In the fifteenth century, the Sultanate of Gujarat emerged as the most powerful of the kingdoms that succeeded the Delhi sultanate. The regional sultans of Gujarat, sometimes referred to as the Muzzafarid or the Ahmadshahi dynasty, were erstwhile nobles of the Delhi sultanate who declared their independence in 1407 from the already dwindling authority at Delhi, and their rule in Gujarat lasted until the 1580s - over a hundred and fifty years - when the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) defeated the last ruling sultan on the plains of Saurashtra. The Muzaffarids integrated the diverse frontier region and its different geographical and social elements. And in doing so they created a distinctive vocabulary and idiom of ‘Gujarati’ regional rule.

In c. 1407, Zafar Khan, the former noble of Delhi and governor of Gujarat, reluctantly declared himself the independent sultan of the province. While Delhi had been sacked at the hands of Timur in 1398, the prestige the former capital and its rulers commanded remained intact. Therefore, many of the regional governors of provinces such as Jaunpur, Malwa, and Gujarat did not so much revolt against their former masters as seek less confrontational means of consolidating their power. Zafar Khan, Gujarat's governor, took the title of Muzaffar Shah, laying the foundations of what was to become one of the longest-lasting regional sultanates to emerge during the fifteenth century. At the time that Zafar Khan declared himself sultan, throwing off the shackles of the moribund Delhi sultanate under Mahmud Tughlaq II (r. 1324-1351), the region had long been an imperial province, referred to both as ‘Gujarat’ or by the name of its capital, Anhilvada (or Naharwala in the Persian chronicles). The regional sultans, Muzaffar Shah and his successors, particularly Sultan Mahmud Begada (r. 1459-1511), strove to integrate different geographical, political, and societal elements of the region. By 1480, Mahmud Begada, who styled himself ‘Gujarati', had established military control over most of the territories of the modern region, as well as, at times, parts of Malwa, southern Rajasthan, and the southern coastal lands stretching almost all the way to present-day Mumbai. It was most of this territory that, with Akbar's conquest, went on to form the Mughal province or subah of Gujarat.

Three major developments preceded this regional imperium and set the stage for the political and cultural transformations that Gujarat would undergo in the fifteenth century.