Babur Wins the First Battle of Panipat With Cannon and Cart
Twelve thousand men and a line of tethered carts break the Delhi Sultanate's much larger army
Quick facts
- Date
- April 21, 1526
- Location
- Panipat, north of Delhi
- Babur's force
- About 12,000, with 15-20 cannon
- Result
- Ibrahim Lodi killed; Delhi Sultanate ends
What happened
At Panipat, about 50 miles north of Delhi, Babur's roughly 12,000 men met the army of Ibrahim Lodi, the Sultan of Delhi, whose forces are usually put between 30,000 and 100,000 with as many as 1,000 war elephants. Babur had no such numbers, but he had gunpowder: 15 to 20 field cannon under Ottoman-trained gunners, lashed behind a barricade of roughly 700 carts tied together with rawhide, an arrangement he had learned of from Ottoman use at the Battle of Chaldiran. Matchlock men fired from cover between the carts while cavalry under the tulughma tactic swept around both flanks. The cannon fire panicked Ibrahim's elephants, which trampled back through his own ranks, and Ibrahim Lodi was killed in the fighting along with thousands of his men.
Why it matters
The battle ended the Delhi Sultanate outright and put Babur in control of Delhi and Agra within days, giving him the base from which the Mughal Empire's near 200-year run over northern India began. It also demonstrated, on Indian soil for the first time at this scale, that a smaller force built around field artillery and coordinated cavalry could defeat a far larger army built around elephants and numbers.
How we know
Babur described the campaign and the battle in his own memoirs, the Baburnama, written in Chagatai Turki; his account of the cart-and-cannon defense and the tulughma flanking maneuver is the primary basis for modern reconstructions of the battle.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Timeline: Mughal Empire · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Victoria and Albert Museum. The arts of the Mughal Empire · Reputable sourcevam.ac.uk · The domain "vam.ac.uk" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- Ancient India → · The battle ended the last Delhi Sultanate and opened the deeper span of Indian history to Mughal rule.