position, but Shah Hasan conquered the whole province,
and governed it, acknowledging Babar as his suzerain. At length, in
1525, was invited to Multan. He marched against the fortress, and,
after a protracted siege, took it by storm (August or September,
1526). Meanwhile, great {25} events had happened in India. On the
29th of April, of the same year, the battle of Panipat had delivered
India into the hands of Babar. Before proceeding to narrate his
invasion of that country it is necessary that I should describe, very
briefly, the condition of its actual rulers at the time.

{26}

CHAPTER IV
BABAR'S INVASIONS OF INDIA

Into the first period of Indian history, that extending from the
earliest times to the invasion of Mahmud of Ghazni, in the beginning
of the eleventh century, I do not propose to enter. The world,
indeed, possesses little detailed knowledge of that period. It is
known that from the Indus to Cape Comorin the country was peopled by
several distinct races, speaking a variety of languages; that the
prevailing religions were those of the Brahman, the Buddhist, and the
Jain; and that the wars periodically occurring between the several
kings of the several provinces or divisions were mostly religious
wars.

The invasion of Mahmud of Ghazni came first, in the year 1001, to
disturb the existing system. But although Mahmud, and his successors
of the Ghazni dynasty, penetrated to Delhi, to Rajputana, and to the
furthest extremities of Gujarat, they did not practically extend
their permanent rule beyond the Punjab. The territories to the
south-east of the Sutlej still remained subject to Hindu sovereigns.
But in 1186, the dynasty of the Ghaznivis was destroyed by the
dynasty of Ghor or Ghur, founded by an Afghan of Ghur, a {27}
district in Western Afghanistan, a hundred and twenty miles to the
south-east of the city of Herat, on the road to Kabul. The Ghuri
dynasty was, in its turn, supplanted, in 1288, by that of the Khilji
or Ghilji. The princes of this House, after reigning with great
renown for thirty-three years over Delhi and a portion of the
territories now known as the North-west Provinces, and, pushing their
conquests beyond the Narbada and the Deccan, made way, in 1321, for
the Tughlak dynasty, descended from Turki slaves. The Tughlaks did
not possess the art of consolidation. During the ninety-one years of
their rule the provinces ruled by their predecessors gradually
separated from the centra