Person · Ghaznavid sultan
Mahmud of Ghazni
Also known as Maḥmūd-i Ghaznavī, Mahmud Ghaznavi, Abu al-Qasim Mahmud ibn Sabuktigin, Abū al-Qāsim Maḥmūd ibn Sabuktigīn, Yamin al-Dawla, Mahmud-i Zavuli, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna
Sultan of the Ghaznavid empire from 998 to 1030 and the first ruler to hold the title sultan, whose realm ran from north-western Iran to the Punjab and Khwarazm. He invaded India seventeen times, sacking Nagarkot, Thanesar, Mathura, Kannauj and, in 1025 and 1026, Somnath, and annexed the Punjab with Lahore. The plunder rebuilt Ghazni as a centre of Persian learning that drew Ferdowsi and al-Biruni, whose Tarikh al-Hind was prompted by Mahmud's Gangetic campaigns.
- Date
- 971–1030
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Patron dynasty
- Ghaznavid
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
His Lahore mint styled him Mahmud butshikan, the breaker of idols, yet his army included Indian soldiers under their own commander, the sipahsalar-i-Hinduwan, who lived in their own quarter of Ghazni and kept their own religion and ceremonies.
His reputation is sharply divided: a hero in Pakistan and a villain in India, he is described by al-Biruni as having ruined the country's prosperity, while Romila Thapar reads the Somnath raid as a political act and Peter Hardy criticises much writing on his fanaticism. Death tolls such as K. S. Lal's estimate of two million killed and enslaved are estimates.
Connections (5)
- Ruled fromGhazni
Mahmud was born at Ghazni in 971, where his father Sabuktigin had founded the dynasty, and he died there on 30 April 1030 and was buried in his Firuzi garden. He spent the plunder of India on the city: a Friday mosque called the Arus al-falak after the Doab campaign of 1018 and 1019, a college, palaces, gardens and the Band-i Mahmudi dam. He brought whole libraries from Ray and Isfahan, demanded the Khwarazmshah's men of learning, and drew al-Biruni and Ferdowsi, who presented the Shahnameh to him there.
- CampaignSomnath / Prabhasa
Mahmud attacked Somnath in 1025; the Chaulukya king Bhima I fled, and the temple, then in the charge of the Abhira feudatory Mandalika, was taken and desecrated in 1026. Avoiding the army that King Bhoja raised against him, Mahmud went home by a harder route through the Thar and Sindh, where hunger and thirst killed many of his men and animals, sacked Mansura, and lost heavily to Jats on the Indus. Romila Thapar reads the raid as a political act, and says contemporaries saw it that way.
- CampaignThanesar (Sthanishvara)
Mahmud invaded Thanesar to obtain a breed of large elephants for his army, and its famous Chakrasvamin image became his target. The Hindu Shahi Anandapala offered fifty elephants to spare it and was refused; Raja Ram of Dera tried to block the Sutlej crossing with an elephant-backed army and was defeated. The local raja fled, the town was plundered without resistance, and the image was carried to Ghazni and thrown into the public square. Wikipedia dates the raid to 1012; the repository's Thanesar entry gives 1014.
- CampaignKalinjar Fort
Mahmud twice marched against the Chandela king Vidyadhara, who had killed the Pratihara Rajyapala for submitting to Ghazni and promised help to the Hindu Shahis. In 1020 he defeated Vidyadhara in battle near Kalinjar. In 1022 he returned, took the surrender of Gwalior on the way, and besieged Kalinjar itself; after a long siege Vidyadhara sent three hundred elephants and other gifts to end it, and Mahmud withdrew in 1023, granting him control of fifteen fortresses.
- Traditional linkGhazi Miyan, Bahraich
The tie is a hagiographer's. The Mirat-i-Masudi, a Persian life written by Abdur Rahman Chishti in the 1620s, makes Mahmud's sister Sitr-e-Mu'alla the wife of Sayyid Salar, and so Mahmud the uncle of Sayyid Salar Mas'ud, the warrior saint venerated at Bahraich as Ghazi Miyan. Wikipedia's account of Mahmud's family reports the marriage only as purported and attributes it to this text, written six centuries after Mahmud's death, so the kinship belongs to the shrine's tradition rather than to Ghaznavid history.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Mahmud of Ghazni". C. E. Bosworth, The Ghaznavids 994–1040 (1963); Romila Thapar, Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (2005).
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