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Chapter 6 – Zenith of the Slave Dynasty – Mohammad Taghlak and Firoz Shah – 1321–1388 A.D.

The old soldier did not belie his reputation. The trusty warden of the marches proved a just, high-minded, and vigorous king. Under his firm hand order was restored as if by magic. Everything possible was done to repair the misfortunes of the unhappy ladies of the late court, and to punish their persecutors. Orders were given to reduce the taxation on agricultural lands to a tenth or eleventh of the produce, and to encourage the tillers to greater production. The Hindus were more heavily taxed, yet not to the verge of poverty. In the verse of Amir Khusru:

“Wisdom and prudence in all that he did were revealed;

The faculties’ hoods seemed under his crown concealed.”

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Peace and prosperity once more reigned in Hindustan, and two expeditions under Taghlak Shah’s eldest son, Prince Jauna, then known as Ulugh Khan, recovered the Deccan provinces as far as Telingana, which the recent troubles had encouraged to revolt. Taghlak himself led his army to Bengal, which had never been even nominally subject to Delhi since the death of Balban, and there he received the homage of the provincial viceroy of Lakhnauti, Nasir-ad-din (grandson of Balban’s son Bughra Khan), and carried in chains to Delhi his recalcitrant brother Bahadur Shah, who styled himself king in Eastern Bengal. On his return from this expedition the gallant old Sultan met his death (1325) by the fall of a roof, which crushed him beneath its ruins. His body was found arched over his favourite child, whom he strove in his last moments to protect. There seems little doubt that the catastrophe was treacherously planned by his eldest son, at least if we may accept the authority of the Moorish traveller, ibn Batuta, who was at Delhi sixteen years later and had his information from someone that actually witnessed the occurrence.

It is in this son, Prince Jauna, who ascended the throne as the Sultan al-Mujahid Mohammad ibn Taghlak, that the main interest of the Karauna dynasty abides. In each of the three dynasties that ruled India throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there was one conspicuously remarkable figure. Among the slave kings it was Balban, the man of action; among the Khaljis it was Ala-ad-din, the crude but daring political

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economist; among the Karaunas it was Mohammad Taghlak, the man of ideas. The history of the East, as we have said, centres in its kings, and the history of Eastern dynasties is apt to consist of the rise of one great man and the decay of his successors. Mohammad Taghlak was the most striking figure in mediaeval India. He was a man with ideas far beyond his age. Ala-ad-din had brought a vigorous but uncultivated mind to bear upon the problems of government; Mohammad Taghlak was even more daring in his plans, but they were the ideals of a man of trained intellect and tutored imagination. He was perfect in the humanities of his day, a keen student of Persian poetry, a master of style, supremely eloquent in an age of rhetoric, a philosopher trained in logic and Greek metaphysics with whom scholars feared to argue, a mathematician, and a lover of science. Contemporary writers extol his skill in composition and his exquisite calligraphy, and his beautiful coinage bears witness to his critical taste in the art of engrossing Arabic, a language which he read and understood, though he could not speak it fluently.

In short, he was complete in all that high culture could give in that age and country, and he added to the finish of his training a natural genius for original conception, a marvellous memory, and an indomitable will. His idea of a central capital, and his plan of a nominal token currency, like most of his schemes, were good; but he made no allowance for the native dislike of innovations, he hurried his novel measures, impatient of their slow adoption by the people, and when his subjects

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grew discontented and rebelled, he punished them without ruth. To him what seemed good must be done at once, and when it proved impossible or unsuccessful, his disappointment reached the verge of frenzy, and he wreaked his wrath indiscriminately upon the unhappy offenders who could not keep pace with his imagination.

Fort of Taghlakabad, at Delhi, enclosing tomb of Taghlak Shah

Hence, with the best intentions and with excellent ideas, but with no balance or patience and no sense of proportion, Mohammad Taghlak was a transcendent failure. His reign was one long series of revolts, savagely repressed; his subjects, whom he wished to benefit and on whom he lavished his treasure, grew to loathe him; all his schemes came to nothing, and when, after twenty-six years, he died of a fever on the banks of the Indus,

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he left a shattered empire and an impoverished and rebellious people.

Yet he began his reign with everything in his favour. He followed a deeply revered father, and he had a high reputation of his own. He was known to be a great general, and his private life was temperate and even austere. All India was quiet, and the distant provinces had been recovered. The suspicion that his father’s sudden end was deliberately planned by the son may have set the people against him; but neither Barani nor Firishta support the story, and it is not certain that it was generally believed. Even if it were, such murders were too common to form an ineffaceable stigma. Mohammad Taghlak failed by his own mistaken government, not on account of an initial crime.

As a rule he never consulted anybody, and formed his projects unassisted; but one day he sent for the historian Barani, who was often in attendance at court, and frankly discussed affairs with him. “My kingdom is diseased,” he complained, “and no treatment cures it. The physician cures the headache, and fever follows; he strives to allay the fever, and something else supervenes. So in my kingdom disorders have broken out; if I suppress them in one place, they appear in another; if I allay them in one district, another becomes disturbed. What have former kings said about these disorders?” The man of history cited instances of the abdication of kings in favour of their sons, and of a sovereign’s retirement from the affairs of state, which were left to wise vizirs. The Sultan seemed to approve

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the idea of abdication, adding, “At present I am angry with my subjects and they are aggrieved with me. The people are acquainted with my feelings, and I am aware of their misery and wretchedness. No treatment that I employ is of any benefit. My remedy for rebels is the sword. I employ punishment and use the sword, so that a cure may be effected by suffering. The more the people resist, the more I inflict chastisement.”

The series of tortures and executions described by Ibn Batuta is too horrible to relate, and the frequent scenes at Delhi, which the Moorish traveller witnessed, where trained elephants, with tusks armed with iron blades, tossed the victims in the air, trampled them under foot, and carved them into slices, make one’s blood rim cold. The Sultan’s own brother and nephew did not escape his ferocity: suspected of treason, the former was beheaded in the presence of his brother; the nephew fled to the raja of Kampila, brought destruction upon his protector, and when caught himself, was flayed and roasted alive, and his cooked flesh sent to his family. One can hardly believe that such enormities could have been committed by a man of Mohammad Taghlak’s refinement.

Apart from such monstrous barbarities, his great mistake – a capital error in an Eastern country – was that he could not let well or ill alone. He was too clever not to see the ills, but not clever enough to know that they were better undisturbed. On the whole, his was a fine principle, a high ideal; but the reaction when he found his ideal unattainable was violent and deplorable.

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Ibn Batuta knew him well in the latter part of his reign, and was well able to judge his character. This is his portrait of the Sultan:–

“This king is of all men the one who most loves to dispense gifts and to shed blood. His gateway is never free from a beggar whom he has relieved and a corpse which he has slain. Tales are spread abroad among the people of his generosity and courage, as of his bloodshed and vindictiveness towards offenders. With all this he is the humblest of men and the most eager to show justice and truth. The rites of religion find full observance with him, and he is strict in the matter of prayer and in punishing its neglect. But what is preeminent in him is generosity.”

The boundless prodigality of the Sultan was indeed one of the causes of his troubles. Even the wealth of India, reinforced by the spoils brought back from the Hindu cities of the Deccan, now again under control, could not meet the extravagance of his generosity and the magnificence of his court. To foreigners he was specially hospitable, preferring them to natives, says the Moorish traveller, Ibn Batuta, who himself enjoyed the. Sultan’s favour and was presented with fiefs and large sums of money, appointed to a judgeship, and finally sent as Mohammad’s ambassador to China. When distinguished strangers came to Delhi, the Sultan would settle upon them the revenues of so many villages or districts, which maintained them in luxury during their visit and enabled them to go home in affluence. The almost incredible largess he scattered among these visitors

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and among learned men, poets, officials, and office-seekers of all degrees, impoverished the treasury which the tranquil prosperity of his father’s brief reign had replenished, and the immense expeditions which the Sultan prepared for visionary foreign conquests completed the ruin of his finances. His project of conquering Persia kept a huge army standing idle, and another dream of invading China led to a disastrous check in the passes of the Himalayas, where money and blood were spilt like water.

Gold coin of Mohammad Taghlak, struck at Delhi, A.H. 726 (A.D. 1326).

The drain on the treasury then compelled fresh taxation, and there is no doubt that an oppressive fiscal system in a country where the margin of agricultural profit is minute was the chief rock upon which Mohammad Taghlak’s government split. The first project which the Sultan formed (says Barani), and which led to .the ruin of the country and the decay of the people, was an attempt to get five or ten per cent. more tribute from the lands in the Doab, the fertile plain between the Ganges and the Jumna. He introduced oppressive cesses and made stoppages from the land returns until the peasants were reduced to beggary. The rich became rebels, and the lands lay unfilled. The effects spread to other provinces; the peasants became alarmed, lost confidence, abandoned their lands, burned their stacks, turned their cattle loose, and took

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to the jungles. Irritated at the failure of the revenue, the Sultan hunted the wretched Hindus like wild beasts, ringed them in the jungles as if they were tigers, and massacred them wholesale. The Doab, Kanauj, and all the country as far as Dalamau, were laid waste, and every man captured was killed and his head hung on the rampart of a town. Landowners and village chiefs were sacrificed as well as humble peasants. A deficiency of seasonable rains aggravated the distress, and famine stalked about the land and mowed down the unhappy people for years.

It was partly the melancholy condition of Hindustan, but still more the inconvenience of a distant northern capital to an empire which was spreading more and more in the Deccan, that induced the Sultan to take the step of transferring the seat of government to Devagiri, which he now renamed Daulatabad, “the empire-city,” in the Maratha country not far from Poona. The insecurity of the roads, as well as the long distances, made Delhi an unsuitable centre, and we find that sometimes the revenue of the Deccan was allowed to accumulate for years at Daulatabad from sheer inability to transport it safely to the capital. Whether the Maratha city would have been more convenient may be questioned, at least for the eastern part of the empire, but for the west and south it might have answered well enough. There was nothing preposterous in the Sultan’s plan. The provinces of the Deccan – for it was now divided into four – extended as far south as Kulbarga near the Bhima tributary of the Krishna River,

Tomb at the Kutb Millar, Delhi.

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and though it is not easy to define their eastward boundary, it probably reached to the Godavari, despite the fact that Telingana was rather a tributary state than a part of the empire.

Had Mohammad Taghlak contented himself with merely shifting the official court, the change would have been reasonable and practical. But he must needs transport the whole population of Delhi summarily and en masse to the new capital. What this meant may be realized when it is remembered that the Delhi which Ibn Batuta described was a vast city, ten miles across, composed of successive suburbs built round the forts and palaces of different kings. There was Old Delhi, the city of the Ghazni rulers; nearby stood Siri, afterwards named the Dar-al-Khilafa, “Abode of the Caliphate,” founded by Ala-ad-din; Taghlakabad was the suburb built by the Sultan’s father, whose palace was roofed with glittering gilt tiles; and Jahanpanah, “the Refuge of the World,” was the name given to the new city which the Sultan dominated from his stately palace. The great wall of Old Delhi, which astonished the Moorish visitor by its thickness and its ingenious arrangement of guardrooms and magazines, had twenty-eight gates; and the great mosque, the Kutb Minar, and the splendid palaces, excited the admiration of the traveller who had seen all the cities of the East and their wonders. He never tires of expatiating on the grandeur of the royal receptions and stately pageants in the “thousand-columned” hall of “the Refuge of the World.” Yet the Delhi he saw was a city slowly recovering

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from what seemed to be a death-blow. All the people had been forcibly removed years before, and the place was still comparatively empty. The heartbroken inhabitants were made to give up their familiar homes and cherished associations, and, taking with them their servants and their children and such belongings as they could carry, to trudge the weary march of seven hundred miles to a strange country which could never replace the beautiful city where they were born and to which they were bound by every tie of love and memory.

A tomb at Old Delhi

Many died on the way, and of those who reached Daulatabad few could resist the homesickness and despondency that kill the Hindu in exile. They were chiefly Moslems, but they were forced to live in an “infidel” country, and they gave up the ghost in passive despair. The new capital became the nucleus of the cemeteries of the exiles.

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The ill-considered plan had failed: Daulatabad was a monument of misdirected energy. The long road, a forty days’ journey, between Delhi and the new capital, laid out with infinite care, bordered with trees all the way like an avenue in a park, with frequent inns and rest-houses, only beckoned the exiles home. The Sultan, who had the wisdom to recognize his failure, ordered the people back to Delhi, but few survived to return. He imported “learned men and gentlemen, traders and landholders” from the country to repopulate the deserted capital; but they did not flourish, and it was long before Delhi recovered its prosperity. Ibn Batuta found the great suburbs sparsely occupied, and the city still seemed almost deserted.

It is but just to the Sultan to admit that he did his best to remedy some of his mistakes. If he could not re-people Delhi at a stroke with the rapidity with which he had emptied it, he did much to mitigate the distress caused by famine and excessive taxation. He abolished (in 1341) all taxes beyond the legal alms and the government tithes, and himself sat twice a week to receive the complaints of the oppressed. He distributed daily food to all the people of Delhi for six months in a time of scarcity, and he organized an excellent system of government loans to agriculturists which would have been of great service but for the dishonesty of the overseers. To meet the heavy drain upon the treasury he made his famous experiment of a token currency, possibly taking the idea from the paper money issued by Khubilai Khan in China or

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from the paper notes with which a Mongol khan of Persia had recently endeavoured to cheat his subjects. But Mohammad Taghlak’s forced currency was not intended to defraud, and as a matter of fact accidentally enriched the people, whilst the substitution of minted copper for paper was a new idea. The copper token was to pass at the value of the contemporary silver tanka, and of course its acceptance depended upon the credit of the public treasury.

Brass money of Mohammad Taghlak, struck at Delhi, A.H. 731 (1330–31 A.D.).

Mohammad Taghlak has been called “the Prince of Moneyers,” and there is no doubt that he devoted much attention to his coinage and dealt with it in a scientific way. “So important indeed,” says Edward Thomas, the greatest authority on Indian numismatics, “did he consider all matters connected with the public currency, that one of the earliest acts of his reign was to remodel the coinage, to adjust its divisions to the altered relative values of the precious metals, and to originate new and more exact representations of the subordinate circulation. The leading motive seems to have been the utilization of the stores of gold which filled the Sultan’s treasuries; and, without proposing to introduce a definite gold standard, which under the surrounding circumstances would doubtless have proved impracticable, he appears to have aimed at a large expansion of the currency of the land by direct means, associated with an equitable revision of the basis of exchange between gold

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and silver, which had been disturbed by the large accessions of the former from the Deccan, unaccompanied. by any proportionate addition to the supply of the latter.”

He was thus an expert in currency questions, and when he introduced his copper tokens he was taking a step of which he should have known the consequences. The curious point is that, while doubtless fully aware that the value of the token depended upon the credit of the treasury, he forgot that it was absolutely essential to the success of his innovation that none but the state should issue the tokens. In those days, however, there was no milling or other device of costly machinery to distinguish the issues of the royal mint from private forgeries. To forge in gold was expensive, but any skilled Hindu engraver could copy the inscriptions and strike copper tokens of the value of tankas in his own behalf. The result was natural. “The promulgation of this edict,” says Barani, “turned the house of every Hindu into a mint, and the Hindus of the various provinces coined copper coins by hundreds of thousands and tens of millions. With these they paid their tribute, and with these they purchased horses, arms, and fine things of all kinds. The rajas, village headmen, and landowners grew rich upon these copper coins, but the state was impoverished. In those places where fear of the Sultan’s edict prevailed, the gold tanka rose to be worth a hundred of the [token] tankas. Every goldsmith struck copper coins in his workshop, and the treasury was filled with these tokens. So low did they

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fall that they were not valued more than pebbles or potsherds. The old coin, from its great scarcity, rose four-fold and five-fold in value. When trade was interrupted on every side, and when the copper tankas had become more worthless than clods, the Sultan repealed his edict, and in great wrath he proclaimed that whosoever possessed copper coins should bring them to the treasury and receive the old ones in exchange. Thousands of men from various quarters who possessed thousands of these copper coins, and caring nothing for them had flung them into corners along with their copper pots, now brought them to the treasury and received in exchange gold tankas and silver tankas. So many of these copper tankas were brought to the treasury that heaps of them rose up in Taghlakabad like mountains,” and there they were seen a century later in the days of Mubarak Shah II.

All these innovations harassed and annoyed the people and made the Sultan unpopular. The failure of his schemes embittered him, and his extreme severity toward all who contravened his enactments brought wide-spread discontent and rebellion. There were other causes for insurrection. The provincial officials were no longer the old feudal landowners, attached by ties . of race and gratitude to their Turkish sovereigns. The Turks had been displaced; the triumph of the Khaljis had loosened the old bonds that knitted the governing class together; a new dynasty that was neither pure Turk nor Khalji was in power, and the officers governing the provinces were hungry adventurers, often foreigners,

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Afghans, Persians, Khorasanis, and Mongols, whom the Sultan overwhelmed with costly gifts. These men had none of the old loyalty, such as it was, and it was from them, known as “the foreign amirs,” that the revolts came which shattered the foundations of the empire.

In the early years of his reign Mohammad Taghlak had ruled a state wider, larger, and more splendid than any of his predecessors. Whilst even the great Ala-ad-din struck his coins only at Delhi and Devagiri, the name and titles of Mohammad Taghlak shone upon the issues of the mints of Delhi, Agra, Tirhut (then called Taghlakpur), Daulatabad, Warangal (then called Sultanpur), Lakhnauti, Satgaon, and Sonargaon in Bengal. A contemporary writer gives a list of twenty-three provinces subject to the Sultan of Delhi, from Sivistan, Uchh, Multan, and Gujarat, by the Indus, to Lakhnauti in Bengal and Jajnagar in Orissa, and from Lahore near the Himalayas to Dvara-samudra and the Malabar coast. Never again till the time of Aurangzib did a king of Delhi hold so wide a sway. Piece by piece the empire dropped away. One province after another revolted, and though the Sultan was usually victorious and punished the rebels without mercy, he could not be everywhere at the same time, and while one insurrection was being crushed, another sprang up at the other end of his dominions. We hear of revolts in Multan, in Bengal, in Ma’bar, and in Lahore; again in Multan, then at Samana; now at Warangal and next near Oudh; at Karra and in Bidar; at Devagiri and in Gujarat.

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Some of them were never suppressed, and Bengal and the Deccan were lost to the kingdom.

An ancient gateway at Warangal

It was in vain that Mohammad Taghlak invoked the shade of a great name and obtained the sanction of the Abbasid caliph of Cairo to his title as orthodox king of India. In vain he received the mantle and diploma of investiture (1343), and welcomed a beggarly descendant of the famous caliphs of Baghdad with peculiar solemnity and humble deference to his splendid court at Delhi and even set the sacred foot upon his own proud neck. Nothing could restore the loyalty of the people or of their governors. Experiments and innovations had harassed them and brought much suffering;

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frequent executions and massacres had exasperated them. No one trusted the changeable and impetuous king, whose fiery temper had been maddened by disappointment and revolts, and who punished small and great offences with the same merciless ferocity. The end came while he was putting down a rebellion in Gujarat and Sind. He pursued the chief rebel toward the mouth of the Indus; but he was already ill with fever, and, still full of eager plans for crushing the Sumras of Thatta and seizing the rebel leader whom they were sheltering, Mohammad Taghlak died on the banks of the river in March, 1351. He had brought exceptional abilities and a highly cultivated mind to the task of governing the greatest Indian empire that had so far been known, and he had failed stupendously. It was a tragedy of high intentions self-defeated.

After his death India recovered like a sick man after an exhausting fever, and the troubles subsided as the waves after a storm. The disturbing force was gone, and the people showed that they could he quiet enough if they were let alone. Mohammad Taghlak left no sons, but his cousin, Firoz Shah, was at once elected to the throne by the chiefs of the army then fighting in Sind, and after defeating the rebels he had no difficulty in making his accession sure. An attempt to set up a pretended son of the late Sultan at Delhi collapsed on the approach of Firoz, and thenceforward during the thirty-seven years of his reign there was not a single rebellion. This was certainly not due to any vigour of the Sultan. Firoz was a man of forty-five,

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whose mother was a Hindu princess of Dipalpur, who nobly gave herself to his father in order to save her people from the exactions with which they were vindictively oppressed when the Raja Mal Bhatti at first proudly refused to give a Rajput princess to a mere half-breed Turk. Their son had been carefully brought up by his brave uncle, the warden of the marches, and had been trained in the art of government by that talented but wrong-headed projector Mohammad Taghlak, with whom he lived as a son for many years. The lessons of his preceptor seem to have been read backwards; at all events Firoz reversed his predecessor’s policy in every detail.

It was characteristic of the merciful and pious disposition of the new king that, after burying his cousin with all honour, he sought out the victims of his ferocity or their representatives, and endeavoured as far as possible to indemnify them for their sufferings and losses. When this was done, he collected the attested documents in which they admitted the reparation they had received and expressed themselves satisfied. All these papers he placed in the tomb of the tyrant, in the pious hope “that God would show mercy to my patron and friend.” It was a gracious and beautiful act. Firoz possessed in an exceptional degree the milk of human kindness, that supreme gift of sympathy and tenderness which made the whole Indian world his kin. He has been charged with weakness and fatuity, but it was a weakness that came very near the Christian ideal of love and charity, and it brought peace and happiness

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to a land which had been sorely tormented. Like his namesake, Firoz the Khalji, the new Sultan had a horror of bloodshed and torture. He had seen too much of both under his cousin’s rule, and he resolved that they should cease. “The great and merciful God,” he wrote in his own touching memoirs, “taught me, His servant, to hope and seek for His mercy by devoting myself to preventing the unlawful slaying of Moslems and the infliction of any kind of torture upon them or upon any men.”

So gentle a king was not made for the glories of conquest; he abhorred war and clearly was no general; if not content to leave the revolted provinces alone, he made little effort to recover them. The Deccan was allowed to become independent under Hasan Gangu, the founder of the Bahmanid dynasty, whose Sultans ruled all the provinces south of the Vindhyas for 180 years. Bengal also remained independent, though Firoz twice attempted to bring it back under subjection. On the first campaign (1353) he was absent from his capital eleven months, and after winning a great battle, in which 180,000 Bengalis are said to have been slain, he refused to storm the fort of Ikdala in which the King of Bengal had taken refuge, for fear of shedding more of the blood of the faithful, and sadly returned to Delhi. In the second expedition, six or seven years later (1359–60), though he had seventy thousand cavalry, infantry “past numbering,” 470 elephants, and all the paraphernalia of war, he concluded a treaty of peace with the Bengal king, and then proceeded to lose himself

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and his army while elephant-hunting in Padmavati, in the wild of Jajnagar, and only after great privations and much difficulty found his way back to Delhi, where no news had been received of him for six months. He had been away two years and a half.

Low-caste Bengalis.

A later expedition to conquer Thatta, which Taghlak had failed to subdue, occupied about the same length of time. With ninety thousand horse and 480 elephants Firoz marched to Bhakkar. Part of the force descended the Indus in five thousand boats, the rest marching along the bank. Famine and pestilence reduced the horses, and after a battle with the Samma Jam, or ruler of Sind, who had a large army and had never owned an overlord, the Sultan made a strategic retreat towards Gujarat, pursued by the enemy, who captured his boats. On the retreat all the horses died; treacherous

Hindu Snake Charmers and Jugglers

India, the home of the cobra, has always been famous for its snake-charmers and its tricks of legerdemain. With tom-toms and shrill pipe the charmer lures the hooded serpent from the basket, teasing and playing with it, and usually accompanying the performance with some clever tricks of sleight of hand.

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guides inveigled the army into the salt marshes of Kachh, and they lost themselves in the desert. Again for six months the Sultan and his army disappeared from human ken; not a word of them reached Delhi, and the vizir had to forge cheering despatches to relieve the public anxiety. The Sultan, however, doggedly held to his purpose, refitted his army in Gujarat, sent thrice to Delhi for reinforcements, and in a second invasion, after some trouble in crossing the Indus, succeeded in occupying Sind, and starved his foe into surrender. The native ruler was brought to Delhi in all honour, and his son was enthroned in his stead. This was the only victorious exploit of the reign of Firoz, except the reduction of Nagarkot, and it was won at great cost. The Sultan had again been away from his capital for two years and a half.

In any other reign there would undoubtedly have been a revolution and a rival king during these long absences. But Firoz possessed a treasure in his vizir, a converted Hindu of good family from Telingana, named Makbul Khan, who had held the highest offices under the dangerous favour of Mohammad Taghlak. Over Firoz the wise though illiterate Hindu gained such influence that the Sultan used to say that Khan-i-Jahan, “lord of the world,” as he was termed in virtue of his office, was the real king of Delhi. So fond was the Sultan of his invaluable vizir that he allowed an income of over a thousand a year to every son that was born to him, and yet more by way of marriage portion to each daughter; and as Makbul was an uxorious person,

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who kept two thousand ladies in his harem, ranging from olive Greeks to saffron Chinese, these endowments must have reached a considerable sum. But Makbul was worth his money. As the Sultan’s deputy and alter ego, he held the state securely while his master was away, stood always between him and official worries, and administered the kingdom with exceptional skill and wisdom. If the borders of the realm were more limited than before, the smaller area was better developed and made more productive.

It was doubtless due to Makbul’s influence, seconded by the Rajput blood which Firoz inherited from Bibi Naila, that the new regime was marked by the utmost gentleness and consideration for the peasantry. It will be remembered that the preceding Sultan had instituted a system of government loans in aid of the agriculturists. These loans the peasants, who had not yet recovered from the distress caused by Mohammad Taghlak’s exactions, were wholly unable to repay. By the advice of the vizir the official records of these debts were publicly destroyed in the Sultan’s presence, and the people were given a clean bill. Taxation was brought back to the limits prescribed by the law of the Koran, and any attempts at extortion were sternly punished. “Thus,” says Afif, the panegyrist of the reign, who was a frequent attendant at the court of Firoz, “the peasants grew rich and were satisfied. Their homes were filled with corn and goods, horses and furniture; everyone had plenty of gold and silver; no woman was without her ornaments and no house without good

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beds and divans. Wealth abounded and comforts were general. The whole realm of Delhi was blessed with the bounties of God.”

Nor was this all. The Sultan was an enthusiastic builder. He had a passion for naming and founding towns. When a son (Fath Khan, “victory-lord”) was born to him on his first march to Delhi after his accession, he immediately founded a town on the site of the happy event and called it Fathabad, “the city of Fath,” or “of victory.” On his Bengal campaigns he rechristened Ikdala “Azadpur,” and Panduah “Firozabad,” and founded the new city of Jaunpur (Jaunanpur) in honour of his cousin, the late king.

A Mohammedan woman.

In the province of Delhi he not only built Fathabad and Hisar Firoza, but also a second Firozabad on the Jumna, ten miles from the capital, where he chiefly resided, and whither the people of Delhi used to resort in crowds, making holiday by the river, along whose banks the new city spread for six miles. Here he set up one of the two Asoka pillars which he had removed from their original places. He had famous architects in Malik Ghazi Shahna and Abd-al-Hakk, who employed an immense

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staff of skilled workmen, all duly paid from the treasury after the plans had been approved and the necessary grants assigned.

One result especially of these new foundations was of incalculable benefit to the country. To supply his new city of Hisar Firoza the Sultan constructed (1355) a double system of canals, from the Jumna and the Sutlaj, one of which, “the old Jumna canal,” to this day supplies the district with irrigation along two hundred miles of its ancient course, and now brings the water to Delhi. A later historian, Firishta, credits Firoz with no less than 845 public works, canals, dams, reservoirs, bridges, baths, forts, mosques, colleges, monasteries, and inns for pilgrims and travellers, to say nothing of repairing former buildings, such as the Kutb Minar and many of the tombs of the kings of Delhi. Curiously, not a single road is mentioned, though that was the greatest want of India. Of all these, the canals were the chief blessing to the people. By the improved irrigation, they were able to get in two harvests instead of one. The superintendence of the canals was entrusted to skilled engineers, who examined the banks during the rainy season and floods and reported on their condition. In return for this benefit the Sultan levied a water-rate of ten per cent. on the outlay. Another wise step was the reclaiming of waste lands by the government, the proceeds of which were devoted to the support of religion and learning. Firoz annually granted more than a third of a million pounds (thirty-six lacs) to learned men and pious endowments, and

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a sum equal to nearly a million pounds (one hundred lacs) was distributed every year in pensions and relief to the poor. The Sultan was not only a builder but a gardener. He planted twelve hundred gardens near Delhi and many elsewhere, and the produce, among which white and black grapes of seven varieties are mentioned, brought in some £8000 net profit to the treasury. The three sources of water-dues, reclaimed lands, and market-gardens added nearly thirty thousand pounds to the annual revenue, which Afif reckoned at six crores and eighty-five lacs of tankas (£6,850,000) throughout the reign – about a third of the revenues of Akbar two centuries later. Of this the fertile Doab alone contributed £800,000.

It is not clear whether this revenue includes the rents of the villages and lands which were assigned to public officials as salary, but it probably does not. This method of paying public servants was strongly condemned by the Sultan Ala-ad-din, as tending to feudal power and fostering rebellion; and Firoz was the first to adopt it generally. During his reign it worked well, but it may be questioned whether it did not contribute to the breakup of the kingdom which ensued after his death. The grants indeed often amounted to viceroyalties of great power, and we find large districts and even provinces assigned to eminent nobles. Thus Karra and Dalamau were granted to Mardan Daulat with the title of “King of the East”; Oudh and Sandila and Koil formed separate fiefs; Jaunpur and Zafarabad were given to another amir;

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Gujarat to Sikandar Khan, and Bihar to Bir Afghan. All these nobles were expected to defend their frontiers and manage their internal affairs. Another deduction which must be considered in estimating the revenue was due to the Sultan’s system of allowing his great fief-holders so much for every well-grown, good-looking, and well-dressed slave, a captive in war, whom they furnished for the service of the court. When the feudatories, that is, most of the high officers of the state, came to pay their annual visit to the capital, they brought not only presents for the Sultan, of horses, elephants, camels, mules, arms, gold and silver vessels, and the like, but also from ten to a hundred slaves apiece, for whom a corresponding deduction was allowed from their taxes or rents. The chief who brought the most valuable contribution was held in most esteem, and thus the system of annual presents to the king, which became so onerous a tax under the Moghul emperors, began to prevail. The slaves were well educated at court, and trained either for the army, for palace employment, or for mechanical trades. There were forty thousand of them on guard at the palace, and twelve thousand artisans in Delhi, and altogether not less than 180,000 slaves were supported by the government. They had a department of their own, with a treasury, muster-master, and distinct officials. When the Sultan went abroad he was escorted by thousands of these slaves – archers, swordsmen, halberdiers, and packmen mounted on buffaloes. Never before had slaves been so largely employed, though it is true that

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Ala-ad-din had mustered over fifty thousand of them over half a century before.

Tomb of Firoz Shah at Delhi

The court to which these pampered servants ministered was luxurious but orderly. It is true the Sultan was somewhat addicted to wine, and on one occasion, in the midst of the Bengal campaign, the general Tatar Khan discovered his sovereign in an undignified position, lying half-dressed on his couch, with a mysterious sheet concealing something under the bed.

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Tatar Khan saw what was the matter, and both were speechless with surprise. At last he began a little sermon on the wickedness of indulgence at such a time of anxiety. The Sultan inquired what he meant, and asked innocently if anything untoward had happened. The khan pointed to the hidden wine-cups under the bed and looked solemn. Firoz said he liked a modest drop now and then to moisten his throat, but Tatar was not to be mollified. Then the Sultan swore that he would drink no more wine while the khan was with the army. So the general thanked God and went out. But Firoz soon afterwards bethought him that the khan was much needed at the other end of the kingdom, and sent him there in all haste. Several times the Sultan was lectured by holy men on his weakness, but he worked off his excesses by vigorous hunting, to which he was enthusiastically devoted, and the vice cannot have gone to such lengths as to interfere with affairs of state – at least so long as the able Hindu vizir was there to control them.

The testimony of all contemporary chroniclers shows that Firoz was adored by the people. It was not only that he reformed abuses, checked extortion, reduced taxation, increased irrigation, and enlarged the markets and opportunities of labour, but he was “a father to his people,” took care of the needy and unemployed, refused to dismiss aged officials, but let their sons act for them – “the veteran,” he said, “may thus stay at home in comfort, while the young ride forth in their strength” – he contrived the marriages of poor Moslems

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who could not otherwise afford the usual dowries, and provided state hospitals for the sick of all classes, native and foreign. Kindly to the Hindus, he yet sternly forbade public worship of idols and painting of portraits, and taxed the Brahmans, who had hitherto been exempt from the poll-tax imposed upon non-Moslems. A devout Mohammedan himself, he kept the fasts and feasts and public prayers, and in the weekly litany the names of his great predecessors were commemorated as well as his own and that of the caliph who had sanctioned his authority.

Gold coin of Firoz Shah, A.H. 788 (A.D. 1386).

When an old man he went on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the legendary hero Salar Mas’ud at Bahraich, humbly shaved, as an act of piety. He never did anything without consulting the Koran, and even selected a governor in accordance with a fal, or lucky omen in the sacred book. Making every allowance for the exaggeration of the court chronicler, his panegyric, written after the Sultan’s death, is probably not misplaced: “Under Firoz all men, high and low, bound and free, lived happily and free from care. The court was splendid. Things were plentiful and cheap. Nothing untoward happened during his reign. No village remained waste, no land uncultivated.”

His old age was troubled by the loss of his great vizir, who died in 1371; three years later the death of the crown prince Fath Khan shook the aged Sultan

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grievously. He surrendered all authority into the hands of the late vizir’s son, the second Khan-i-Jahan, and when the latter fell by the influence of Prince Mohammad in 1387, the old king transferred the royal elephants to the prince and allowed him to rule as he pleased. Unfortunately Mohammad was given to pleasure, and his misgovernment excited a formidable rebellion of the slaves who formed so important a faction in Delhi. Firoz himself had to come forward to quell the revolt, which instantly subsided at his appearance, and the prince fled. The Sultan next appointed his grandson Taghlak Shah II, son of Fath Khan, to administer the realm, and very soon afterwards died, “worn out with weakness,” at the age of ninety, in September 1388. No king since Nasir-ad-din had so appealed to the affections of his subjects, and in the brief and modest memoirs which the Sultan left, he recites some of the successful efforts he made to repress irreligion and wickedness, and to restore good government, just law, kindness, and generosity to the people, in the place of torture and bloodshed and oppression. “Through the mercy which God has shown to me,” he wrote, “these cruelties and terrors have been changed to tenderness, kindness, and compassion. I thank the All-Bountiful God for the many and various blessings which He has bestowed upon me.”

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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