Delhi Sultanate Army

The army of the Delhi Sultanate, the succession of Turkic and Afghan dynasties that ruled much of northern India from 1206 to 1526, began under nomadic Turkic Mamluk military slaves belonging to Muhammad of Ghor, and its elite core, the Wajih, were Turco-Afghan regular cavalry archer units recruited substantially from former slave soldiers. Military strength grew enormously across the sultanate's dynasties, with the Khalji dynasty from 1290 to 1320 said to have maintained a standing cavalry of roughly 300,000 to 400,000 horsemen alongside 2,500 to 3,000 war elephants, and the succeeding Tughlaq dynasty expanding mounted forces further to an estimated 500,000. The Khalji army under Alauddin Khalji pushed deep into Gujarat, Malwa and Rajputana and as far south as the Deccan, seizing enormous war spoils including, according to tradition, the Koh-i-Noor diamond, while Muhammad bin Tughluq's campaigns brought the sultanate to its greatest territorial extent before political fragmentation weakened later Tughluq military capacity. Perhaps the Delhi Sultanate's most consequential achievement was defensive rather than offensive: its armies repeatedly repelled Mongol invasions launched from the Chagatai Khanate, sparing the Indian subcontinent from the kind of devastating Mongol conquest inflicted on Central Asia, Persia and much of Russia in the same era, before the sultanate's final Lodi dynasty was overthrown by Babur's invasion in 1526.