Timur sacks Delhi
Siri, Delhi
Timur routs the Tughluq army outside Delhi on 17 December 1398 and sacks Siri, Jahanpanah and Old Delhi; the Sultanate never regains its reach.
Timur crossed the Indus in September 1398 and sacked towns across the Punjab. Before the battle he had a great number of prisoners killed; his court historians put it at 100,000. After defeating Sultan Nasir al-Din Mahmud and his minister Mallu Iqbal, his army plundered the three walled cities of Delhi for days and left early in 1399 with captives. Yazdi says Timur reserved all the stonemasons for the great mosque he planned at Samarkand.
The Sultanate survived as a regional state. The Sayyids, who ruled from 1414 as nominal deputies of Timur's son, held little beyond Delhi. Bahlul Lodi, from 1451, rebuilt it into a kingdom of the Punjab and the Ganga plain, and Sikandar Lodi made Agra his capital; Gujarat, Malwa, Jaunpur and Bengal went their own way. The Lodis' Delhi fell to Babur, Timur's descendant, at Panipat in 1526.
The numbers come from Timur's court historians, who wrote to glorify him, and no independent count exists. Historians accept a massacre on a very large scale and treat the figures as uncertain.
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