As English history to the vast majority of Englishmen begins with the Norman, so does also the modern history of India begin with the Mohammedan, conquest. As early as in the eighth century Arab conquerors made incursions into Scinde as far as Hyderabad, only to be driven back by a revolt of Hindoos; but it was not until the eleventh century that Sultan Mahmoud, the second of the House of Ghuznee, established a Mohammedan garrison to the south of the Indus at Lahore, nor until the end of the twelfth century that Shahab-ud-din penetrated as far as Benares and fixed the seat of government at Delhi. It was at his death that India assumed the form of an independent kingdom distinct from the governments to the north of the Indus; and it was only a few years later that the invasion of the Moguls under Zinghis Khan heralded the approach of the race that was first to gather the greatest portion of the peninsula into a single empire, and to found a dynasty which should rule it. The battle of Delhi placed Baber, the first of this dynasty, in possession of the capital, and set up therein the throne of the Great Mogul. Baber's grandson, Akbar, after fifty years of conquest, wise policy and incessant labour, reduced the whole of Hindostan and great part of the Deccan under the Mogul Empire, dividing it for administrative purposes into eighteen provinces, each under the rule of a governor or _subahdar_. But the Deccan had never been firmly secured; and even after the Hindoos had submitted there were Mohammedan chieftains who refused to acknowledge the supremacy of the Moguls. Too jealous, however, to unite in resistance, these chieftains allowed themselves to be crushed in detail; and in 1656 the Emperor Shah Jehan seemed to have established his authority over all the Mohammedan kingdoms of the Deccan. But even so the work of Shah Jehan did not endure. In the reign of his son Aurungzebe a new power appeared to dispute the rule of the Moguls in the Deccan. A race of Hindoo mountaineers, the Mahrattas, came down from their fastnesses in the Western Ghauts and hired themselves out as mercenary soldiers to the Mohammedan chiefs. Led by a man of genius, the famous Sevajee, the Mahrattas grew continually in strength, and at length fairly defeated the army of the Moguls in the open field. It was not until after the death of Sevajee that Aurungzebe was able to drive his followers back to the hills, and push his Empire to its farthest limits to southward, so far indeed as to include in it even a portion of Mysore. Never before, it should seem, had so much of the peninsula been united under the dominion of one man; but the Mahrattas none the less had laid the axe to the root of the Mogul Empire, and from the death of Aurungzebe the tree, though destined to totter for yet another fifty years, was already doomed. It must now be told how the foundation of a new Indian Empire fell not to the Mahrattas but to invaders from Europe. [Sidenote: 1498.]