Mahmud’s second expedition towards Lohara

A second attempt to reach Kashmir

Mahmud’s second expedition towards Lohara failed to take the fortress that guarded an approach to the Kashmir Valley. Gardizi records it under AH 412, separately from the earlier attempt under AH 406. The campaign is conventionally placed in 1021–1022, during the reign of Sangramaraja.

This distinction rests on two passages in the Persian chronicle, not simply on modern accounts repeating two different dates. In the 1928 edition of Gardizi’s Zayn al-Akhbar, the first attempt appears on pages 72–73 and the later one on page 79. The later passage names the fortress, describes a month spent there and records the withdrawal.

The second failure did not end all military activity in the region. Gardizi continues with a movement towards Lahore and Takeshar and raids in the foothills before the return to Ghazni. The defence of the approach to Kashmir and the experience of people farther south therefore need to be considered together.

What the dates establish

Gardizi begins the later episode by stating that the year AH 412 had arrived. The passage itself gives no named month for departure or for the opening of the siege. It says the force stayed at the fortress for a month and returned towards Ghazni when spring came.

Muhammad Nazim’s 1931 reconstruction places the departure from Ghazni in September–October 1021 and the return in March–April 1022. These are the departure and return windows followed here, with attribution. They should not be turned into exact dates for the siege or the withdrawal from the fortress.

The catalogue uses the approximate September–October departure window to place this expedition within 1021. That placement concerns the campaign’s beginning. A month filter does not mean that every incident described in the article happened in those months.

The difference between an Islamic year and a Gregorian calendar year also matters. A campaign assigned to AH 412 can cross the boundary between 1021 and 1022. Retaining the campaign range avoids treating the spring return as though it necessarily occurred in the same Gregorian year as the departure.

The siege in Gardizi’s account

Gardizi says Mahmud intended to go towards Kashmir and besieged Loharkot. He remained there for a month but could not take it because the fortress was exceptionally strong and difficult to attack. The passage gives a clear unsuccessful outcome without supplying a day-by-day record of the fighting.

It names no commander of the garrison and offers no trustworthy total for the defending or attacking forces. It also provides no list of assaults, siege engines, wall breaches or casualties. Those details cannot be reconstructed merely from the fact that a siege took place.

The earlier passage is more explicit about the weather. In its account of AH 406, Gardizi describes severe cold, snow and reinforcements reaching the defenders from Kashmir. The later passage inspected here emphasizes the fortress’s strength and does not repeat that extended description of snow.

Nazim includes severe winter conditions in his account of the second attempt. That is part of his historical synthesis. It should remain distinguishable from what the corresponding passage of Gardizi expressly says, rather than being presented as a direct translation of it.

This distinction leaves room for the role of winter without erasing the defenders. Neither account supports reducing the failure to an accident of weather or portraying the fortress as an empty obstacle.

Withdrawal, foothill raids and the return

After the failure to capture Loharkot, Gardizi says Mahmud came out of the valley and went towards Lahore and Takeshar. He then describes troops being sent out to conduct raids in the foothills. The narrative proceeds to the return towards Ghazni when spring arrived.

The text’s military and religious vocabulary belongs to the outlook of its author. Describing these operations as raids does not establish the experience of every settlement or identify all the people affected. The passage supplies no usable list of villages, named civilian victims, captives or quantities of property taken during this phase.

Even with those limits, the continuation is significant. An unsuccessful siege could be followed by violence elsewhere. The survival of the fortress should not become a claim that the entire surrounding region escaped harm or that the army simply went home immediately.

Nazim explains Takeshar as a sub-Himalayan region of Punjab extending westward from the Chenab. This geographical gloss helps distinguish the later movements from entry into the Kashmir Valley. It does not provide a precise route for every raiding detachment.

Why older accounts differ

Stein’s 1900 discussion treated the dates 1015 and 1021 found in different later histories as alternatives for an unsuccessful expedition. He preferred the later date partly because he connected Al-Biruni’s personal knowledge of Lohara with Mahmud’s movements after the capture of Khwarizm in 1017.

Gardizi’s separate entries provide a reason to distinguish two attempts. Nazim’s later treatment explicitly does so. Reading those entries directly strengthens the distinction while leaving the detailed calendar conversion and the comparison of other witnesses open to further checking.

Al-Biruni’s observations remain valuable for a different purpose. His description of Lahur as a strong fortress and his recorded latitude and distance from Kashmir’s capital support geographical investigation. They do not themselves supply a dated account of the second siege.

The fortress is associated with Loharin in the Poonch region, on the southern side of the Pir Panjal. Stein’s identification used the chronicle’s routes, geographical descriptions and his own field observations. The more detailed discussion of the proposed site belongs to the article on the first approach to Lohara.

The outcome and the gaps

The second campaign left the fortress untaken in the account examined here. It supplies evidence of a successful obstruction of Mahmud’s approach to Kashmir, followed by withdrawal and further campaigning outside the Valley. It does not establish that all of Kashmir’s frontiers were permanently secure.

Gardizi’s narrative is brief and centred on the invading ruler’s movements. It says little about the people maintaining the fortress, the organization of supplies or civilian life during the siege. A detailed article must make use of what survives without replacing those missing voices with invented conversations and casualty figures.

The research still needs comparison with additional editions, manuscript variants and translations of the relevant Persian accounts. The separate years, the month-long stay, the failure to capture Loharkot and the subsequent foothill operations can be read in the edition examined here. Exact siege dates, a complete sequence of fighting and the scale of civilian losses remain unresolved.