1761
Third Battle of Panipat
The setting
Panipat, modern Haryana - the same plain as 1526 and 1556
Open plain in winter, after a two-month standoff that starved the Maratha camp. The ground mattered less than the supply lines cut across it.
Reveal the outcome
Recorded sideDurrani Afghan forces and Indian allies under Ahmad Shah Durrani
Recorded resultdecisive victory
Catastrophic Maratha defeat, among the largest single-day death tolls of any pre-industrial battle.
How the atlas explains it
Ahmad Shah won the campaign before the battle. He cut the Maratha lines of supply and waited two months while a huge encamped host - army and pilgrims and families together - ran out of food. The Marathas attacked because they had to, not because the moment was right. They broke the Afghan left; then Vishwasrao, the Peshwa's heir, was shot dead, Sadashivrao Bhau rode into the fight and vanished, and Ahmad Shah committed a held reserve into an army that had just lost both its commanders. The same single-point failure as Talikota and Panipat II, on the same plain.
What followed
Halted Maratha expansion at its peak and left a power vacuum in North India that the East India Company filled within decades. The scale of civilian death makes the engagement type worth marking: this was not only an army that was destroyed.