Babur (Zahir al-Din Muhammad)

Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483–1530) was the founder and first emperor of the Mughal dynasty in India. A Central Asian prince of the Timurid dynasty descended from Timur on his father's side and Genghis Khan on his mother's side, Babur faced decades of exile and warfare in the Fergana Valley before establishing a base in Kabul in 1504.

Invited into northern India, Babur deployed Ottoman gunpowder matchlocks and artillery at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526, crushing the vastly larger army of Ibrahim Lodi of the Delhi Sultanate. A brilliant prose stylist, naturalist, and poet, his autobiographical memoir, the Baburnama, is celebrated as a masterpiece of Islamic literature. By his own wish, he was buried in the terraced gardens of Bagh-e Babur in Kabul.