Battle of Peshawar
Mahmud's first great victory in India, which broke the Hindu Shahi kingdom and opened Punjab to two decades of raids.
By the end of the tenth century the Hindu Shahi kings, who ruled from Waihind on the Indus, held the Punjab and the gateway to India. Their great enemy was the Turkic dynasty of Ghazni in Afghanistan.
On 27 November 1001 Mahmud of Ghazni, with some fifteen thousand cavalry, met the Shahi king Jayapala near Peshawar. Jayapala's army was larger, with elephants, but Mahmud's mounted archers broke it. Jayapala was captured with fifteen members of his family and released for a heavy ransom of gold and elephants.
Shamed, Jayapala abdicated and burned himself on a pyre. The battle opened the Punjab to Mahmud's raids; within twenty-five years Lahore was a Ghaznavid city, and the region entered eight centuries of rule by Muslim dynasties from beyond the Indus.
Same era
Invaders at the gates, 1400 BCE – 1221
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