The Mughal Empire and Historical Reputation: Crash Course World History #217

Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course World History and today we’re going talk about the Mughal Empire.

And we’re also going to talk about the two most important Mughal emperors, Akbar and Aurangzeb and how their historical reputations were made.

Mr Green, Mr Green? Don’t you mean the Mongol Empire?

[Mongoltage]

Oh, Me From The Past, that reminds of the time that you conflated the word forte with the word forté - which of course you pronounced fort.

But on this occasion you aren’t entirely wrong the Mughals were kind of the Mongols. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

[Theme Music]

So, the Mughals were Muslims who created an empire in India that held power for roughly 200 years between the early 16th and early 18th centuries,

although, technically the Mughal empire didn’t come to an end until after the Indian Rebellion against the British in 1857.

Now the Mughals weren’t the first Muslims in India, those would have been merchants, and they weren’t even the first Muslims to rule significant parts of India.

That honor goes to the Delhi sultanate which began in 1206 in northern India.

But the Delhi Sultanate didn’t last very long, and it was replaced by a bunch of regional kingdoms, and one of them, the Lodi sultanate had the misfortune of falling to the founder of the Mughal dynasty, Babur in 1526.

Not Babar, although that would have been awesome.

Babur was descended from Timur, the last great Central Asian conqueror in the Mongol tradition, and also from Chinggis Khan,

which explains why Babur and his followers are called the Mughals; it’s the Persian-Arabic word for Mongols.

Now I know what you’re saying, something like 12% of human beings currently living in the world are descended from Chinggis Khan, but Babur got in on the ground floor of it.

Anyway, I think we have some footage of Babur raiding the Lodi sultanate, don’t we Stan?

[Mongoltage]

Ehhh… I don’t feel like that was actual file footage from 1206. I feel like that was a racist Hercules movie from Italy in the 1950’s.