A Rajput clan that built Ajmer into a fortress capital, checked Muhammad of Ghor's own first invasion under Prithviraja, and was destroyed the following year when the same enemy returned with a cavalry charge no confederate Indian army could withstand.
Conquest1192Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)
Languages of administration
Sanskrit
Prakrit
Writing system: Nagari
Core region
Eastern Rajputana, centred on Ajmer and the older Chahamana seat of Sambhar (Shakambhari)
How it was governed
1 of 4 coded
Army raised byHow the fighting force was recruited, not how it fought.
No cited figure
Revenue fromWhat the state lived on. The values are unranked: the field cannot express which mattered most.
No cited figure
Succession byThe rule in force, not the outcome. A rule repeatedly violated is still the rule.
No cited figure
Right to rule fromThe ground publicly asserted — on coins, in the khutba, in titles.
conquestThe right of the sword, asserted as such
descentDescent from a house or lineage, publicly invoked
Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)
Each line is drawn from a source that addresses the question directly. A line reads No cited figure where no source consulted does — never because the answer seemed obvious.
Turning points
3 hinges
11001192
1100
Ajayadeva founds AjmerCapital move
Ajayadeva Chauhan founded Ajmer as a new capital for a dynasty that had previously ruled from Sambhar (Shakambhari), giving the Chahamanas a fortress seat that would anchor their power in eastern Rajputana for the rest of the dynasty's own independent existence.
Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)
1191
The first battle of TarainBattle
Prithviraja led a confederacy of Northern Indian princes to a real victory over Muhammad of Ghor's own invading army at Tarain, forcing the Ghurid force to retreat beyond the Indus - the high point of organised Hindu resistance to the Ghurid advance, and the last such victory any Northern Indian confederacy would win.
Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)
1192
The second battle of TarainBattle
Muhammad of Ghor returned with a fresh army and, on the same field, broke Prithviraja's own confederate host with a charge of twelve thousand mounted horsemen; the captured Prithviraja was executed, and Ajmer's own inhabitants were put to the sword or sold into slavery - ending the dynasty's independence in the same year its own greatest king had won his greatest victory.
Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)
Chapters
3 in order · about 3 minutes
A fortress capital
formationDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)
The Chahamanas - Chauhans, in the vernacular - were, like the
Pratiharas, one of the four Rajput clans a well-known legend traced to
a purifying fire-pit at Mount Abu, alongside the Paramaras and
Chaulukyas. For generations their own power was based at Sambhar,
also called Shakambhari, in the heart of Rajputana. That changed
around 1100, when a chief named Ajayadeva Chauhan founded a new
capital at Ajmer - coins struck in his own name and that of his queen
Somaladevi survive as evidence of the new seat's early standing.
Ajmer's own position, defensible and central to the trade routes
crossing eastern Rajputana, would anchor Chahamana power for the rest
of the dynasty's independent history.
The walls of Taragarh, the hill fort above Ajmer.
Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Hemant Shesh · CC BY-SA 3.0
Vigraha-raja's own reach
The dynasty's own territorial reach grew across the twelfth century.
Vigraha-raja IV, reigning in the century's middle decades, extended
his ancestral dominions considerably - later legend credited him with
conquering Delhi outright from its Tomara rulers, though Smith judges
the claim erroneous; Delhi's own Tomara dynasty, founded around the
building of its Red Fort a century earlier, was not in fact displaced
by the Chahamanas at this point. What is certain is that Vigraha-raja
was a patron of real distinction: inscriptions recovered from Ajmer's
own principal mosque preserve substantial portions of two Sanskrit
and Prakrit dramas from his court, one composed in his own honour and
the other, by tradition, his personal composition. It was a court
confident enough in its own standing to commission theater - and it
would produce, within a generation, the dynasty's single most famous
king.
The Adhai Din ka Jhonpra in Ajmer, where the inscribed dramas of Vigraha-raja's court were found.
Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Jakub Hałun · CC BY-SA 4.0
The first field at Tarain
peakDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)
Vigraha-raja's own nephew Prithviraja - Prithviraj, or Rai Pithora -
became, in Smith's own phrase, "the popular hero of Northern India,"
his exploits in love and war still the subject of bardic verse
centuries after his death. The romantic side of that reputation rested
on his abduction, around 1175, of the daughter of Jaichand, the
Gaharwar king of Kanauj - a match Smith notes was "not unwilling" on
the princess's own part, whatever obstacle her father's rivalry with
Prithviraja had placed in the way. The military side rested on real
achievement: in 1182 Prithviraja defeated the Chandela king Parmal and
captured Mahoba, and by the 1180s his own standing was secure enough
that Northern India's rival powers looked to him as their natural
leader against a new and growing threat from beyond the Indus.
Prithviraja in a posthumous painting from Kota, the frontispiece of a manuscript of the Prithviraj Raso.
Royal Asiatic Society, London · Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Unknown · Public domain
A confederacy that actually worked
That threat was Muhammad of Ghor, already undisputed master of most
of the Punjab, whose advance did what decades of mutual rivalry
between Chahamana, Chandela, Gahadavala and other Rajput powers had
never managed: it forced them into a genuine common cause. In 1191
Prithviraja led the resulting confederacy against the invading Ghurid
army at Tarain, between Thanesar and Karnal, and won - a defeat severe
enough to force Muhammad's own forces back across the Indus entirely.
It was the last real Hindu military victory over the Ghurid advance,
and it made Prithviraja, for one year, the undisputed hero not just of
song but of Northern India's actual military balance - a triumph that
gave no warning of how completely it would be reversed within twelve
months.
A charge of twelve thousand
endDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)
Muhammad of Ghor did not accept the defeat at Tarain as final. He
returned the following year, 1192, with a fresh army and met
Prithviraja - again at the head of an immense confederate host, its
numbers swollen by contingents from princes across Northern India - on
the same field. This time the result reversed completely. A charge of
twelve thousand well-armed Ghurid horsemen broke the confederate line
outright, demonstrating, as Smith puts it, "the inability of a mob of
Indian militia to stand the onset of trained cavalry." Prithviraja was
taken prisoner and executed in cold blood; Ajmer itself, his own
capital, was put to the sword or sold into slavery when the Ghurid
army reached it.
A single year, both directions
The two battles of Tarain, fought exactly a year apart on the same
ground, bracket the entire arc of the Chahamana dynasty's own
independence: the first proved a united Northern India could still
turn back a Ghurid invasion outright, and the second proved that
victory had bought nothing durable, because the same confederate
structure that had won in 1191 simply could not survive contact with
a properly organized cavalry charge in 1192. Prithviraja's own defeat
opened the Ghurid conquest of Delhi and the wider Gangetic plain in
earnest - the campaign that would, within two years, end the
Gahadavala kingdom of Kanauj as well, and within little more than a
decade give Northern India the sultanate whose own slave-general
founders would outlast every Rajput power that had once contested
Ajmer, Kanauj and Delhi among themselves.
The walls of Qila Rai Pithora, the fortified city at Delhi named for Prithviraja.
Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Aman Pandey1602 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Prithviraja's confederate army, victorious at Tarain a year earlier, was broken by the same Ghurid cavalry it had beaten in 1191; the defeat opened the Ghurid conquest of Delhi and the wider Gangetic plain and ended Chahamana independence for good.
The shaded band is this polity’s span; the dark part of each bar is the stretch the two shared.
Derived from cited spans, not from a separate source. Where both spans are ranges and they meet only on the widest reading of each, the pair is listed as possible rather than resolved to one answer. Unlinked entries are here for scale and are not written up.
Extent
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Rating
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Reach
No cited figure
Longevity
92 years
20th percentile
Demographic weight
No cited figure
Influence
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Descendant scripts
No cited figure
Religions carried
No cited figure
Successor claims
No cited figure
Weighted total
20th percentile
computed from 1 of 4 axes, renormalised across the axes that have figures. A polity with two documented axes is not penalised against one with four.
