trading contact through the English East India Company.

Shah Jahan (1592-1666), fifth Mughal emperor, ruled from 1628 until his deposition in 1658. His reign brought Mughal architecture to its height and drained the treasury in failed campaigns for Balkh and Kandahar, ending in the succession war that raised Aurangzeb.

The Mughal Empire (1526-1857) ruled most of the Indian subcontinent for three centuries, creating a distinctive Indo-Islamic civilization with magnificent architecture, sophisticated administration, and lasting cultural achievements blending Persian, Central Asian, and Indian traditions.

The Timurid Empire (1370-1507 CE) was a vast Central Asian empire founded by Timur that became a major center of Islamic culture, art, and learning, bridging the medieval and early modern periods of Islamic civilization.