Medieval history of bihar

With the advent of the foreign aggression and eventual foreign subjugation of India, the position of Bihar was also adversely affected. Around the middle of the 7th or 8th century A.D. - the Gupta Period - when, with the conquest of almost all of northern India by invaders from the middle-east, the Gupta dynasty also fell a victim.

In medieval times Bihar lost its prestige as the political and cultural center of India.

The Mughal period was a period of unremarkable provincial administration from Delhi.

The only remarkable person of these times in Bihar was Sher Shah, or Sher Khan Suri, an Afghan.
Based at Sasaram which is now a town in the district of the same name in central-western Bihar, this jagirdar of the Mughal King Babur was successful in defeating Humayun, the son of Babur, twice - once at Chausa and then, again, at Kannauj (in the present state of Uttar Pradesh or U.P.) Through his conquest Sher Shah became the ruler of a territory that, again, extended all the way to the Punjab. He was noted as a ferocious warrior but also a noble administrator - in the tradition of Ashok and the Gupta kings. Several acts of land reform are attributed to him. The remains of a grand mausoleum that he built for himself can be seen in today's Sasaram (Sher Shah's maqbara.)
Thus Bihar saw a brief period of glory for six years during the rule of Sher Shah Suri, who was from Sasaram and built the longest road of the Indian subcontinent, the Grand Trunk Road, which starts from Calcutta and ends at Peshawar, Pakistan.

Muhammad Bin Bakhtiar Khilji, a General of Muhammad Ghori captured Bihar in 12th century. Ikhtiar Uddin Muhammad bin Bakhtiar Khilji (12th century) was one of the military generals of Qutb-ud-din Aybak. Muhammad Khilji conquered Bihar in 1193. He also brought Bengal’s ruler Lakshmana Sena under his authority. He was the founder of the Khilji dynasty.

During 1557-1576, Akbar, the Mughal emperor, annexed Bihar and Bengal to his empire and made Bihar a part of Bengal. With the decline of Mughals, Bihar passed under the control of Nawabs of Bengal, one of the important state in india.