The Central Asian prince who lost his ancestral kingdom and won an empire instead — descended from both Timur and Genghis Khan, driven out of Samarkand by the Uzbeks, he seized Kabul, then conquered northern India at Panipat in 1526 and founded the Mughal dynasty. He also wrote the Baburnama, one of the most candid memoirs any conqueror has left.
He was a king at twelve, an exile by twenty, and an emperor of India at forty-three. Babur spent his youth fighting to hold Samarkand, the fabled capital of his ancestor Timur, and lost it every time. Cut off from Central Asia, he turned south, took Kabul, then gambled everything on a march into India. At Panipat in 1526 his guns and tactics broke a far larger army, and the Mughal dynasty was born. Yet he stayed ambivalent about the land he won. He missed the melons and cool gardens of Kabul, where he asked to be buried. And he wrote it all down — the battles, the friendships, the drinking he gave up, the grief, even the plants and animals he saw — in a memoir so frank it remains one of the rare honest windows into a conqueror's mind.