This paper examines the materiality of military travel in central India during the centuries shortly following the turn of the first millennium. It focuses on the ways in which the movement of armies engaged natural topographies and effected transformations in the architectural landscape, with an emphasis on the areas that extended around the regional political centers of Gwalior, Narwar, and Chanderi. Built as large hilltop fortresses overlooking a largely forested terrain, all three had longer histories predating the Ghurid campaigns of the 1190s that made them crucial to the establishment and maintenance of territorial control under the succession of Delhi sultans. While Gwalior had served in earlier periods as a major outpost of the imperial capital at first Kannauj, Narwar and Chanderi grew to prominence under regional Hindu rajas during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Situated directly along older historic routes of travel, they served both as administrative nodes in larger systems of regional governance and as defensible outposts. They facilitated both the transmission of knowledge through long-distance networks and also the launching of ambitious military campaigns aimed at conquering the Deccan. While these fortresses sat at the pinnacle of regional politics and cultural practices, my investment in this presentation is less in larger centers than in the fortification of smaller places that served as stopping points in the landscape that extended between them. These included a wide range of villages and towns which functioned variously as postal stations, agrarian and industrial enclaves, and outposts of mercantile exchange. Although such places played a crucial role in the facilitation of governance and travel, they are frequently forgotten by scholars, in part because they possess only a limited textual footprint. At such places, the movement of people and ideas is traceable primarily through their instantiations in architectural environments and material culture, such as seen most readily through the establishment of new village and town walls, the erection of memorial stones and chattris, the construction of stepwells and artificial lakes, and the foundation of new temples and mosques. In addition to charting broader trans-regional movements associable with the Ghurids and their immediate successors, this presentation will also consider the more circumscribed paths that were followed by the armies of regional and local Hindu rulers, who, as late as 1281, were vying similarly for control of the areas around Narwar and Chanderi in efforts to secure a foothold over a distinctly contested domain.