Army of the Mughal Empire

The army of the Mughal Empire was the military force through which the Mughal emperors established and expanded their rule in India. Its origins lay in the cavalry-based armies of central Asia, like the Mughals themselves, but its essential form and structure was set by the third emperor, Akbar, and its regular forces were mainly recruited and fielded by Mansabdar officers. In the seventeenth century it grew to be the largest army in the world, though estimates of its size vary widely between sources, from about four million men by the census of Abul Fazl to far higher modern figures. The Mughals relied on strong cavalry, with horses imported mostly from Arabia, Iran, Turkey and central Asia, and adopted gunpowder warfare so thoroughly that the historians Marshall Hodgson and William McNeill called them a gunpowder empire, using heavy cannon, light artillery, grenades, rockets and mortars. A naval arm, the Amla-e-Nawara, kept warships and transport ships, and historians disagree about how far the army kept pace with military change in Europe.