Nadir Shah rose from Turkmen tribal obscurity in Khorasan to the throne of Persia by way of pure military genius — restorer of a collapsed state, and the last of the great steppe-style conquerors. By 1738 his campaigns had reached Kandahar and Kabul; beyond lay the Mughal Empire: fabulously wealthy, politically hollow, its emperor Muhammad Shah presiding over a court famed for poetry, painting, and paralysis. The pretext was the Mughals’ failure to seal the frontier against fleeing Afghans; the motive was simpler — Persia’s wars needed paying for, and Delhi was the treasury of Asia.
At Karnal, north of Delhi, on 24 February 1739, Nadir’s smaller, harder army — its horsemen firing from the saddle, its swivel-gun camel corps outmanoeuvring the Mughals’ lumbering artillery and war elephants — wrecked the imperial host in a few hours. Muhammad Shah surrendered himself; the two monarchs entered Delhi together in March, and the occupation began politely.
The massacre
It broke on a rumour. Grain prices under occupation sparked a bazaar riot; word ran through the city that Nadir Shah was dead, and crowds killed Persian soldiers — some hundreds — through the night. At dawn on 22 March Nadir rode out to see the bodies of his men, was reportedly shot at from a window, and drew his sword — the signal, by his army’s convention, for a general massacre.
For most of a day, Persian troops slaughtered systematically through Chandni Chowk and the surrounding quarters — house by house, the districts of the riot suffering worst — with fires burning whole streets and residents killing their own families ahead of the troops. The dead are conventionally put at 20,000 to 30,000 in roughly six to nine hours; contemporary chroniclers wrote that the Chenab of corpses choked the drains. At the pleading of the Mughal grandees — the emperor’s, by tradition, delivered with the plea that there was no one left to kill but the dead — Nadir resheathed the sword as formally as he had drawn it, and the killing stopped at the word.
The baggage train
The plunder was then organised with tax-collector thoroughness: the imperial treasury, the nobles’ fortunes assessed and extracted, the city mulcted street by street. The haul — coin, jewels, plate — has been estimated at hundreds of millions of rupees; it included the Peacock Throne of Shah Jahan, the jewel-crusted seat that had cost twice the Taj Mahal, and the Koh-i-Noor diamond, allegedly named on the spot — “Mountain of Light” — by Nadir himself. So vast was the take that on returning home he remitted Persia’s taxes for three years.
Nadir left Muhammad Shah his throne and his hollowed empire; Mughal authority never recovered, and the powers that would fight over the carcass — Marathas, Afghans, and a certain English trading company — moved into the vacuum within the decade. Nadir was assassinated by his own officers in 1747; the throne was broken up in the chaos that followed; and the Koh-i-Noor passed via Afghan and Sikh hands to the British crown in 1849 — where it sits, claimed by four countries, to this day.