Babur (Persian: ببر, Persian: [bɑː.βuɾ]; 14 February 1483 – 26 December 1530; born Zahīr ud-Dīn Muhammad) was the founder of the Mughal Empire in South Asia. He was a descendant of Timur and Genghis Khan through his father and mother, respectively. He was also given the posthumous name of Firdaws Makani ('Dwelling in Paradise').
Born in Andijan in the Fergana Valley (now in Uzbekistan), Babur was the eldest son of Umar Shaikh Mirza II (1456–1494, Timurid governor of Fergana from 1469 to 1494) and a great-great-great-grandson of Timur (1336–1405). He ascended the throne of Fergana in its capital, Akhsikath, in 1494 at the age of twelve and had to put down a rebellion. He conquered Samarkand two years later, only to lose Fergana soon after. In his attempt to reconquer Fergana, he lost control of Samarkand as well. In 1501, he briefly recaptured both areas but his attempt failed when the Uzbek prince Muhammad Shaybani defeated him and founded the Khanate of Bukhara.
In 1504, the exiled Babur conquered Kabul, which was under the putative rule of Abd ur-Razaq Mirza, the infant heir of his uncle Ulugh Beg II. Forming a partnership with the Safavid emperor Ismail I he reconquered parts of Turkestan in 1511, including Samarkand, only to again lose it and the other newly conquered lands to the Shaybanids.
After losing Samarkand for the third time, Babur turned his attention to India and employed aid from the neighbouring Safavid and Ottoman empires. He defeated Ibrahim Lodi, the Sultan of Delhi, at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 and founded the Mughal Empire. Before the defeat of Lodi at Panipat, the Sultanate of Delhi had been a spent force, long in a state of decline.
The ruler of the adjacent Kingdom of Mewar, Rana Sanga, advanced on Babur with a grand coalition of Rajput and Afghan warlords, engaging Babur in the Battle of Khanwa. Babur achieved a decisive victory due to his skillful troop positioning and use of gunpowder. The battle, one of the most decisive events in Indian history, was a watershed event in the Mughal conquest of northern India.
Religiously, Babur started his life as a staunch Sunni Muslim, but he underwent significant evolution. He became more tolerant as he conquered new territories and grew older, allowing other religions to peacefully coexist in his empire and at his court. He also displayed a certain attraction to theology, poetry, geography, history, and biology — disciplines he promoted at his court — earning him a frequent association with representatives of the Timurid Renaissance. His religious and philosophical stances are characterized as humanistic.
Babur married several times. Notable among his children were Humayun, Kamran Mirza, Hindal Mirza, Masuma Sultan Begum, and the author Gulbadan Begum. Babur died in 1530 in Agra, with Humayun succeeding him. He was first buried in Agra, but, as per his wishes, his remains were moved to Kabul and reburied. Babur is regarded as a national hero in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. He wrote the Baburnama in Chaghatai Turkic; it was translated into Persian during the reign (1556–1605) of his grandson, the emperor Akbar. Many of his poems have become popular folk songs. A devoted garden-builder, Babur is also credited with introducing the formal charbagh to the plains of northern India.
Ẓahīr-ud-Dīn is Arabic for "Defender of the Faith" (of Islam), and Muhammad honours the Islamic prophet. The name was chosen for Babur by the Sufi saint Khwaja Ahrar, who was the spiritual master of his father. The difficulty of pronouncing the name for his Central Asian Turco-Mongol army may have been responsible for the greater popularity of his nickname Babur, also variously spelled Baber, Babar, and Bābor. The name is generally taken in reference to the Persian word babur (ببر), meaning "tiger" or "panther". The word repeatedly appears in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and was borrowed into the Turkic languages of Central Asia.
Babur's memoirs form the main source for details of his life. They are known as the Baburnama and were written in Chagatai, his first language, though, according to Dale, "his Turkic prose is highly Persianized in its sentence structure, morphology or word formation and vocabulary." Baburnama was translated into Persian during the rule of Babur's grandson Akbar.
Babur was born on 14 February 1483 in the city of Andijan, Fergana Valley, contemporary Uzbekistan. He was the eldest son of Umar Shaikh Mirza II, ruler of the Fergana Valley, the son of Abū Saʿīd Mirza (and grandson of Miran Shah, who was himself son of Timur) and his wife Qutlugh Nigar Khanum, daughter of Yunus Khan, the ruler of Moghulistan and a descendant of Genghis Khan.
Babur hailed from the Turkic Barlas tribe, which was of Mongol origin and had embraced the Turco-Persian tradition. They had also converted to Islam centuries earlier and resided in Turkestan and Khorasan.
Aside from the Chaghatai Turkic, Babur was equally fluent in Classical Persian, the lingua franca of the Timurid elite.
Some of Babur's relatives, such as his uncles Mahmud Khan and Ahmad Khan, continued to identify as Mongols and allowed him to use their Mongol troops to help recover his fortunes in the turbulent years that followed.
Hence, Babur, though nominally a Mongol (or Moghul in Persian language), drew much of his support from the local Turkic and Iranian people of Central Asia, and his army was diverse in its ethnic makeup. It included Sarts, Tajiks, ethnic Afghans, Arabs, as well as Barlas and Chaghatayid Turko-Mongols from Central Asia.
In 1494, eleven-year-old Babur became the Timurid ruler of Fergana, in present-day Uzbekistan, after his father, Umar Sheikh Mirza, died "while tending pigeons in an ill-constructed dovecote that toppled into the ravine below the palace". During this time, two of his uncles from the neighbouring kingdoms, who were hostile to his father, and a group of nobles who wanted his younger brother Jahangir to be the ruler, threatened his succession to the throne. His uncles were relentless in their attempts to dislodge him from this position as well as from many of his other territorial possessions to come. Babur was able to secure his throne mainly because of help from his maternal grandmother, Aisan Daulat Begum, although there was also some luck involved.
Most territories around his kingdom were ruled by his relatives, who were descendants of either Timur or Genghis Khan, and were constantly in conflict. At that time, rival princes were fighting over the city of Samarkand to the west, which was ruled by his paternal cousin. Babur had a great ambition to capture the city.
In 1497, he besieged Samarkand for seven months before eventually gaining control over it. He was fifteen years old, and for him, the campaign was a huge achievement. Babur was able to hold the city despite desertions in his army, but he later fell seriously ill. Meanwhile, a rebellion back home, approximately 350 kilometres (220 mi) away, amongst nobles who favoured his brother, robbed him of Fergana. As he was marching to recover it, he left Samarkand to Sultan Ali Mirza, leaving him with neither territory in his possession. He had held Samarkand for 100 days, and he considered this defeat as his biggest loss, obsessing over it even later in his life after his conquests in India.
For three years, Babur concentrated on building a strong army, recruiting widely amongst the Tajiks of Badakhshan in particular. In 1500–1501, he again laid siege to Samarkand, and indeed he took the city briefly, but he was in turn besieged by his most formidable rival, Muhammad Shaybani, Khan of the Uzbeks. The situation became such that Babur was compelled to give his sister, Khanzada, to Shaybani in marriage as part of the peace settlement. Only after this were Babur and his troops allowed to depart the city in safety. Samarkand, his lifelong obsession, was thus lost again. He then tried to reclaim Fergana but lost the battle there also, and, escaping with a small band of followers, he wandered the mountains of central Asia and took refuge with hill tribes. By 1502, he had resigned all hopes of recovering Fergana; he was left with nothing and was forced to try his luck elsewhere. He finally went to Tashkent, which was ruled by his maternal uncle, but he found himself less than welcome there. Babur wrote, "During my stay in Tashkent, I endured much poverty and humiliation. No country, or hope of one!" Thus, during the ten years since becoming the ruler of Fergana, Babur suffered many short-lived victories and was without shelter and in exile, aided by friends and peasants.