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 sideMaratha confederacy
Recorded resultannihilated; Sadashivrao Bhau killed, his body never certainly identified
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.