Death of Mahmud of Ghazni

April 30, 1030

The Turkic sultan who had raided India seventeen times and carried home enough gold to build palaces at Ghazni died in his capital. His empire would not long survive him. A new Oghuz Turkic group, the Seljuks, were already stirring on his Central Asian frontier and would soon strike. The wealth he had looted funded a court that rivaled Baghdad in its patronage of poets and scholars.