One of North India's most celebrated heroes, king Harsha (ca. 590-647) was a gifted warrior-administrator, a sensitive poet and playwright, and a generous patron of religions and the arts.

From the middle of the 5th century North India was subjected to the incursions of marauding Huns. Their activity hastened the decline of the Gupta Empire, which dissolved by the mid-6th century, leaving North India again fractured politically into several independent sovereignties. Two dominant among these were the Maukhari, who ruled the region around the city of Kanyakubja (Kanauj), and the Pushyabhuti, who controlled lands north of Kanauj from their capital at Sthanvisvara (Thaneswar).

Harsha was the younger of two sons of the Pushyabhuti ruler Prabhakaravardhana. In 604 Prabhakara ordered his older son, Rajyavardhana, to march against the still-active Huns. During that campaign Prabhakara died. Shortly thereafter the young princes learned that their sister's husband, Grahavarman--the Maukhari ruler of...