Ranjit Singh Ji was born at Gujranwala in 1780, lost an eye to smallpox as a child, succeeded to a middling misl at twelve and took Lahore at nineteen. He was crowned Maharaja in 1801 and ruled until 1839.
The state at its height ran from the Sutlej to the Khyber and from Kashmir to the edge of the Sindh desert. The East India Company never went to war with it in his lifetime, and annexed it in 1849, ten years after his death.
He was illiterate. He kept no throne in the ordinary sense, sat cross-legged, and had the coinage struck in the name of the Gurus rather than his own. Government was in Persian. The senior civil officer, Fakir Azizuddin, was Muslim; the finance minister, Dina Nath, was a Hindu Brahmin; the commanders included Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Europeans and Americans.
He abolished capital punishment across the state. In forty years of rule, with wars on every frontier, no one was executed by his order. That is recorded by hostile European observers and is not disputed.
He also broke the confederate structure of the Khalsa, took the misls one at a time, dispossessed his own mother-in-law, and left a succession so unresolved that the state destroyed itself within six years of his death.
He died at Lahore in June 1839. Four of his wives and seven attendants performed sati at the cremation.
He took Lahore at eighteen in 1799, was proclaimed Maharaja in 1801, and had absorbed every misl west of the Sutlej within a decade.
He never sat on a throne in the presence of the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, struck his coins in the Gurus' name rather than his own, and appointed Muslims and Hindus to the highest offices of the state.
He accepted the Sutlej line in 1809 and expanded west instead, to Multan, Kashmir, Peshawar and the Khyber. He died in 1839 and the state he built lasted ten years after him.