Army of the Mughal Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  The Army of the Mughal Empire, at its peak in the 17th century, was by some estimates the largest fighting force on earth. Historian Abul Fazl recorded that a single encampment required 100 elephants, 500 camels, 400 carts, and 100 bearers just to move its tents from one site to the next. Traveller Niccolao Manucci, who witnessed the imperial camp in person, wrote that its grandeur surpassed anything belonging to any European ruler of the age.

  How did an army that began as a Central Asian cavalry force come to dominate a subcontinent and attract comparisons to both the Roman legions and the Victorian British Army? What held this machine together, who paid for it, and why did it eventually collapse under its own weight? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Akbar's Blueprint

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  The third Mughal emperor, Akbar, gave the army its essential shape. Before him, the force inherited by the dynasty was built on the cavalry traditions of Central Asia, mobile and effective but not yet suited to governing a continent. Akbar changed that. He codified the mansabdari system, the framework by which officers called mansabdars recruited, paid, and fielded soldiers on behalf of the crown. Under his reign, as many as 1,600 mansabdars served the empire. By the time of Shah Jahan, that number had grown to 8,000.

  Each mansabdar held a dual rank. His zat rank expressed his personal standing, while his sawar rank determined the number of horsemen he was required to supply. The minimum obligation was 10 horsemen; a high commander might supply 5,000. A prince's obligation reached 25,000. Salaries were tied directly to these ranks, creating a ladder of obligation running from the humblest officer to the throne.

  The appointment process itself was personal. According to historian Jos Gommans, assessments and postings of mansabdar officers were made by the emperor himself. Foreign appointments were rare but not unheard of: the Englishman William Hawkins was among those appointed to the rank, and during his life he recorded the names of about 41 mansabdar officers who commanded between 3,000 and 5,000 horsemen each.

  Akbar also reorganized the branches of the army into four: the cavalry, the infantry, the artillery, and the navy. The artillery was the exception to the mansabdari rule. It had its own designated commander and answered to a separate chain of command, a reflection of how technically specialized and politically sensitive the gun corps had become.

• 3. The Moving Capital

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  Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, visiting the Mughal court, noted that travelling with the imperial entourage felt as convenient as journeying through Italy or France. That impression was deliberate. The Mughal imperial camp, described in sources as "the exalted camp" or "the victorious camp", was not merely a military headquarters but a mobile administrative capital, capable of housing hundreds of thousands of people along with 50,000 horses and oxen.

  More than 2,000 workers and labourers were sent ahead of the main body to build the camp before the emperor arrived. Akbar's entourage could altogether accommodate 300,000 people. The large camp covered between 6 and 16 kilometres per day, preceded by scouts, provisioning agents, and road-builders who prepared bridges and campsites and secured the cooperation of local rulers along the route.

  Abul Fazl, the chronicler of Akbar's reign, described the pavilion structures in meticulous detail, listing their Persian names: emarat, khaneh, qasr, moshkuy, sarai, shabistan tagh, iwan, and kakh. Persian literary traditions, including texts as ancient as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish, were reflected in the garden and pavilion layout of the encampments. The Catalan Jesuit Antoni de Montserrat, who accompanied Akbar on a Kabul expedition, recorded his own account of the magnitude of what he witnessed.

  The model drew directly on Babur, the dynasty's founder, who wrote frequently about pitching his camp throughout Hindustan as he advanced. Babur's mobile strategy was a political as much as a military tool: by controlling the movement of his subjects, he maintained power even after battlefield defeats. His successors kept that logic and expanded it into an institution that blended the steppe camp tradition with Persian ceremonial grandeur.

  Beyond the tents, the Mughals also built permanent fortresses: Lalbagh Fort, Allahabad Fort, the Red Fort, Balapur Fort, and Purana Qila, among others. They inherited chains of forts scattered across the Deccan, adding permanent stone anchors to a system otherwise defined by motion.

• 4. Cavalry, Horses, and Armour

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  Historian Annemarie Schimmel estimated that around 75 percent of Mughal warhorses were imported. Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Central Asia supplied the best animals, and emperors at times issued formal mandates to officials including mansabdars, kotwals, zamindars, and mutasaddis, offering tax remissions to promote the horse trade.

  The empire's systematic classification of horse quality began in 1595. At the top sat the Iraqi variant of the Arabian breed, regarded by contemporary Mughals as the finest warhorse available. Below it came an Arabian-Persian mixed breed prized for endurance, speed, and temperament; then the Turkish breed, valued for strength and stamina on long marches and considered the standard for a regular cavalry unit. Inferior grades extended down to the Tattus, regarded as barely suitable for military use. The quality of each horse was enforced by a branding system called the Dagh, the imperial mark burned into the animal's side.

  Under Jahangir, the army maintained 342,696 cavalry troopers. Each trooper was required to own at least two horses. Their armour consisted of two layers: outer steel plates and a helmet protecting the head, breast, and limbs, with an inner garment of cotton or linen quilted thick enough to resist a sword or a bullet. The horses wore their own protection: a Bargustawan mail and plate armour formed from three parts, a shaffron for the head, a crinet for the neck, and a combined peytral and crupper for the body.

  Francois Bernier observed that a Mughal cavalry archer could unleash six arrows before a rifleman could fire twice. Historian Jos Gommans recorded how the Mughals themselves mocked the European style of cavalry charge, finding their own seated posture at full gallop more effective. Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri testified to the spectacle of that charge, noting that riders adorned their horses' saddles and head covers with gems and jewel stones.

  In the Second Battle of Panipat, the Mughal force led by Ali Quli Khan Shaibani fielded three sections of cavalry vanguard with a centre of 10,000 horsemen, including Bairam Khan's detachment of Turks. That battle illustrated the diversity of the cavalry: at any given time the troops under a single Subahdar might be drawn from dozens of different ethnic backgrounds, equipped and drilled according to regional traditions that the empire had absorbed rather than erased.

• 5. Elephants, Camels, and Guns

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  In 1581, the Catalan Jesuit Antoni de Montserrat recorded that Akbar brought around 500 elephants and 28 field cannons to his battle against his brother Mirza Hakim. That scale was not unusual. Akbar maintained between 5,000 and 7,000 elephants in his fil-khana, his elephant house, reserving about 100 of the best for his personal collection. Historian Raman Sukumar estimated that under Jahangir the total elephant population in Mughal service swelled from 12,000 to 40,000.

  Abul Fazl, author of the Akbarnama, stated that in Mughal society one well-conditioned elephant was worth 500 horses. War elephants wore Bargustawan-i-pil armour of chain mail and plate that weighed 118 kilograms. Their primary role by the later Mughal period had shifted away from frontal shock tactics, as historian Andre Wink noted that cavalry warfare came to replace the logistically difficult elephant charge. But elephants remained essential as carriers: female elephants dragged siege cannons, and the Gajnal unit carried Indian swivel-guns on its back, two guns per animal. In 1703, Mughal commander Daud Khan Panni spent 10,500 coins to purchase between 30 and 50 war elephants from Ceylon.

  Camel units offered a different kind of firepower. The Zamburaks carried mounted swivel guns, weapons double the size of a standard musket, capable of being fired from the camel's saddle. Bernier reported that Aurangzeb took two to three hundred camel-guns with him on his expedition to Kashmir. Akbar's own camel corps numbered around 6,000 to 7,000 riders, drawn from Baloch and Rabari trainers.

  The artillery corps had its own commander, the Mir-i-Atish. The largest piece recorded was deployed during the Siege of Chittorgarh in 1567-1568: a gigantic mortar designed by Persian engineer Fathullah Shirazi, capable of firing a cannonball weighing over 3,000 pounds. Heavy cannons had to be dragged by elephants and oxen, making rivers and waterways essential arteries for moving them. Emperor Akbar used metal cylinder rocket weapons called bans against enemy war elephants at the Battle of Sanbal, and in 1657 rockets were deployed again during the Siege of Bidar. Chronicler Abul Fazl recorded one miscellaneous rocket artillery engine that modern historian Andrew de la Garza compared to the German Nebelwerfer. Those Mughal rockets are considered predecessors to the Mysorean rockets later used by Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan.

• 6. The Navy and the Sea

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  The Mughal naval force was called the Amla-e-Nawara. In Dhaka alone, the fleet at one point numbered 768 ships, crewed by 933 sailors of Portuguese origin and 8,112 artillery personnel. The fleet had not always looked like this: Akbar built the saltwater navy from scratch after conquering Bengal and Gujarat in the late 16th century, reorganizing what had been civilian vessels into professional institutions of naval administration, a process documented in the Ain-i-Akbari.

  The waters of Bengal shaped how the navy fought. The Ganges River delta turned any land campaign into an amphibious operation, and local warlords known as the Baro-Bhuyan military confederacy, twelve chiefs in total, owned large quantities of warships. The Mughals absorbed these men into the imperial framework, assigning them to naval positions and granting them uncultivated lands in return.

  Grand vizier Mir Jumla repaired and fortified three river forts, Hajiganj Fort, Sonakanda Fort, and Idrakpur Fort, between 1660 and 1663 to support maritime operations. He also employed sailors from Britain, the Dutch Republic, and Portugal on his warships: a galiot built by the Dutch at Hooghly was manned by six or seven British sailors under a captain named John Durson. A Britishman named Thomas Pratt was hired to construct boats and make ammunition for riverine warfare.

  The empire's largest ships were impressive by any standard. The Rahimi reached 1,500 tons and was known to Europeans as the great pilgrimage ship, its large sails identifiable from miles away to sailors in the Red Sea. The Ganj-i-Sawai weighed 1,600 tonnes and carried 800 guns onboard. The Ganj-i-Sawai was eventually sacked by English pirate Henry Every.

  The conflict in Chittagong in the mid-1660s tested the navy severely. In December of that year, Aurangzeb dispatched Shaista Khan, his governor of Bengal, with 288 vessels and more than 20,000 men, assisted by about 40 Portuguese vessels, to pacify piracy in Arakan territory and capture Chittagong. The resulting naval battle was documented as the largest galley battle of the Early Modern period, involving more than 500 ships and claiming more than 40,000 lives. Chittagong was renamed Islamabad and became the headquarters of a Mughal faujdar.

  Aurangzeb's vizier Jafar Khan, reflecting on the navy's limitations, blamed not a shortage of money or resources but a shortage of trained men to direct the vessels. Syed Hassan Askari concluded that Aurangzeb's preoccupation with his Maratha conflicts left the naval project chronically under-resourced, though Aurangzeb did acquire British expertise to strengthen the fort of Janjira island and paid Siddi Yaqub a subsidy of 400,000 rupees to manage the Murud-Janjira, whose fleet blockaded Bombay and forced the submission of British forces during the Siege of Bombay.

• 7. Decline and Fragmentation

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  A flaw was built into the mansabdari system from the beginning. A mansabdar graded at a ratio such as 1000/500 held the title of a commander of a thousand but was only required to keep half that many troopers. In practice, the real contingent was cut further still, by a rule requiring that only one-third, one-fourth, or one-fifth of even the nominal sawar figure be maintained. Horse-branding checks meant to guarantee real soldiers were steadily relaxed and widely disregarded. Nobles diverted contingent pay to personal use and were rarely punished. The gap between paper strength and real strength was a permanent feature of the army, not a late abuse.

  Historian Richard M. Eaton noted that Aurangzeb strengthened the mansabdari system and rotated jagirs to deter usurpation during his early reign. But the long Deccan campaigns of his final decades overstrained the jagirdari system, leaving too few productive revenue assignments for a swelling number of claimants. Aurangzeb brought about 170,000 cavalry troopers, along with similar numbers of infantry and non-combatants, for a single campaign in the Deccan alone. The revenues needed to pay them simply could not keep pace.

  Historian Jeremy Black argued that the army's struggles in the period leading to its decline reflected broader patterns of Asiatic military development in the 17th century. The spread of cheap muskets among the peasantry prompted new corps of mounted musketeers. The rise of disciplined European-trained infantry shifted battlefield advantage away from the heavy cavalry on which the Mughals had staked their power. The field artillery remained poor by European standards. Rulers across the subcontinent responded to these shifts differently: the Nizam, for instance, readily embraced European-style infantry while the Mughals were slower to adapt.

  By the eve of Nader Shah's invasion the institutions and norms regulating the Mughal system had reached near-total collapse. In 1739 the Persian conqueror Nader Shah sacked Delhi, exposing how little remained of imperial military power. Provincial governors and tributary chiefs converted their semi-autonomous forces into the standing armies of effectively independent successor states. The single imperial host fragmented into the competing armies of successor polities, and the military architecture Akbar had built across three centuries dissolved into its constituent parts. The Siddi naval forces of Janjira, once subsidized by Aurangzeb to resist the Marathas, were among those successor formations that outlasted the empire they had served.