# Timur sacks Delhi
**तैमूर द्वारा दिल्ली की लूट**

- Canonical page: https://indianepics.online/event/timur-delhi-1398/
- Chapter: [Cholas to the Sultanate](https://indianepics.online/chapter/medieval.md)
- Track: evidence (archaeology and documents)
- When: 1398 CE – 1399 CE
- Where: Siri, Delhi (28.5507, 77.2196)
- Tags: war, political

## Summary

Timur routs the Tughluq army outside Delhi on 17 December 1398 and sacks Siri, Jahanpanah and Old Delhi; the Sultanate never regains its reach.

17 दिसंबर 1398 को तैमूर ने दिल्ली के बाहर तुग़लक़ सेना को हराया और सीरी, जहाँपनाह व पुरानी दिल्ली को लूटा; सल्तनत फिर कभी पहले जैसी विस्तृत न हो सकी।

## Account

Timur crossed the Indus in September 1398 and sacked towns across the Punjab. Before the battle he had a great number of prisoners killed; his court historians put it at 100,000. After defeating Sultan Nasir al-Din Mahmud and his minister Mallu Iqbal, his army plundered the three walled cities of Delhi for days and left early in 1399 with captives. Yazdi says Timur reserved all the stonemasons for the great mosque he planned at Samarkand.

The Sultanate survived as a regional state. The Sayyids, who ruled from 1414 as nominal deputies of Timur's son, held little beyond Delhi. Bahlul Lodi, from 1451, rebuilt it into a kingdom of the Punjab and the Ganga plain, and Sikandar Lodi made Agra his capital; Gujarat, Malwa, Jaunpur and Bengal went their own way. The Lodis' Delhi fell to Babur, Timur's descendant, at Panipat in 1526.

The numbers come from Timur's court historians, who wrote to glorify him, and no independent count exists. Historians accept a massacre on a very large scale and treat the figures as uncertain.

## Sources

- Elliot and Dowson, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, vol. III (1871) — https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.458719 (Extracts from Sharaf al-Din Yazdi's Zafarnama and the Malfuzat-i Timuri, the memoirs attributed to Timur, which most modern scholars regard as a later compilation)
- Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (1999)

## Image

Timur defeats the sultan of Delhi. Bhora, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ATimur_defeats_the_sultan_of_Delhi.jpg

---
Content licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source repository: https://github.com/SkidGod4444/indianepics