RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES AND MILITARY FEUDALISMa victory in Orissa, unsuccessful. In 1362 he embarked on a campaign
against Sind and Gujarat which almost ended in disaster. For six months
no news of the Sultan reached Delhi and it was assumed that he had
perished in the desert. It was Firoz’s good fortune that in this trying time
Delhi was in the hands of his loyal follower, Jahan Khan, a converted
Hindu from Telengana.
Firoz was a great builder of mosques, forts and canals. Firoz Shah
Kotla, the multi-storeyed citadel of his capital, still exists in Delhi. There
he installed two Ashoka pillars which he had transported with great
difficulty from distant provinces. He consulted Brahmins in order to
decipher the inscriptions on these pillars, but even they could not read the
ancient script. Like his predecessors, Firoz also introduced some reforms:
he abolished torture and extended the poll tax (jizya) to Brahmins who had
hitherto been exempt from it. He made a point of having slaves sent to him
from the provinces converted to Islam and to reward converts in and
around Delhi with presents. This was obviously a deliberate policy aimed
at securing the support of loyal Muslims in and around his capital.
When Firoz died in 1388 the sultanate of Delhi soon disintegrated. Two
of his relatives indulged in a futile struggle for the succession from their
strongholds in two citadels of the capital. Meanwhile, almost all provincial
governors attained the de facto status of independent rulers.
The sultanate of Delhi was finally shattered in 1398, when Timur
swooped down on India and sacked Delhi after his conquest of Persia
(1387) and final capture of Baghdad (1393). For three days Timur’s
soldiers indulged in an orgy of murder and plunder in the Indian capital.
The Hindu population was exterminated; the Muslims were spared,
although presumably their property was not. The deeds of these Turkish
warriors shocked even Timur, who wrote in his autobiography that he was
not responsible for this terrible event and that only his soldiers should be
blamed. At any rate after Timur had left Delhi remained uninhabited for
quite some time.
The sultanate of Delhi virtually ceased to exist for fifteen years after
Timur’s raid. Gujarat, Malwa and Jaunpur near Varanasi emerged as
sultanates in their own right. In the west, Lahore, Multan and Sind
remained under the control of descendants and successors of Timur. From
1414 there was again a sultanate of Delhi under the Sayyid dynasty, but its
influence was restricted to the Doab. In 1451 Buhlul Khan of the Afghan
clan of the Lodis established a new dynasty in Delhi, which once more
asserted its control over northern India. Buhlul Khan himself conquered
the sultanate of Jaunpur and his successors—Sikander and Ibrahim—
subjected Gwalior and Bihar. The Lodi sultans and particularly the short-
lived dynasty of Sher Shah established an efficient administration in the
central region of their realm which later provided a good foundation for
the Mughal machinery of government. In order to control Gwalior and the