Between about 1000 and 1027 Mahmud of Ghazni led some seventeen campaigns into northern India, sacking Kannauj, Mathura, Thanesar and the temple of Somnath, and annexing the Punjab, where Lahore became the Ghaznavid Indian capital. Ghaznavid court chronicles present the campaigns as jihad and record enormous quantities of plunder and enormous numbers of captives, describing slave markets in Ghazna, Khurasan and beyond glutted with Indian captives; the numbers are conventional and propagandistic, and modern historians treat them as unusable while accepting that enslavement occurred at scale. Temples were destroyed at several of the sacked cities, an element that has since become central to competing modern Indian narratives about the period. The raids did not attempt to hold most of the territory they crossed, but the annexation of the Punjab established a permanent Muslim political presence in northern India and the routes and precedents used by the later Ghurid conquest and Delhi Sultanate. Assessment of the campaigns is politically charged in South Asia, with Hindu nationalist historiography treating them as a foundational trauma and other historians emphasising plunder economics over religious motive.
Ghaznavid armies raided the Punjab, the Ganges plain and Gujarat, carrying captives and plunder back to Afghanistan
No defensible denominator exists. Eleventh-century northern India has no census or fiscal register that survives in usable form; atlas-scale reconstructions give figures for the subcontinent as a whole but cannot be apportioned to the raided regions. The captive numbers in the Persian court chronicles — Utbi, Baihaqi, and the later Firishta — are rhetorical set-pieces meant to magnify the sultan's holy war, ranging from 5,000 to 500,000 for single campaigns, and modern historians treat them as unusable as counts.
No defensible range. The chronicles claim great slaughter at Somnath and elsewhere in the conventional language of victory narratives, and there is no independent evidence against which to test them.
Ghaznavid court chronicles themselves record the destruction of temples and the marching of captives into slavery, which is the only documentation available.
India, Afghanistan