Latest / Aurangzeb: The Emperor Who Expanded and Broke the Mughal Empire — Fexingo History / Aurangzeb's Army: The Mughal Military Machine
Transcript
- Lucas: You know, we've spent a lot of episodes on Aurangzeb's individual campaigns, his sieges, his religious policies, but I think today we should step back and look at the machine itself — the Mughal army under Aurangzeb. Not just the battles, but the whole infrastructure that kept a massive empire fighting for decades. Luna: Oh, that sounds like a great angle. What was the backbone of that military? Lucas: The core was the mansabdari system, which was like a rank-based payroll that tied every noble to a specific military obligation. Aurangzeb inherited this from Akbar, but he tweaked it. A mansabdar was responsible for maintaining a certain number of cavalrymen and horses, and his rank determined his salary and his position in the hierarchy. But by Aurangzeb's time, the system was getting creaky. There were too many mansabdars, and the empire couldn't always pay them on time, so they started to skim from their own troops' pay. Luna: So the soldiers were often underpaid or not paid at all? Lucas: Exactly. That's one reason desertion was a chronic problem. But at the top, you had the ahadis, the emperor's own elite guards. They were directly recruited, paid from the imperial treasury, and fiercely loyal. They were the Praetorian Guard of the Mughals, if you will. They accompanied Aurangzeb even into the Deccan, where he spent the last 25 years of his life camping with his army. Lucas: And then you had the artillery. This is where the Mughals had a real edge for a while. Cannons were heavy and hard to move, but they could break down fort walls. Aurangzeb used massive siege guns like the Zarb Zaman, which was so big it took hundreds of oxen to pull. But they also had smaller, more mobile pieces, and they had rocketeers — basically guys who fired rockets that would explode in the air, creating chaos among enemy troops. Luna: Rockets in the 17th century? That sounds ahead of its time. Lucas: It does, but they were crude — basically iron tubes on bamboo sticks, not like the Congreve rockets later. Still, they were intimidating. But the real shock weapon was the war elephant. We did an episode on them, but here's the thing: in Aurangzeb's army, elephants weren't just for show. They were trained to break through enemy lines, trample infantry, and their smell spooked horses. But they were also a liability — if an elephant panicked, it could stampede and crush your own men. Luna: Sounds like a double-edged sword. Lucas: Yeah. So commanders used them carefully. But the army wasn't just about the heavy hitters. It had a massive support tail. The camp followers alone could number hundreds of thousands — merchants, cooks, servants, and even entertainers. There were bazaars that moved with the army, so soldiers could buy supplies. There were also postal runners and pigeon posts to keep communication lines open, and there were medical units with hakims to tend the wounded. Lucas: That's the logistics side, which is often underrated. Aurangzeb's genius was in organization, not just in fighting. He was a micromanager, and he controlled the army from his tent. He knew the strengths and weaknesses of his commanders, and he often intervened in minute details, like how many horses a certain officer should maintain. Luna: That must have driven his generals crazy. Lucas: Probably. But it also meant that the army was a well-oiled machine, at least on paper. Yet the reality was messy. The army was a patchwork of ethnic groups — Turanis from Central Asia, Iranis from Persia, Afghans, Rajputs, and later Deccanis. Each group had its own leaders and loyalties. Aurangzeb tried to balance them, but it was a constant juggling act. He suspected some of his nobles, especially the old mansabdars, of disloyalty, and he wasn't wrong. Some of them defected to the Marathas or the Deccan sultanates. Luna: Given all that, how did he manage to keep the army together for so long? Lucas: Well, part of it was sheer will and his personal presence. He led from the front, enduring the hardships of the Deccan with his soldiers. He also kept them busy — constant campaigns meant there was always loot to be had and land to be assigned. But there was a cost. The treasury was drained, and the army became more and more expensive to maintain. By the end, the soldiers were often unpaid for years, and the empire was effectively bankrupt. Luna: So the very machine that expanded the empire also broke it. Lucas: That's a grim irony, isn't it? And it's something we'll come back to. But first, let me talk about the moral and ethical dimension. Aurangzeb was a devout Sunni Muslim, and he wanted his army to reflect that. He issued regulations in the fatawa e alamgiri, his legal compendium, about the conduct of soldiers — they were forbidden from molesting civilians, looting without authorization, and destroying crops. In theory, war was supposed to be just and humane, at least for those who weren't enemies of the state. Lucas: But the reality on the ground was often different. The chronicler Bhimsen Saxena, who served in the Deccan, described how soldiers sometimes tortured villagers to reveal hidden treasures. So there was a gap between the ideal and the practice. Still, Aurangzeb himself was known to personally punish soldiers who committed atrocities, especially against women and children. That was rare for a monarch at that time. Luna: That's more than most rulers did back then, I think. Lucas: True. But the very nature of the war in the Deccan — this long, grinding conflict — made it brutally hard to maintain discipline. The Marathas, led after Shivaji by his sons and then his grandson, Shahu, used guerrilla tactics. They would strike and melt away, and the Mughal army had to chase them across rugged terrain. That wore down the soldiers, and morale dipped. Lucas: Still, Aurangzeb kept pushing. He believed he was on a divine mission, and that conviction is what kept the army going, at least while he lived. But after he died in 1707, the army quickly lost cohesion. Without his iron hand, the mansabdars and the ethnic factions pulled in different directions. The empire's military power dissolved within a few decades, even though it had seemed so formidable just fifty years earlier. Luna: It's like the whole system was built on his personal strength, and when he was gone, it just collapsed. Lucas: Absolutely. And that's the paradox of his legacy. He expanded the empire to its greatest territorial extent, but he did it by exhausting the very resources that made it powerful. It's a lesson that military might alone isn't enough — you need a sustainable system, and he didn't have that. Lucas: Before we go further, I want to say this. If today's episode gave you a new way to think about Aurangzeb and the Mughal army, well, that's what we're here for. And the way we keep these conversations ad-free, unsponsored, is through listener support. If you find yourself getting something useful out of these deep dives, you can help us keep it going at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small way to say thanks and keep the history flowing. Luna: Yeah, and it really does mean a lot to us. We've been at this for over 200 episodes, and it's the listeners who make it possible. Lucas: So, back to the army. We talked about the mechanics, but I want to return to Aurangzeb's personal relationship with his soldiers. There are stories from the maasir i alamgiri, the official court chronicle, that he would personally inspect the troops, even the common foot soldiers. He would ask about their rations and their families. That was unusual for an emperor who was usually aloof. It earned him a kind of loyalty that went beyond duty. Luna: So he was a hands-on commander, not just a distant king. Lucas: Exactly. And that's why, when the army finally returned to Delhi after his death, it was a shadow of what it had been. The soldiers were old, broken, and unpaid. The empire's treasury was empty. It's a poignant image — that great war machine, reduced to a weary column of men marching home. It's almost like the army itself was a mirror of Aurangzeb's reign: powerful, but ultimately overextended and fragile. Lucas: One more thing: the role of the fatawa e alamgiri in military law. It laid out rules for the distribution of plunder, the treatment of prisoners, and the prohibition of certain weapons, like poisoned arrows. That's pretty forward-thinking. But it also sanctioned the jizya tax on non-Muslims, which we've discussed. So the same legal code that humanized war also reinforced religious discrimination. It's a contradiction that runs through his entire rule. Luna: It's a complex legacy, to say the least. Lucas: It sure is. And that's why we keep digging into these details — because the more you learn about Aurangzeb, the more you see how one man's faith and ambition shaped a century of South Asian history, for better and for worse.