The Mughals were a dynasty of Central Asian origin, founded in India by Babur after the First Battle of Panipat in 1526, that ruled most of the subcontinent at its height and lasted, in name, until 1857.
Babur descended from Timur on his father's side and from Chinggis Khan on his mother's. After losing his ancestral principality of Ferghana and failing to hold Samarkand, he made Kabul his base and turned towards Hindustan. At Panipat in 1526 he defeated the Delhi Sultan Ibrahim Lodi, using field artillery and the tulughma flanking tactic, and in 1527 he beat a Rajput confederacy led by Rana Sanga at Khanwa. His son Humayun lost the throne to the Afghan ruler Sher Shah Suri in 1540 and spent fifteen years in exile, regaining Delhi only in 1555, months before his death.
The empire took its lasting shape under Akbar (1556–1605), who won the Second Battle of Panipat in 1556 and spent decades expanding into Rajputana, Gujarat, Bengal, Kashmir and the Deccan fringe. Jahangir and Shah Jahan ruled over a period of relative stability and great artistic output, and Aurangzeb (1658–1707) pushed the frontier deep into the Deccan, taking Bijapur and Golconda in the 1680s. After 1707 a run of weak successors, court factions, the rise of regional powers and invasions by Nadir Shah (1739) and Ahmad Shah Abdali steadily reduced the emperor to a figurehead.
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