Qutb-ud-din Aibak died in AD 1210, due to injuries sustained in a fall while…

Qutb-ud-din Aibak, a former slave-general of Muhammad of Ghor, founded the Slave (Mamluk) Dynasty and became the first Sultan of Delhi in AD 1206. Chaugan, an equestrian mallet-and-ball game played on horseback (a form of polo), was a favourite pastime and cavalry-training exercise of the early Turkic Sultans of Delhi.

In AD 1210, while playing chaugan at Lahore, Aibak's horse stumbled and fell, crushing him beneath it and causing fatal injuries. He died of these injuries and was buried at Lahore, an event recorded in early chronicles such as Minhaj-i-Siraj's Tabaqat-i-Nasiri.

• Sword fight refers to close combat or duelling with bladed weapons, associated with battles or personal disputes of the period rather than a mounted sporting game.

• Wrestling (kushti) is an unmounted grappling contest between two competitors, practiced widely in medieval India as physical training.

• Archery is the skill of shooting arrows from a bow, a core military skill of the Delhi Sultanate's mounted and foot soldiers.

None of these three activities is linked in the chronicles to Aibak's fatal fall; the historically attested cause of his death is the accident while playing chaugan (polo).