Bands of Turkic adventurers poured into India to seek their fortune. Bakhtiyar Khilji was one of these adventurers.20 He seems to have arrived in Ghazni from Central Asia around 1195 before moving to India as a soldier. He soon managed to get himself a small estate near Mirzapur (now in Uttar Pradesh) where he gathered a sizeable body of Central Asian soldiers of fortune like himself. Around 1200, Bakhtiyar attacked and destroyed the famous university of Nalanda. Most of the Brahmin scholars and Buddhist monks were put to death and its library was torched. Another famous university at
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