Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji was eleven when his father was killed at Lahore. At his installation he asked for two swords, miri and piri, temporal and spiritual authority, and wore both.
He built the Akal Takht facing the Harmandir in 1606, a platform higher than the emperor's throne at Delhi was permitted to be, and held court there. He raised a body of horse, accepted arms and horses as offerings, and kept a hunting establishment.
He was imprisoned at Gwalior fort for a period, the length given variously as two to twelve years. The account of his release is that he refused to leave unless the fifty-two hill rajas held there came out with him, and that he had a cloak made with fifty-two tassels for them to hold. The day is kept as Bandi Chhor Divas and coincides with Diwali.
He fought five engagements against Mughal detachments between 1621 and 1635, at Ruhela near Hargobindpur in 1621, at Amritsar and Lahira in 1634, and at Kartarpur in Jalandhar district and Phagwara in 1635. These are the first battles in Sikh history. None was a war of conquest and all were defensive actions arising out of local provocations.
He founded Kiratpur in 1626 and moved there, out of Mughal territory and into the hill states, and died there in 1644.
He built a mosque at Sri Hargobindpur for the Muslims of the town he founded. It stands and is called Guru ki Maseet.
The two swords are worn crossed and the point is that neither is worn alone. What changed in 1606 is not that a religious community picked up weapons. It is that one authority was declared to cover both, in one person, at one seat, and every argument in Sikh institutional life since has been about how that works in practice.
Kiratpur was a break as sharp as the swords were. He left Amritsar, left Mughal territory and put the establishment inside a hill state, and the centre of the tradition stayed in the Shivaliks under the next two Gurus and through the whole of Anandpur. The Majha was left behind for eighty years.
He is the hinge of the whole tradition. Everything before him is a teaching and a community and everything after him is also a political fact.