"With Mahmud's expedition into India begins one of the most horrible
periods of the history of Hindustan. One monarch dethrones another, no
dynasty continues in power, every accession to the throne is
accompanied by the murder of kinsmen, plundering of cities,
devastation of the lowlands and the slaughter of thousands of men,
women and children of the predecessor's adherents; for five centuries
northwest and northern India literally reeked with the blood of
multitudes."[1] Mohammedan dynasties of Afghan, Turkish and Mongolian
origin follow that of Ghasna. This entire period is filled with an
almost boundless series of battles, intrigues, imbroglios and
political revolutions; nearly all events had the one characteristic in
common, that they took place amid murder, pillage and fire.

[Footnote 1: E. Schlagintweit, _Indien in Wort und Bild_, II, 26 f.]

[Illustration: AKBAR, EMPEROR OF INDIA.
From Noer's _Kaiser Akbar_, (Frontispiece to Vol. II).]

The most frightful spectacle throughout these reeking centuries is the
terrible Mongolian prince Timur, a successor of Genghis-Khan, who fell
upon India with his band of assassins in the year 1398 and before his
entry into Delhi the capital, in which he was proclaimed Emperor of
India, caused the hundred thousand prisoners whom he had captured in
his previous battles in the Punjab, to be slaughtered in one single
day, because it was too inconvenient to drag them around with him. So
says Timur himself with shameless frankness in his account of the
expedition, and he further relates that after his entry into Delhi,
all three districts of the city were plundered "according to the will
of God."[2] In 1526 Baber, a descendant of Timur, made his entry into
Delhi and there founded the dominion of the Grand Moguls (i.e., of the