Timur sacks Delhi

Since Firuz Shah's death the Delhi Sultanate had been torn by civil war — from 1394 one sultan held Delhi and another Firozabad — and the governors of its great provinces paid it only nominal allegiance. Timur's grandson Pir Muhammad crossed the Indus late in 1397 and took Multan; Timur himself crossed the river in September 1398, sacked the strongholds of Bhatnair and Sarsuti and marched on Delhi. According to Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi's Zafarnama, written in the 1420s, a few days before the battle (on 3 Rabi‘ II) Timur ordered the Hindu prisoners taken since the Indus to be killed, fearing that they would join the enemy: "100,000 infidel Hindus were put to the sword" (transl. H. M. Elliot and J. Dowson).

The battle was fought on 7 Rabi‘ II 801 — 16 December 1398 in the reckoning of Elliot and Dowson and of Peter Jackson, 17 December in other accounts — on the plain outside the city. Yazdi says that Timur protected his front against the sultan's 120 war elephants with a ditch, palisades, buffaloes tied together and iron caltrops, but won without needing them. The Indian army — 12,000 horse and 40,000 foot in Yazdi, 10,000 horse and 20,000 foot in other Timurid figures cited by Jackson — was routed; Mahmud Shah and Mallu fled from the city by night, the sultan to Gujarat and Mallu into the Doab. An amnesty granted to the citizens meant nothing once disorders broke out between the inhabitants and the soldiers who had entered the city: for several days the three cities of Delhi — Siri, Jahanpanah and Old Delhi — were plundered and burned, the defenders who held out in the great mosque of Old Delhi were killed, and, by Yazdi's account, every soldier led away "more than twenty persons as slaves".

Timur stayed in Delhi for fifteen days and left on 22 Rabi‘ II, about 1 January 1399, taking the captured elephants and thousands of craftsmen with him; Yazdi says that he reserved the stonemasons for the great Friday mosque he planned at Samarkand. Storming Meerut and ravaging the land towards Hardwar and Jammu, he recrossed the Indus in March 1399. In Jackson's words, the Sultanate "reverted to being simply one of a number of competing powers" in northern India: for three years there was not even a sultan in Delhi, and the Tughluq dynasty ended with Mahmud Shah's death in 1412/1413.