Nader Shah Attacks India - Sack of Delhi 1739

TL;DR

Nader Shah invaded the Mughal Empire in 1738–39, defeating a 300,000-man army at Karnal and looting Delhi of 700 million rupees worth of treasure.

Key Points

• 1.Nader Shah seized the Iranian throne in 1736 through calculated manipulation. At the Mughan Qurultai with 20,000 attendees, he staged a false reluctance to rule, executing a mullah who praised the Safavids, and imposed conditions abolishing the Safavid dynasty and curbing Shia clerical power.
• 2.His religious policy was a radical break from Safavid Shiism. Nader stripped clerics of religious lands, redirecting revenues to soldiers, and attempted to have 'Jafarism' recognized as a fifth Sunni school at the Ottoman court — a bid the Ottoman Sultan ultimately rejected.
• 3.The Indian campaign began with the siege of Kandahar in 1737. Nader's 110,000-man army built a mock city called Naderabad to sustain the siege; after two months of assault in early 1738, the Afghans surrendered, restoring Safavid borders before Nader pushed east.
• 4.Nader outmaneuvered Mughal provincial forces through repeated tactical deception. At the Khyber Pass he personally led 10,000 cavalry through the southern Tatsobi pass to strike the Mughal rear, routing Nasir Khan's 20,000 troops and capturing Peshawar within three days.
• 5.The Battle of Karnal on February 24, 1739 destroyed the Mughal field army. Nader lured detached Mughal columns — totaling roughly 30,000 under Saadat Khan and Khan Dowran — into coordinated ambushes using concealed gunners and feigned retreats, exploiting the Mughals' lack of inter-command coordination and their reliance on arrows versus Nader's firearms.
• 6.The sack of Delhi yielded staggering plunder estimated at 700 million rupees. After a Delhi riot killed 3,000 of his soldiers and triggered a massacre of ~30,000 civilians, Nader extracted gold, silver, jewels, the Peacock Throne, and territorial concessions west of the Indus — enough loot to fund his army and declare a three-year tax-free period across his empire.