Babur

Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (14 February 1483 – 26 December 1530), founder of the Mughal empire, was first and longest a king of Kabul: an exiled prince from the Fergana Valley who crossed the Hindu Kush in 1504, seized the city, and from that Afghan base launched the conquest of India. He is buried in Kabul, in the garden he laid out himself, and his candid memoir — the Baburnama — remains one of the great autobiographies of any age. He is buried in the Gardens of Babur in Kabul.[1]

An exile who would not quit

Born in Andijan, descended from Timur through his father and from Genghis Khan through his mother, Babur inherited tiny Fergana at twelve, took Samarkand twice, and lost it twice — finally to the Uzbek conqueror Shaybani Khan, who swept him out of Central Asia altogether. By 1504 he was a refugee with two or three hundred followers when he turned on Kabul, held by the Arghun chiefs; after a siege of barely ten days the city opened its gates, and Babur had a kingdom.[1][2]

Kabul, 1504–1526

He would rule from Kabul for twenty-two years, and his memoirs make the city and its gardens, fruits, and weather more vividly documented than almost anywhere else in early modern Asia. Revenue from the poor mountain kingdom never satisfied him: his first raid into India came in 1505, through the Khyber. In the west he contested Kandahar for years with the Arghuns and their Safavid backers, securing the city around 1522 and commemorating his conquests with the carved inscription terrace now known as Chilzina.[1][3]

Hindustan and the empire

In 1526 Babur destroyed the Lodi sultanate at Panipat and founded the empire his grandchildren would call Gurkani and history calls Mughal. He died in Agra in December 1530, but his wishes brought him home: his remains were moved to Kabul between 1539 and 1544 and reburied in Bagh-e Babur, the terraced garden he had made on the city's edge.[1][4]

The memoirist and gardener

Baburnama — written in Chaghatai Turkic, translated into Persian under his grandson Akbar — records wars and famines but also melons, snowfalls, and temperaments with equal precision. A devoted garden-builder credited with carrying the formal charbagh to India, Babur made his Kabul garden a dynastic sanctuary: Jahangir pilgrimaged there in 1607 and walled the grounds, Shah Jahan raised a marble screen around the tomb in 1638, and Aurangzeb added a white marble mosque in 1675 to mark his conquest of Balkh. After centuries as a public pleasure ground and later royal residence, the garden was restored in the early twenty-first century and draws up to a million visitors a year.[5][4]

Sources

  1. Babur — Wikipedia
  2. Siege of Kabul (1504) — Wikipedia
  3. Chil Zena: A Carved Mountain Gateway and Stair Shelter in Kandahar — Ancient History Sites
  4. Bagh-e Babur — Wikipedia
  5. Ebba Koch, "The Garden of Babur in Kabul: A Dynastic Project of the Mughal Dynasty and Its Survival," International Journal of Islamic Architecture (Intellect, 2023).