The years around 1200 ce mark a significant turning point in the history of warfare in India, due to the decisive campaigns waged in northern India by the Ghurids of Afghanistan and the concomitant introduction of new forms of military culture from the eastern Islamic world. While limited parts of India’s periphery had been under Islamic rule long before this time, it was only under the Ghurids that Islamic control was established in the core region along the Ganga and Yamuna rivers (the “Ganga-Yamuna Doab”). A series of decisive battles was carried out here between 1192 and 1206, under the direction of Quṭb al-Dīn Aybeg, a Turkish slave commander (ghulām) in the service of the Ghurid sultan Mu‘izz al-Dīn Muḥammad bin Sām. Even after Mu‘izz al-Dīn’s death in 1206, Aybeg remained in India controlling the newly acquired Ghurid territories from his base in Lahore in the Punjab.

The Ottoman empire is named after Osman(d.1324), the eponymous founder of the dynasty, whose name came to be rendered in English as Ottoman. Osman was a Turkish frontier lord – beg in Turkish – who commanded a band of semi-nomadic fighters at the beginning of the fourteenth century in northwestern Asia Minor (Anatolia), known at the time to Turks, Persians, and Arabs as the land of Rum (Rome); that is, the land of the Eastern Roman Empire. Osman Beg was but one of many Turkish lords who carved out their respective principalities in western and central Asia Minor, profiting from the power vacuum caused by the Mongols’ destruction of the Seljuq sultanate of Rum in 1243.