....In 1398 the Turkish conqueror Taimur or Tamerlane ended all this with his bloody raid on India and sack of Delhi. The monuments of the next ten years still testify to the desolation and despair he left behind. It took   nearly fifty years for the Delhi kingdom to become more than a local chiefship…Even the revival was slow and fitful. In the Deccan, or center, the Delhi empire had broken up into the succession state of the Bahminis, a brilliant, brittle minority rule. But this state was itself shattered in the late fifteenth century. The Muslim forces were patently in disarray.

Nor were the Hindus in much better case. All over the north, they had lost sovereignty. Only in Rajasthan had they held out, but even here they were deeply divided by clan feeling and chiefs’ rivalry, with new states flaking off from the old as the chisel of ambition worked on Rajput pride and obstinacy.”

This summarizes the situation on the eve of Babur’s invasion. Now on to Babur himself, again in the words of Dr. Percival Spear:

“Babur is one of the most attractive characters in Indian or any other history. He was not only a soldier-statesman of a familiar type, but a poet and man of letters, of sensibility and taste and humor as well. Wherever he went he laid out Persian gardens and his memoirs are dotted with references to natural beauties. It was the absence of the hills and streams of his homeland that he felt so keenly in India…”