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The Ghurid Sultanate. The Ghurids (c. 1011-1215) were a mountain dynasty from Ghur, the remote highlands of central Afghanistan, who rose from local chiefs - first as tribute-payers, then rivals, of the Ghaznavids - to build the last great empire of the eastern Islamic world before the Mongols. The dynasty's rise began with a family feud: after the Ghaznavid sultan poisoned their prince, his brother Ala al-Din Husain 'World-Burner' (Jahansuz) sacked Ghazna itself in 1150, and his nephews Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad and Mu'izz al-Din Muhammad (Muhammad of Ghor) divided and expanded the realm.
While Ghiyath al-Din ruled the west from Firuzkuh, Mu'izz al-Din turned east and changed Indian history. After an early defeat by the Rajput confederacy of Prithviraj Chauhan at Tarain (1191), he returned the next year and crushed the Rajputs at the second battle of Tarain (1192), opening the Gangetic plain. His slave-generals - Qutb al-Din Aibak, Bakhtiyar Khalji - took Delhi, sacked the great Buddhist university of Nalanda, and carried Turkish arms to Bengal; defeated in turn by the Khwarazmians at Andkhud (1204), Mu'izz al-Din was assassinated in 1206, and his Indian conquests became the independent Delhi Sultanate under Aibak.
In their heyday the Ghurids ruled from Herat to the Bay of Bengal and built some of the most beautiful monuments of the age: the minaret and palace of Firuzkuh, the surviving Minaret of Jam - a 65-meter tower of carved brick and Kufic inscription, now a UNESCO World Heritage site - and the great mosques of Ghazna and Delhi begun by their generals, including Delhi's Qutb Minar, finished by the Delhi sultans.
The empire had no deep roots: held together by the two brothers' energy, it was squeezed between the Khwarazmian Empire and its own rebellious generals, and after 1210 the Khwarazmshah Muhammad overran it; the last Ghurid holdings fell by 1215. But their Indian inheritance, the Delhi Sultanate, ruled for another three centuries.
Encyclopaedia Iranica: Ghurids
World History Encyclopedia: Muhammad Ghori
Encyclopaedia Iranica: Firuzkuh: The Ghurid Capital