In the medieval period, Purbiya mercenaries from Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh were a common feature in Kingdoms in Western and Northern India.
In the Delhi Sultanate period prior to the rise of the Mughals in India, Jamal-ud-Din Yaqut was a prominent Siddi slave-turned-nobleman who was a close confidant of Razia Sultana (1205–1240 CE).
[6] During the first war between Bahamani Sultanate and Vijayanagara Empire, launched in 1365 by Muhammad Shah I, both sides imported their artillery guns and employed Turkish and European gunners to man them.
[6] During Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama's first historic journey to India in 1498, he observed that there were Italian mercenaries in the employ of various Rajahs on the Malabar coast.
[8][verification needed] The Maratha ruler Shivaji employed many Portuguese and hundreds of Goans and Bombay East Indians in his navy, until they were persuaded by the colonial authorities in Goa to desert.
[5] Shah Alam II gave the German mercenary Walter Reinhardt Sombre a large estate in the Doab, north of Delhi.
[9] Sombre settled in the estate with his wife Farzana Zeb un-Nissa, also known as Begum Samru, and made the village of Sardhana his capital.
[9] The ruling class of this principality was drawn from an assortment of Mughal noblemen, and 200 French Indian and Central European mercenaries, many of whom had converted to Islam.
[5] One of the most prominent mercenaries in the Adil Shahi court was Gonçalo Vaz Coutinho, a Portuguese former landowner in Goa, who was imprisoned there on a murder charge before escaping to Bijapur in 1542.
[11] By the 1680s, the increasing defections of British soldiers and East India Company servants led Charles II of England, to issue an order calling back all Englishmen in the employ of Indian princes.