Gupta Army

The army of the Gupta Empire, which dominated northern India from the fourth to sixth centuries AD, represented an advance on earlier Indian military organization, fielding five coordinated arms of infantry, cavalry, chariotry, elephantry and river naval vessels, with heavy cavalry archers and heavy sword cavalry forming its core striking units. Under Samudragupta, who ruled roughly 335 to 375 AD, Gupta forces uprooted eight kings of the north, subjugated forest-region rulers of central India and defeated twelve rulers along the southeastern coast, a sweep of conquest recorded on the Allahabad Pillar inscription that made the Gupta military the dominant power of the Indo-Gangetic plain. Samudragupta's son Chandragupta II extended the empire westward, defeating the Saka Western Kshatrapas in Malwa, Gujarat and Saurashtra by 395 AD to give the Guptas a coast-to-coast domain and mark the empire's military and cultural high point. Gupta military fortunes reversed under pressure from Central Asian Huns, as the Kidarites threatened Kumaragupta I's reign and the Alchon Huns under Toramana and Mihirakula broke through Gupta defenses in the northwest around 500 AD, and though the Guptas defeated Mihirakula by 528 AD, the drain of the Huna wars left the empire fatally weakened within a generation.