This is Part 26 of 47 in HorizonDesk's chronological series on Indian history, from the Stone Age to Independence in 1947. It follows Part 25: Sindh, Mahmud of Ghazni and Muhammad Ghori.
When Muhammad Ghori was killed in 1206, his slave generals held his Indian conquests. Within a century their successors in Delhi had beaten back the Mongols, fixed grain prices in the capital and sent an army as far south as Madurai. This part runs from Qutb-ud-din Aibak to the fall of the Khaljis in 1320.
The rulers from 1206 to 1290 are often called the "Slave dynasty". Historians prefer "Mamluk" or "early Turkish" sultans: there were really three separate lines, and not every sultan had been a slave. Our main sources are court writers: Minhaj-us-Siraj (Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, c. 1260), the Khalji court poet Amir Khusrau, and Ziauddin Barani (Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, c. 1357). Each had his loyalties, and dates often differ by a year or two.
Qutb-ud-din Aibak and Aram Shah, 1206 to 1211
Aibak had been bought as a boy and rose to command Ghori's Indian armies. After 1206 he ruled from Lahore rather than Delhi, facing two rival Ghurid commanders, Yildiz at Ghazni and Qubacha in Multan. Minhaj calls him lakh-bakhsh, "giver of lakhs". In Delhi the Quwwat al-Islam mosque and the first storey of the Qutb Minar date from his time; see our Qutub Minar guide.
Aibak died in 1210 after a fall from his horse while playing chaugan, a form of polo, at Lahore. His successor Aram Shah, possibly his son, was soon defeated by Aibak's son-in-law, the governor of Badaun, whom the Delhi nobles had invited to rule.
Iltutmish: the real founder, 1211 to 1236
Shams-ud-din Iltutmish, an Ilbari Turk sold into slavery as a youth, is usually seen as the true builder of the Sultanate; Britannica calls him "the third and greatest" of the Slave dynasty sultans.
- Survival and consolidation. He defeated Yildiz near Tarain in 1216, and in 1228 forced Qubacha into the Indus, where he drowned. Bengal was brought back between 1225 and 1229, and he recovered Ranthambore (1226), Mandor and Gwalior (1231). Delhi became the permanent capital.
- The Mongol threat. In 1221 Jalal-ud-din Mangbarni, the fugitive prince of Khwarazm, reached the Indus with Genghis Khan in pursuit. Iltutmish politely refused him refuge, and the Mongols turned back. For the Mongols' wider story see our Mongol Empire explainer.
- Legitimacy. In 1229 the Abbasid caliph sent him a robe of investiture, recognising the Sultanate as a state in its own right.
- Administration and money. He developed the iqta system, assigning a territory's revenue to an officer who kept troops and order, and introduced the silver tanka (about 11 grams) and the copper or billon jital, the basis of north Indian currency for centuries. He also completed the Qutb Minar.
Iltutmish relied on his own Turkish slave officers, the Shamsi slaves. Barani later calls the top group of them the Chihalgani, "the Forty". Peter Jackson and others doubt there was ever a fixed body of exactly forty; it may be Barani's shorthand for a powerful clique that made and unmade his heirs.
Razia Sultan, 1236 to 1240
Iltutmish's eldest son died before him, and he is said to have named his daughter Razia as heir. On his death in 1236 the nobles instead raised his son Rukn-ud-din Firuz, whose mother Shah Turkan ran the government. Within months, backed by the people of Delhi, Razia replaced him.
Razia is the only woman to rule from Delhi in the Sultanate period. She issued coins in her own name and, says Minhaj, put aside the veil, wore a tunic and cap and rode an elephant before her troops. Minhaj, who served her, wrote that she had every royal quality except that she was not born a man.
Her trouble was the Turkish nobility. She promoted outsiders such as Jamal-ud-din Yaqut, an Abyssinian officer; the scandal chroniclers attached to him is now read as political gossip. In 1240 Altunia, governor of Bhatinda, rebelled. Yaqut was killed, Razia was captured, and in a twist she married Altunia and marched with him on Delhi. They were defeated, and Razia was killed near Kaithal in October 1240.
Balban and the theory of kingship, 1266 to 1287
The nobles then ruled through weak sultans, from 1246 Nasir-ud-din Mahmud, Minhaj's patron. The real power was Ghiyas-ud-din Balban, once Iltutmish's slave, the sultan's deputy and father-in-law. When Nasir-ud-din died in 1266, Balban took the throne himself.
Barani, writing some 70 years later, presents him as a theorist of kingship:
- The king was zill-i-ilahi, "the shadow of God", answerable to God alone.
- Courtiers had to perform sijda (prostration) and paibos (kissing the ruler's feet), in a strictly Persian-style court.
- He broke the power of the old Shamsi nobles, using a network of spies and harsh punishment.
- He rebuilt the army department (diwan-i-arz) and cleared Mewati raiders from the forests around Delhi.
When Tughril Khan of Bengal revolted around 1280, Balban marched east and executed him and his followers. Against the Mongols he chose defence, fortifying the north-west frontier; his favourite son, Prince Muhammad, died fighting them in 1285. Barani's speeches for Balban are best read as Barani's own ideas in a famous king's mouth.
The end of the Mamluks and the Khalji revolution of 1290
Balban died in 1287. His grandson Kaiqubad was a pleasure-loving youth who soon suffered a stroke. In 1290 the army commander Jalal-ud-din Firuz Khalji seized power, Kaiqubad was murdered, and the infant Kayumars was set aside.
The Khaljis, of Turkic origin but long settled in Afghanistan, were outsiders to the old Turkish nobility. Their coup, which Mohammad Habib called the "Khalji revolution", opened high office to Afghans, Indian Muslims and others.
Jalal-ud-din Khalji, 1290 to 1296
Jalal-ud-din was about 70 when he became sultan. Barani portrays him as mild, even soft, pardoning rebels. He defeated a Mongol force in 1292 and let Mongols who converted settle near Delhi as the "new Muslims".
His ambitious nephew and son-in-law, Ali Gurshasp, governor of Kara, raided Bhilsa in 1292 and then, in 1296, crossed the Vindhyas without permission to attack Devagiri, capital of the Yadava king Ramachandra, the first Sultanate raid into the Deccan, returning with enormous treasure. When the old sultan came to Kara to meet him in July 1296, he was murdered on the riverbank. Ali Gurshasp took the throne as Alauddin Khalji, buying over Delhi's nobles with Devagiri gold.
Alauddin Khalji, 1296 to 1316: wars and Mongols
Alauddin was the most powerful ruler of the early Sultanate. His generals conquered Gujarat in 1299, sacking Somnath again, and took the great forts of Rajasthan and Malwa: Ranthambore from the Chauhan king Hammira in 1301, Chittor in 1303, then Malwa, Siwana and Jalore.
His greatest test was the Mongols of the Chagatai khanate in Central Asia. His armies defeated them in 1298 near Jalandhar, and at Kili near Delhi in 1299, where his general Zafar Khan was killed. In 1303 Targhi's Mongols camped outside Delhi for two months while Alauddin held out at Siri, later his new city. After victories at Amroha in 1305 and on the Ravi in 1306, the major invasions stopped, helped by Mongol civil wars. Few Asian states withstood the Mongols so well.
Market regulations and revenue reforms
To pay a large standing army cheaply, Alauddin fixed prices in Delhi. Barani lists the rules:
- Fixed prices for grain (wheat at 7.5 jitals a mann), cloth, horses, cattle and slaves, held even in poor-rain years.
- Separate markets for grain, for cloth and luxuries (the Sarai-i-Adl), and for animals and slaves, each under a controller such as Malik Qabul, with spies reporting to the sultan.
- Royal granaries, and punishment for hoarding, cheating on weights and selling above the price.
The countryside paid for this. In the Ganga-Yamuna Doab, land revenue was raised to half the produce, assessed by measuring the land, with extra taxes on houses and grazing animals. The privileges of village headmen and local chiefs (khuts, muqaddams and chaudhuris) were cut, and a department was created to recover arrears. Soldiers were paid in cash, with horses branded (dagh) and descriptive rolls (huliya) to stop false musters. Wine and nobles' gatherings were banned.
How far to trust this is debated. Barani, our only detailed source, wrote half a century later with a moral purpose; Khusrau confirms the low prices but not the methods. Irfan Habib defends Barani as broadly reliable; others think the picture idealised, or the controls limited to Delhi. The system did not outlive Alauddin. His Alai Darwaza (1311), the Qutb complex's southern gateway, still stands.
Chittor 1303 and the Padmavati legend
Alauddin besieged Chittor, the fort of the Guhila king Ratnasimha (Ratan Singh), for about eight months and took it in August 1303. Amir Khusrau, who was there, describes the siege but says nothing of a queen.
The story of Padmini (Padmavati), whose beauty Alauddin desired and who chose jauhar over capture, comes from the Awadhi poem Padmavat by the Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi, written in 1540, more than two centuries later. Jayasi presents it as an allegory; later bards and colonial writers such as James Tod retold it as history. Most historians treat Padmini as literary tradition rather than a documented person, while noting that Rajput tradition holds her dear and that jauhar in sieges is recorded elsewhere.
Malik Kafur and the southern campaigns
Alauddin's most famous general was Malik Kafur, a eunuch captured in Gujarat in 1299. His campaigns sought treasure and tribute, not annexation. The Yadavas of Devagiri submitted in 1307 to 1308, the Kakatiya Prataparudra of Warangal paid tribute after a siege in 1309 to 1310, and the Hoysala Ballala III at Dwarasamudra gave in during February 1311. Then Kafur turned to Ma'bar, the Pandya kingdom.
The Pandyas, whose earlier glory we traced in Tamil History Part 25: the Later Pandyas, were divided. After Maravarman Kulasekara I died around 1310, his sons Sundara Pandya and Vira Pandya fought for the throne. The Persian historian Wassaf says Sundara, losing, sought help from Delhi. The Pandyas avoided pitched battle. Kafur's troops raided towns and temples, including Khusrau's Barmatpuri, often identified with Chidambaram, and entered Madurai in April 1311 to find the king gone. Some accounts say Srirangam was also raided, though the heaviest blow there came in 1323. With rains setting in, Kafur turned back, reaching Delhi in October 1311.
The scale is debated: Khusrau speaks of 512 elephants, 5,000 horses and 500 mann of gold and jewels, while Barani's far higher figures are widely rejected. The raid did not end Pandya rule, but weakened it and opened the way for the later Madurai Sultanate.
Decline and fall, 1316 to 1320
In Alauddin's last, sick years Kafur held power. When the sultan died in January 1316, Kafur enthroned a young son, blinded other princes, and was murdered about a month later. Qutb-ud-din Mubarak Shah then ruled until 1320, relaxing his father's controls. His favourite Khusrau Khan, a convert from Gujarat, killed him and briefly ruled. In September 1320 the frontier governor Ghazi Malik marched from Dipalpur, defeated Khusrau Khan and became sultan as Ghiyas-ud-din Tughluq, founding the Tughluq dynasty.
Key takeaways
- Iltutmish turned Ghori's conquests into a state with a capital, a currency and the iqta system.
- The Khalji revolution of 1290 widened the ruling class; Alauddin built an empire, held off the Mongols and controlled Delhi's markets, as Barani tells it.
- Malik Kafur's raids carried Delhi's power to Madurai in 1311, but tribute, not direct rule, was the aim.
Next part
In Part 27, we turn to The Tughlaqs, Sayyids and Lodis, from Muhammad bin Tughluq's bold experiments and Timur's sack of Delhi to the Lodi sultans and the road to Panipat in 1526.
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Delhi sultanate
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Iltutmish
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ala al-Din Khalji
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Qutb Minar and its Monuments, Delhi
- Minhaj-us-Siraj (c. 1260), Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, trans. H. G. Raverty (1881)
- Ziauddin Barani (c. 1357), Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, extracts in Elliot and Dowson, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, Vol. 3 (1871)
- Amir Khusrau (1311), Khazain-ul-Futuh, trans. M. Habib as The Campaigns of Alauddin Khilji (1931)
- Jackson, P. (1999), The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History, Cambridge University Press
- Chandra, S. (2004), Medieval India: From Sultanat to the Mughals, Part One, Har-Anand
- Habib, M. and Nizami, K. A. (eds.) (1970), A Comprehensive History of India, Vol. 5: The Delhi Sultanat, People's Publishing House
- Habib, I. (1984), "The price regulations of Alauddin Khalji: a defence of Zia Barani", Indian Economic and Social History Review 21(4)
- Lal, K. S. (1950), History of the Khaljis, 1290 to 1320, Indian Press
- Kumar, S. (2007), The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, 1192 to 1286, Permanent Black
- Sastri, K. A. Nilakanta (1955), A History of South India, Oxford University Press
