A History of India, Third Edition

RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES AND MILITARY FEUDALISM

An earlier attack on Warangal in 1304 had been unsuccessful. Now,
however, the great general Malik Kafur, a converted Hindu slave from
Gujarat, captured Warangal for Ala-ud-din. The Kakatiya king was then
reinstated in the same way as the Yadava king. Malik Kafur is supposed to
have returned to Delhi with such an amount of loot that he needed 1,000
camels to carry it. The famous Koh-i-Nur diamond is said to have been
among these treasures. In 1310 Malik Kafur penetrated deep into the South.
With the support of the Yadava king he rushed to Dvarasamudra, the capital
of the Hoysalas, and captured it. The Hoysala king, Ballala III, was at that
time away fighting a war against the Pandyas of Madurai; on his return he
accepted the same conditions as the Yadava and Kakatiya kings had done
before him. Malik Kafur then attacked the Pandya king himself and burned
down his capital, Madurai; he also looted some of the great temple cities,
such as Srirangam, and once more returned to Delhi loaded with treasures
and accompanied by 612 elephants. This whole Southern campaign had
taken him just eleven months.
At the same time as Ala-ud-din launched his southern campaigns he also
successfully fought against the Mongols in the North. In 1296–7 the
Mongols had conducted their usual campaigns of plunder in northwestern
India, but in 1299 Qutlugh Khvaja, a descendant of Chingis Khan, came
with an army of 200,000 men. He obviously wanted to subject the
Sultanate of Delhi but was defeated by Ala-ud-din. Four years later, when
Ala-ud-din was returning from Chitor and many of his troops were in
Andhra Pradesh trying to capture Warangal, the Mongols returned with
120,000 men on horseback. The invaders swept through the streets of
Delhi but could not capture Ala-ud-din’s fortified military camp there. Two
months later the Mongols disappeared as quickly as they had come.
Further Mongol attacks in 1306–7 were also repulsed successfully. In his
methods of warfare and in his cruel acts of revenge Ala-ud-din was
certainly on a par with the Mongols. Thousands of Mongol prisoners were
trampled to death by elephants in Delhi while the sultan’s court watched
and, in true Mongol tradition, a pyramid composed of the heads of
vanquished Mongols was erected outside the city gate of Delhi.

Ala-ud-din’s administrative reforms

Ala-ud-din’s victories as the mightiest warlord in Indian history were based
to a large extent on his efficient administration. As his administration
reforms were of some importance also in the context of the structural
problems of Hindu kingdoms which we have discussed earlier we shall
analyse these reforms in some detail.
Ala-ud-din’s predecessors had based their rule mainly on the strength of
their army and the control of a few important towns and fortresses. They
derived their financial resources from loot, from taxes imposed on the