The first major and enduring Muslim-ruled state in the Indian subcontinent (1206–1526), founded by a Turkic former slave-soldier and ruled by five successive dynasties from Delhi. It planted Persianate Islamic high culture across a Hindu-majority land, repelled repeated Mongol invasions that devastated the rest of Asia, and is read today in sharply opposed ways.
In the decades around 1300, the Mongols had already shattered Baghdad and emptied the cities of Central Asia. Their horsemen pushed again and again toward northern India — and one state stood in their path and held. The Sultanate of Delhi turned back invasion after invasion across the northwest, and for a crucial span much of northern India was spared the ruin visited on the lands to its west. Delhi itself would fall to Timur in 1398, but that lay a century off. Scholars, poets, and refugees fleeing the Mongols streamed into Delhi instead, and the sultans used that wealth of talent to build a new Indo-Islamic world on Indian soil. The state that did this was itself founded by a former military slave. That is the paradox at its center: a regime of outsiders, built on conquest, that became the shield of the subcontinent.