Before marching to confront Shivaji himself, however, the Bijapur general [Afzal Khan] first proceeded to Tuljapur and desecrated a temple dedicated … - Richard Maxwell Eaton

When Firuz Tughluq invaded Orissa in 1359 and learned that the region's most important temple was that of Jagannath located inside the raja's fortress in Puri, he carried off the stone image of the god and installed it in Delhi 'in an ignominious position'.

The notion that Babur’s officer destroyed a temple dedicated to Rama’s birthplace at Ayodhya and then got the emperor’s sanction to build a mosque on the site – the Babri Masjid – was elaborated in 1936 by S.K. Banerji. However, the author offered no evidence that there had ever been a temple at this site, much less that it had been destroyed by Mir Baqi. The mosque’s inscription records only that Babur had ordered the construction of the mosque, which was built by Mir Baqi and was described as “the place of descent of celestial beings” (mahbit-i qudsiyan). This commonplace rhetorical flourish can hardly be construed as referring to Rama, especially since it is the mosque itself that is so described, and not the site or any earlier structure on the site.

Think of trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle in which 30% to 50% of the pieces are missing, and you have no border pieces at all. The best you can do is to fit together the few pieces you have in order to construct a reasonable approximation of what the whole picture most likely looked like. An honest historian will admit that the evidence is almost always fragmentary, incomplete, or even contradictory. But what one cannot do is to try to fill in the blank spaces with pieces that don’t exist, or that you think “must have” existed.