Babur captured Kabul in 1504 after years of instability in Central Asia. The city became his base before the later Mughal conquest of northern India. In Kabul he cultivated gardens, poetry, memoir-writing and a courtly culture shaped by Turkic, Persian and Timurid traditions.

Babur's memoir, the Baburnama, became one of the great works of early modern life writing. His Kabul years show how conquest, exile, landscape and multilingual court culture fed a prose style that later enriched Persianate and Mughal literary worlds.