Art 4. Vol 4. 2026
There is a temptation, when beginning the story of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, to begin at Panipat. That is where conventional histories often begin him: a Central Asian prince arrives in Hindustan, defeats Ibrahim Lodi in 1526 and establishes what would become the Mughal Empire. But Babur himself would have recognised very little of that man in the frightened twelve-year-old who inherited Ferghana in 1494.
His journey did not begin with India. It began with loss.
The Making of a Timurid Prince
On 8 June 1494, Babur’s father, Umar Shaikh Mirza, died suddenly at Akhsi after falling from the precipice of his pigeon-house.
Babur’s description of the event remains one of the most memorable passages of the Baburnama:
“Umar Shaikh Mirza flew, with his pigeons and their house, and became a falcon.”
The boy who succeeded him was only twelve. And immediately, the political world around him began to close in.
Babur belonged to the Timurid house of Amir Timur, but by the end of the fifteenth century the great empire of Timur existed largely in fragments.
His grandfather, Sultan Abu Sa’id Mirza, had been the last Timurid ruler capable of holding together the great political space of Transoxiana and Khurasan. After his death in 1469, his territories were divided among his sons. Samarkand went to Sultan Ahmad Mirza, Ferghana to Babur’s father Umar Shaikh, Kabul to Ulugh Beg Mirza and other territories to other Timurid princes.
This division explains almost everything that follows. Babur was fighting on every front at once: his own family, ambitious begs, Mongol khans, Uzbek chiefs, and the political consequences of Timurid fragmentation. And nowhere was that contradiction more painfully visible than in his obsession with Samarkand.
The Shadow of Abu Sa’id
Babur’s understanding of this world was profoundly shaped by the memory of his grandfather.
Abu Sa’id represented something that Babur increasingly lacked: Timurid political unity.
He had been able to gather the fractured Timurid territories of Transoxiana and Khurasan under one authority, and Babur’s later narrative repeatedly makes clear how extraordinary the political landscape of his grandfather’s generation had been.
Abu Sa’id had distributed territories among his sons precisely as Timur had done before him, but after his death that system became a source of fragmentation rather than strength.
Babur therefore grew up with a paradoxical inheritance. He possessed an extraordinary pedigree — but very little power. He was a Timurid prince by blood. Yet blood alone did not guarantee obedience.
Samarkand: The City That Haunted Babur
Samarkand held a status no other city could match for Babur: it was the Timurid capital, the city of Timur and Ulugh Beg, the natural centre of the political world to which he believed he belonged. At fifteen, he marched against it. After a seven-month siege, in 1497, he finally entered the city. But victory immediately became a trap.
The city had been devastated by war. There was little wealth to distribute, and Babur’s soldiers, having received almost nothing, began to desert.
Babur records the situation with remarkable candour:
“When we entered the town, it was in such distress that it needed seed-corn and money-advances; what place was this to take anything from?”
His soldiers began leaving “by ones and twos.”
And among those who eventually deserted was the man Babur had trusted most heavily:
Sultan Ahmad Tambal
This is where Babur’s political education truly begins.
Tambal had initially been rewarded handsomely by Babur. When Samarkand was captured, Babur tells us that:
“the largest share falling to Sl. Ahmad Tambal.”
Tambal had risen from the circle of household retainers to the ranks of the great begs.
But Samarkand’s poverty transformed loyalty into self-interest. Tambal abandoned Babur and eventually became one of the principal forces threatening his rule in Ferghana.
The tragedy became even worse. While Babur was struggling to retain Samarkand, Andijan — the very kingdom he had inherited from his father — was threatened. Babur rushed to save it.
He lost Samarkand. Then he lost Andijan.
And soon he was moving through Central Asia not as a sovereign marching from victory to victory, but as a young prince desperately trying to find somewhere from which to survive.
Babur later described this condition with brutal simplicity:
“We had lost Samarkand for the sake of Andizhan, and now Andizhan too was lost.”
He felt, he wrote, that he had been:
“driven from pillar to post.”
This is perhaps the most important sentence for understanding the young Babur. He was, for now, an exile rather than an imperial conqueror.
The Second Samarkand and the Betrayal of Kin
Yet Babur did not surrender his dream. In 1500, at seventeen, he returned to Samarkand.
This time, the political calculations became even more complicated. His younger brother Jahangir Mirza, Sultan Ali Mirza and various Timurid and Mongol factions were all pursuing their own interests. Babur’s family functioned less like a united house than a political battlefield.
The young prince nevertheless succeeded again in entering Samarkand. But the triumph was short-lived. Because another power had now entered the game.
Muhammad Shaybani Khan
The Uzbek leader was fundamentally different from Babur’s Timurid cousins. Where Babur’s Timurid cousins fought over a share of the inheritance, Shaybani wanted all of it.
Shaybani’s rise exposed the greatest weakness of the Timurids: while they fought among themselves for cities, the Uzbeks were constructing a new political order around them.
Babur’s second occupation of Samarkand therefore became a confrontation between two entirely different political futures.
The battle came at Sar-i-Pul in 1501. Babur was defeated. Samarkand was lost. His sister Khanzada Begum fell into Shaybani Khan’s hands. And Babur fled.
The road from Samarkand now became a road of exile.
The Uzbek Storm
What makes Babur’s account extraordinary is that he treats Shaybani as a serious rival rather than a simple villain — he recognised real power when he saw it.
Shaybani was dangerous precisely because he understood the political weakness of the Timurids. Babur’s real problem ran deeper than military defeat: the political world he had inherited was disappearing beneath his feet.
The Timurids were divided between Samarkand, Ferghana, Hisar, Badakhshan and Herat. Husayn Bayqara still ruled in Herat, while his sons competed among themselves. Khusrau Shah controlled territories around Hisar and Balkh. Sultan Mahmud Khan and Ahmad Khan represented the Chaghatayid-Moghul side of the political equation. And everyone had their own calculations.
Babur’s memoir is therefore much more than a war diary. It is an anatomy of Timurid political fragmentation.
Why Kabul? The Forgotten Turning Point
The conventional story often makes Kabul appear almost inevitable. It wasn’t.
Kabul was less a decision than a consequence: circumstance pushed Babur there, one setback at a time. After his repeated failures in Transoxiana, Babur found himself moving through the territories of the very people who were supposed to be his allies. His hopes of recovering Ferghana or Samarkand had become increasingly unrealistic as Shaybani’s power expanded.
One of the lesser-known but crucial pieces of this story is the advice Babur received from Baqi Beg Chaghaniani, associated with Khusrau Shah. The logic was brutally practical: move away from the Uzbek advance, go towards Kabul — and acquire a kingdom of your own.
In other words, Kabul offered something sturdier than refuge: a strategic retreat that could become a new beginning.
The political circumstances of Kabul made this possible. The Timurid prince Ulugh Beg Mirza had died, leaving his young successor Abdul-Razzaq amid factional struggles. Muhammad Muqim Arghun had seized power. Kabul was, therefore, a contested political space, not the impregnable Timurid possession its name might suggest.
Babur recognised the opportunity. He marched towards it. In 1504, he entered Kabul.
For the first time since losing Ferghana, Babur possessed something he could call his own.
Not Samarkand. Not Ferghana. But a kingdom.
The Sufi Inheritance
There is another thread running quietly beneath this political story: the influence of Khwaja Ubaydullah Ahrar.
Ahrar had died in 1490, when Babur was still a child, so his influence on Babur came inherited rather than lived — passed down through his father’s devotion to the Naqshbandi tradition and through Khwaja Mawlana Qazi, a disciple of Ahrar.
The relationship became especially significant when Qazi was later murdered by the forces associated with Ahmad Tambal.
Babur’s response is striking. He writes:
“Of Khwaja Qazi’s being a saint I have no doubt.”
And then, with almost complete admiration:
“No one so bold has ever been seen.”
For Babur, spirituality and politics stayed woven together throughout his life. The Naqshbandi tradition gave him more than religious vocabulary: a model of moral authority, discipline, and political legitimacy.
Later in life, his reverence for Ahrar remained profound: during illness in India, Babur would turn again to Ahrar’s writings and even translate the Risala-i-Walidiyya into Chaghatay Turkic.
Babur’s journey, in other words, was as much inward as it was geographical: he carried Ferghana, Samarkand, Timur, and Ahrar with him wherever he went.
The Prince Becomes a Survivor
By the time Babur entered Kabul in 1504, something fundamental in him had changed. He had failed repeatedly, been betrayed by his own begs, opposed by his own kin, and had lost Samarkand twice and Ferghana once, all while watching the Uzbek advance swallow the Timurid political world he had been born into. And yet he had survived it, which by 1504 was already an achievement few of his rivals could claim.
What Kabul gave him was something Samarkand, for all its glamour, never had the chance to offer: distance. Distance from the Uzbeks pressing in from the north. Distance from the internecine feuding of Ferghana. And, most valuably, the room to decide, for the first time, what kind of Timurid ruler he actually wanted to become, rather than simply which city he could hold onto for another hundred days.
This is where the first part of Babur’s journey properly ends, and it should end here rather than at Panipat or at the founding of an empire twenty-two years later. It ends on the mountains around Kabul, with a twenty-one-year-old prince who had lost nearly everything his ancestors had left him, and had gained, in exchange, a political base and the hard-won experience to use it.
The boy who had inherited Ferghana at twelve was gone. In his place stood something harder, and considerably more dangerous to his enemies: a survivor who had learned exactly what Central Asia’s politics could take from a man, and exactly what it could not.
Samarkand had been the dream. Kabul became the platform. And somewhere beyond Kabul, though Babur could not yet have known how far, lay a land he had already begun to call Hindustan.