A tattered teen-ager once conquered Kabul with a rag-tag army. His secret? Mostly, it was that his predecessor was an awful tyrant, and Babur was relatively kind. Relatively - he did build pyramids of skulls from time to time. But then, he was descended from Timur the Lame (Tamerlane) on his father's side, and Genghis Khan on his mother's.
Today, Babur is considered a local hero in Kabul, although he was originally from Uzbekistan. Most people remember him more for his later exploits - conquering India and founding the Mughal Empire - but Babur himself always missed the cool highlands of Afghanistan.
Picture from Hulton Archive / Getty Images.
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