"Râzia Begum (my Lady Content) was possessed of every good quality which usually adorns the ablest princes; and those who scrutinise her actions most severely, will find in her no fault but that she was a woman."
Alas! Poor Lady Content! Of what avail that you changed (as it is solemnly set down) your apparel; that you abandoned the petticoat in favour of the trews; that your father, when he appointed you regent during one of his long absences, defended his action by saying that though a woman, you had a man's head and heart, and were worth more than twenty such sons as he had? All this was of no avail against womanhood. Let this be thy comfort, poor shade of a dead queen, that the argument still holds good against thy sisters in this year of grace 1907!
Setting this aside, the career of Queen-Content matches in tragedy that of Mary Queen of Scots. A clever girl, evidently, her father made her his companion, and while her brothers were dicing and wenching, drinking and twanging the sutara, she was frowning with him over endless pacifications, endless violences, becoming, apparently, an adept at both. For it would have needed great qualifications to ensure the almost unanimous vote of the nobles which placed a woman on the throne.
At first even these contemptuous Mahomedans were satisfied. Then came discontent. Did Râzia Begum really favour the Abyssinian slave whom she allowed--horribile dictum!--to "lift her on her horse by raising her up under the arms"? Or had she really forgotten the petticoat in the trews? Who can say? All we know is that Malik-Altûnia, the Turki governor of Bhattînda--curious how that name crops up in all the really exciting tales of Indian history!--revolted on the plea of the queen's partiality to the Abyssinian; that she marched against the rebel, leading her troops; that a tumultuous conflict occurred in the old place of battles, in which the Abyssinian favourite was killed, the queen taken prisoner, and sent to Altûnia's care in the fort.
So far good. But here affairs take a turn which is fairly breathless, and which gives pause for doubting Altûnia's disinterested care for morality and les convenances.
He promptly married the empress, and with scarce a comma, we find him raising an army to espouse her cause, and fighting her battles, the Bothwell of his time. He failed, and he and his wife were put to death together on the 14th of November A.D. 1239.
A tragic tale indeed! Best finished by another excerpt from the historian.
"The reign of Sultana Râzia Begum lasted three years, six months, and six days. Those who reflect on the fate of this unfortunate princess will readily discover from whence arose the foul blast that blighted all her prospects.--What connection exists between the high office of Amîr-ul Omra and an Abyssinian slave? Or how are we to reconcile the inconsistency of the queen of so vast a territory fixing her affections on so unworthy an object?"
And no one, apparently, remembered that she herself was the daughter of a Turki slave who achieved empire.
Byrâm was the next brother to ascend the throne. The two years, one month, and fifteen days before he also "sipped the cup of fate" is a welter of crimes. Enemies were trodden under foot of elephants, slaves suborned to feign drunkenness and assassinate friends; in short, "these proceedings, without trial or public accusation, justly alarmed every one," so Masûd, the next brother, had his innings. A poor one, though it lasted twice as long as Byrâm's. He found time in it, however, to repel the first Moghul invasion by way of Tibet into Bengal. This was in A.D. 1244, and it was followed by a similar incursion the next year, by way of Kandahâr and Sinde. Masûd seems to have become imbecile over wine and women, and when deposed, was contemptuously allowed to live by his brother, Nâsir-ud-din, the only one of Altâmish's sons who appears to have been worth anything; possibly because he had passed the whole of the last four reigns in prison!
Adversity may be a hard, but she is a good taskmistress, and in Nâsir-ud-din she had evidently good mettle on which to work. He was a man, distinctly, of original parts, for while in prison he had always preferred supporting himself by his writings to accepting any public allowance; a "whimsical habit" which he continued after he came to the throne. He was also almost scandalously moral according to the orthodoxy of the day in refusing to have more than one wife, and in cutting down all outward show and magnificence on the ground that, being only God's trustee for the State, he was bound not to burden it with useless extravagance.
As he reigned for no less than twenty years, he had time to gather together the disjecta membra, of the Indian empire which Eîbuk had built up, and which was fast coming to be a series of semi-independent provinces, and even once more to annex Ghuzni to the kingdom of Delhi. He followed his predecessors' example also in rousing yet again the Râjput resistance. During the previous reigns the clans had recovered themselves, and, from the Mahomedan point of view, needed a lesson. So some few thousands were killed in battle, some few hundred chiefs put to death, and innumerable smaller fry condemned to perpetual slavery. And yet a story is told of Nâsir-ud-din which shows him not devoid of heart.
A worthy old scholar, criticising the king's penmanship, pointed out a fault. He, smiling, erased the word, but when the critic was gone, began to restore it, remarking that it was right, but it was better to spoil paper than the self-confidence of an old man.
He died, after a long illness, in A.D. 1266, and thereinafter Ghiâss-ud-din the wazîr, who had married a sister of Sultana Râzia's, ascended the throne, possibly in the absence of more direct heirs. He must have been nearly sixty at the time, for he died twenty-one years after in his eightieth year.
He also was a Turki slave, first employed as falcon-master by Altâmish, who promoted him again and again; wherefore, Heaven knows, for history gives us but a poor character of him. He appears to have been a pious, narrow-minded, intolerant, selfish tyrant, with a hypocritical dash of virtue about him which took in his world completely. Circumstances also aided him in posing as perfection; for about this time the Moghul invasion had reached the western borderlands, and hundreds of illustrious and literary fugitives crowded thence, to find in Delhi the only stable Mahomedan government.
These, flattering and fawning, helped to noise his fame abroad as a paragon. Then the son of his old age, Prince Mahomed, was a potent factor in his popularity. The apple of his father's eye, he seems to have been an Admirable Crichton, and his death, in the moment of victory, not only "drew tears from the meanest soldier to the General," but came as a final blow to the old king, "who was so much distressed that life became irksome to him."
This great affection between father and son--for "Prince Mahomed always behaved to him with the utmost filial affection and duty"--is, indeed, the one human interest of a life devoted to pious pretences, to pomp and pose.
His grandson Kêik-obâd came to the throne at his death, and promptly gave the reins to pleasure and the guidance of public affairs to his wazîr. He succeeded in painting Old Delhi very red indeed during his short reign of three years. "Every shady grove was filled with women and parties of pleasure, every street rang with riot and tumult; even the magistrates were seen drunk in public, and music was heard in every house."
His minister kept him at this task also; for, perceiving a faint check in the pursuit of pleasure, he "collected graceful dancers, beautiful women, and good singers from all parts of the kingdom, whom he occasionally introduced as if by accident."
So, finally, the three-year-old Prince Keî-omurs--the only child of a miserable father who was now paralytic--was smuggled out of the harem to be King-designate, while the wretched, debauched, half-dying man had his brains beaten out with bludgeons while he was lying on his bed helpless; and so, battered out of all recognition, his body was hastily rolled up in the bed-clothes, and flung through the window into the sliding river.
A horrid tale, with which the history of the Slave Kings fitly comes to an end.
They were not a good breed. Even Ferishta the historian, who has a weakness for kings, feels this, for he ends his account of them with the sphinx-like remark: "Eternity belongs only to God, the great Sovereign of the Earth!"
As can easily be imagined, India at the end of those ten Slave reigns (which between them lasted but eighty-two years) was a very different place to what India had been when Eîbuk's iron hand first closed on it. Half the Punjâb, almost all Râjputana, and the better part of the United Provinces, had run red with Hindu blood in those days; but as the stream subsided, the terrible legacy of the flood had remained as a lesson welding the whole land into apathetic acquiescence, until absorption set in with the years, and as time went on, the crushed, half-dead organism began once more to feel life in its veins. For Hinduism is India--India is Hinduism. When the last trace of the metaphysical Monism which underlies every aspiration, every action, has disappeared, India and Hinduism will have disappeared also, but not till then.
So as time crept on, and under slack rule Mahomedan began to fight Mahomedan, each petty governor playing for his own hand, his own independence, the Râjputs raised their dejected heads, and, seizing every opportunity, strove to recover part at least of their own. Gwalîor with its rock,--that almost impregnable fort--for instance, changed hands many times, and, save during the reign of Nâsir-ud-din, no attempt was made on the part of the Mahomedans after the time of Altâmish, either to increase their conquests, or do more than temporarily bolster up their rule.
Nor when the Slave dynasty ended, and one Jelâl-ud-din, of the House of Khilji, established himself on the throne of Delhi by the murder of the three-year-old Keî-omurs, was there any change of policy. He was seventy years old; old for kingship in any country, extraordinarily so for India. And he was weak, hesitating. For a while distracted by feeble remorse he refused royal honours, and after a very short time delegated his authority to his nephew, Allah-ud-din, who succeeded him, and who for many years prior to his uncle's death arrogated to himself almost absolute independence.
The seven years of Jelâl-ud-din's reign, then, are but a prelude to Allah-ud-din's twenty.
A vigorous man this, and an unscrupulous. One of his first emprises was the conquest of the Dekkan which, as yet, had been untouched by Mahomedan adventure.
He got no further, however, than Deogîri, the capital of the Mâhârâjah of the Mahrattas. Far enough, however, for pillage à la Kutb-din-Eîbuk. He found the Râjputs unprepared--they had strict scruples of honour regarding the necessity for a formal declaration of war, by which their adversaries were not bound--and the usual slaughter took place. For the first time, also, mention is made of merchants being tortured to make them disclose their treasures. "L'appetit vient en mangeant," and a rich Hindu banya was to the Mahomedan what the Jew was to a Crusader.
The result was prodigious. Allah-ud-din left Deogîri--surely misnamed thus the "Shelter of the Gods"--with "2,400 pounds weight of pearls, 12 pounds of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, 6,000 pounds of silver, 4,000 pieces of silk, besides a long list of other precious commodities to which reason forbids us to give credit." In truth, reason appears as it is somewhat over-taxed!
It was on Allah-ud-din's return from this campaign that he perpetrated the foulest murder of Indian history; and that means much.
His expedition had been absolutely unauthorised by his uncle, the king, who, almost dotingly affectionate though inwardly relieved at his favourite's success, was persuaded to ask on Allah-ud-din's return for explanations, and express displeasure. The latter feigned remorse, went so far as to hint that the excess of his regret might put an end to his melancholy life; so lured the old man to meet him on the banks of the river Ganges, where the villain halted, fearful, he protested, of just punishment. The king, deceived, crossed the river in the Royal Barge almost unattended, bidding those who did accompany him unbuckle swords lest the beloved prodigal might take affright. He reached the landing-stage, and found Allah-ud-din backed by trusty friends. The old man advanced, the prodigal fell at his feet, to be raised with almost playful tenderness. "Lo!" said the tremulous old voice, as the tremulous old hand patted the villain's cheek, "how couldst thou fear me, Allah-hu? Did I not cherish thee from childhood? Have I not held thee dearer than mine own sons?"
The words had hardly left his lips, the first step hand-in-hand towards the Royal Barge had hardly been taken, when Allah-ud-din gave the signal. The feeble old man was thrown down. One cry, "Oh, Allah-ud-din, Allah-ud-din!" and all was over. His head, transfixed on a spear-point, was paraded about the city, and his murderer, making a pompous and triumphant entry into Delhi, ascended the throne in the Ruby Palace, and thereinafter utilised part of his loot by spending it on magnificent shows, grand festivals, and splendid entertainments, "by which the unthinking rabble were made to forget in gaiety all memory of their former king, or of the horrid crime which had placed the present one on the throne."
So much for Allah-ud-din's accession. His reign is literally crammed full of picturesque incidents, and would almost require a volume to itself. Before attempting a few details, there is one tale of Jelâl-ud-din's which deserves record--that of the Mysterious Stranger. He was called Sidi--Dervish Sidi. He appeared in Delhi suddenly, opened a large house, and commenced to distribute charity on a scale of magnificence which led instantly to the belief that he must possess the philosopher's stone. He thought nothing of giving three thousand pieces of gold in casual relief to some noble but distressed family. Every day he expended about 8,000 pounds of flour, 400 pounds of meat, with sugar, spices, and butter in proportion to feed the poor, while he lived on rice alone, and foreswore both wine and women. So, after a time, his influence almost exceeding that of Majesty itself, he was accused of high treason, and by the king's orders condemned to the ordeal by fire.
It was to be carried out coram populo. On the plain between the town and the river all preparations were made: a circle round the blazing pile to give fair view to the populace; Sidi Dervish, and his companions in suspicion, saying their prayers; then, at the last moment, objection raised and upheld by learned doctors that such ordeals were both contrary to the law of God and against Reason. So Sidi Dervish and his friends are being hauled off to prison once more, until the foiled king gives a hint to some shaven monks hard by: "I leave him to you to be judged according to his deserts."
Cut down by the shaven ones' razors, Sidi offers no resistance, begs them to be expeditious in sending him to God, lays his curse heavily on the king and his posterity, and dies; whereupon a black whirlwind rises and envelopes all for the space of half an hour. A terrifying end to one whose piety was unquestioned, but whose dogma was disturbing; for Sidi Dervish held, we are told, "very peculiar opinions, and never attended public worship."
A quaint, incomprehensible tale, surely, that reads true, and brings wonder as to who the poor man could possibly have been.
To return to Allah-ud-din. One of the most picturesque stories of Râjput history is associated with his name: the story of the Princess Padmani and the first sack of Chitore--that terrible happening which still haunts the memory of the race, and provides its ultimate inviolable oath, "By the sin of the sack of Chitore."
Padmani, then, was peerless. Her very name survives to the present day as synonymous with perfect womanhood. And Allah-ud-din--who seems to have been eclectic in his pleasures--hearing of her beauty while still only commander-in-chief to his uncle, forced his way to the sacred stronghold of the Râjputs, and threatened instant attack if he were not allowed to see her, if it were only her reflection in a mirror. Now such hardy, yet in a way honourable, requests were not foreign to the Râjput spirit, and Râjah Bhim-si, her husband, granted it. With due pomp and ceremonial he escorted Allah-ud-din to his palace, with due pomp and ceremony showed him the reflection of the most beautiful woman in India, with due pomp and ceremony escorted the Mahomedan general back to his tents, trusting to his honour. But Allah-ud-din's honour was a mutable quantity: he seized the husband as ransom for the wife, and swore instant death if the princess were not delivered to him without delay. So forth from the frowning rock came seven hundred litters, Padmani and her women offering themselves up in exchange for a life that was the dearest thing on earth to every Râjput man and woman. Into the camp they came; and then? Then each litter belched out reckless manhood armed to the teeth; each disguised litter-bearer threw off his swathing shawl and proclaimed himself warrior.
So the husband was brought back to the wife, and in the ensuing battle the Râjputs died hard. There is a story of how one widow of the slain, standing with foot ready to mount the funeral pyre of her dead hero, called in a loud voice to the page who had followed him in the fight:
"Boy! Tell me once more ere I go how bore himself my lord?"
"As reaper of the harvest of battle! On the bed of honour, he spread a carpet of the slain, whereon, a barbarian his pillow, he sleeps ringed about by his foes."
"Yet once again, oh boy, tell me how my lord bore himself?"
"Oh mother! Who can tell his deeds! He left none to fear or to praise!"
The memory of Padmani's trick rankled. After ascending the throne Allah-ud-din returned to Chitore. Up till then, A.D. 1303, the fort was maiden, had been held unassailable, impregnable. But Allah-ud-din was rich beyond belief. He gave gold for every basket of earth brought to raise the pile, whence, overtopping the rock, he could pour his missiles into the doomed city.
Night and day, day and night through the long hot weather the baskets worked, the gold was paid, until the end drew near.
The tale which is still told round many a watch-fire runs that one night Râjah Bhim-si, to whom twelve sons had been born by the beautiful Padmani, woke in fear. Before him, in a lurid light, stood Vyan-Mâta, the tutelary goddess of his race. "I am hungry," she wailed. "Lo! I drink Râjput blood, but I am hungry for the blood of kings. Let me drink the blood of twelve who have worn the diadem, and my city may yet be inviolate."
So one by one eleven of the young princes were raised to the throne. Then, after three days' reign, they went forth to meet the foe, to meet fate.
But the youngest, Prince Ajey-si, was the darling; so when his turn came, his father's heart failed him, and he called his chiefs together. "The child shall go free to recover what is lost. I will be the twelfth king to die for Chitore."
"Yea-we will die for Chitore," was the reply.
So each Râjput man put on the bridal coronet and the saffron robe, and every Râjput woman her wedding garment. And when the dawn came, the city gates were set wide, and through them poured desperate manhood surrounding a little knot of picked heroes who had sworn to see the child safe; while from behind rose up on the still morning air a column of smoke from the vast funeral pyre on which desperate women had sought the embrace of death in the dark vaults and caves which honeycomb the rock, and which, since that fatal day, have never been entered but once by mortal man. Their very entrance is now forgotten.
So runs the story. This, at least, is fact: the great Sacrifice of Honourable Death--the Johâr--was performed at Chitore, and Allah-ud-din, entering victorious, found a silent city.
Given an unscrupulous man, possessed of boundless wealth, and all things are possible in a country distracted by jealousies as India was at this time. And all things were achieved. The frequent incursions, growing year by year on larger scale, of the Moghuls who had already gained foothold to the west and north, were repelled. The Dekkan was finally conquered and annexed by the king's worthless slave and favourite, the eunuch Kafûr, a man whose life was one long tale of infamy. Originally the seat of the great Andhra dynasty, the Dekkan, divided into many principalities, had passed into many hands. In the seventh century King Hârsha had attempted to gather it into his empire, but had been foiled by the skill of Pulikêsin the king, during whose reign the wonderful caves in the Ajanta valley were excavated and adorned.
Another dynasty, another king in the eighth century gave to the Dekkan the marvellous rock-cut temple at Ellora. At first a stronghold of the Jain religion, it oscillated between that and Brahmanism, until in the twelfth century the latter finally came uppermost with the Haysâla line of kings.
It was in A.D. 1310 that Kafûr swept through the kingdom, despoiled the capital, laid waste the country, and carried off the reigning Râjah, though its final absorption in the Mahomedan empire was not until A.D. 1327. Kafûr, however, set his mark so far south as Adam's Bridge, opposite Ceylon, the furthest point yet reached by any northern invasion.
This was the zenith of Allah-ud-din's power. His health had yielded to intemperance of all kinds; he became more and more despotic, more and more cruel, more and more under the baleful influence of his creature Kafûr.
Rebellion grew rife. Little Prince Ajey-si's heir, Hâmir, recovered Chitore, Guzerât revolted, and almost ere it was annexed, the Dekkan rose and expelled half the Mahomedan garrison.
These tidings coming to the already suffering king brought on paroxysms of rage, and he died, his end accelerated by poison administered by that slave of his worst passions, Kafûr. Thereupon followed the usual murders and sudden deaths of an Indian succession, followed by the death of Kafûr, and the final enthroning of Allah-ud-din's third son, Mobârik. He was a weak sensualist, who, nevertheless, was human. So he removed some of his father's more oppressive taxes, and did away with his restrictions on trade and property. After which he and his creature Khûshru, a converted Hindu slave, outraged all decency, and gave way to sheer dissolute devilry, which ended in the master's murder by his favourite, who thereinafter snatched at the crown.
But this man even the Mahomedan India of the time could not stand. Mobârik, "whose name and reign would be too infamous to have a place in the records of literature, did not our duty as historian oblige us to the disagreeable task," was bad enough. Khûshru was worse. So he was killed, and a worthy warrior, by name Ghâzi-Beg Toghluk, who had repelled many invasions of Moghuls, was invited to the throne.
Ferishta's description of this is rather nice, and bears quotation:
"So they presented him with the keys of the city, and he mounted his horse and entered Delhi in triumph. When he came in sight of the Palace of a Thousand Minarets" (this must have been somewhere close to the Kutb) "he wept, and cried aloud:
"'Oh, subjects of a great empire! I am no more than one of you who unsheathed my sword to deliver you from oppression, and rid the world of a monster. If, therefore, any member of the royal family remain, let him be brought, that we his servants should prostrate ourselves before his throne. But if none of the race of kings have escaped the bloody hands of usurpation, let the most worthy be selected, and I swear to abide by the choice.'"
Not a bad speech. Small wonder that there followed on it the first historical notice of "chairing"--"the populace, laying hold of him, raised him up, carried him to the throne, and hailed him as Shâhjahân, Master of the World; but he chose the more modest title of Ghiâss-ud-din...."
For the curse of Sidi Dervish had been effectual, and the House of Khilji was extinct.
Warned by the past, one of the first acts of Ghiâss-ud-din was formally to nominate his successor from amongst his four sons. He made an unfortunate choice, for there is little doubt but that Prince Jonah was accessory to his father's death four years afterwards, when he invited him into a wooden palace which promptly fell upon, and crushed the king and five of his attendants.
Neither was Prince Aluf-Khân--under which title Jonah became heir-apparent--a lucky choice in other ways. He lost a large army in attempting to regain Deogîri, and was not particularly successful against the Râjputs. The king, meanwhile, spent most of his energy in building a new citadel at Delhi, the ruins of which still survive under the name of Tôghlukabad. A fine, massive piece of work it must have been, with its huge blocks of dressed stone and curiously sloping walls, reminding one of a modern dam.
So with the death of honest Ghiâss appears the typical Eastern potentate, complete as to arrogance, cruelty, power, and pride, who for seven-and-twenty years was to cry, "Off with his head!" to any one he pleased.
He seems to have been clever. We are told that he was the "most eloquent and accomplished prince of his time, and that he was not less famous for his gallantry in the field than for those accomplishments which render a man the ornament of private society."
It sounds well, but, judged by his acts, it appears doubtful if pride and arrogance had not made Mahomed Toghluk partially insane. No other supposition explains the extraordinary contradictions of his rule. He "established hospitals and almshouses for widows and orphans on the most liberal scale," but "his punishments were not only rigid and cruel, but frequently unjust. So little did he hesitate to spill the blood of God's creatures, that one might have supposed his object was to exterminate the human species." On more than one occasion, going out for a royal hunt, he suddenly announced his intention of hunting men, and not beasts; so the unoffending peasantry were driven in by the beaters and slain as if they were blackbuck. He imagined and started vast schemes for conquering China and Persia, in order to enrich his coffers, yet bribed a Moghul invasion to return whence it came by a huge subsidy which completely crippled him. He attempted to face famine--one of the worst India has ever known--by projects for agricultural improvements, and then added to the horrors and distress by ordering Delhi to be evacuated, and its inhabitants on pain of death to migrate with his court to Deogîri, which he rechristened Dowlutabâd, or the "Abode of Wealth." He founded an admirably regulated postal system throughout the country, but the roads themselves were bad, and absolutely unsafe for travellers. He tried to escape insolvency by coining copper at silver values--the first instance of token money in India--then fell upon his people tooth and nail because the public credit was not stable enough to stand the strain. Consequently, vast tracts of land were left uncultured, whole families fled to the woods to subsist on rapine and murder, while famine desolated wide provinces.
But the potentate remained a potentate. So strong was his grip on the people, that when, after having once been allowed to return to Delhi he again ordered them to Dowlutabâd, they obeyed, leaving "the noblest metropolis, the Envy-of-the-World, a resort for owls, and a dwelling-place for the beasts of the desert."
Thus it was not the hand of an assassin, but a surfeit of fish which eventually carried him off. This much may be said in his favour--he was no sensualist.
He was succeeded by his cousin Ferôze in A.D. 1351, who until his death, at the great age of ninety, in A.D. 1388, bent his whole mind towards restoring peace and prosperity to his distracted empire; which, while the largest, nominally, that India had ever seen, was in reality at the breaking-up point from sheer disorder. His great panacea appears to have been irrigation, and many an old canal in India dates from the time of Ferôze Toghluk. Despite his efforts, however, the empire began to disintegrate. The Dekkan and Bengal gained independence by the reception of ambassadors at court, and various smaller states seceded into autonomy. India was, in fact, at this time semi-fluid, half-gelatinous. Its form was for ever changing. Each principality at one moment, amœba-like, reached out an invertebrate arm and clutched at something, the next it had shrunken to a mere piece of jelly, quiescent, almost lifeless. And Ferôze Toghluk's hand was not strong enough for the task set it. Yet he was a good and kindly soul, as is evidenced by the resolutions which he caused to be engraven on the mosque he built at Ferôzebad (another portion of Old Delhi). In one he abolished judicial mutilation, claiming that God in His goodness having conferred on him the power, had also inspired him with the disposition to end these cruelties. Another orders the repeal of many vexatious taxes and licences. Yet another reduced the share of war plunder due to the sovereign from four-fifths to one-fifth, while it increased that of the troops to four-fifths from one. A fourth recorded his determination to pension for life all soldiers invalided by wounds or by age. A fifth declared his intention of severely punishing "all public servants convicted of corruption, as well as persons who offer bribes." The latter being a nicety in legal morality which one would hardly expect of the fourteenth century.
Ferôze was followed in about six years by no less than five kings whose only record of interest is that they stood by and watched the great empire which Kutb-ud-din Eîbuk had wrested from the Râjputs, and which Allah-ud-din had consolidated by sheer tyranny, fall to bits. Anarchy reigned supreme, civil war raged everywhere, and in Delhi itself two nominal kings were in arms the one against the other when, in A.D. 1398, news came that for an instant checked quarrel, and made all India hold its breath.
The Moghuls, under Timur, on their way to Delhi, had crossed the Indus, The long-dreaded, ofttimes-delayed invasion had come at last.
There is one cry of terror which from time immemorial has echoed out over the wide wheatfields of Northern India. Sometimes it has come when the first sword-points of the new-sprouted seed give a green shading to the sandy soil, and the flooding water from the wells which cease not night or day follows obedient to the naked brown figure with a wooden spud which directs it first to one patch of corn, then to another. Sometimes, again, it has come when the village has emptied itself upon the harvest field, when men are cutting and threshing, and women winnowing, while the children lie asleep in the great heaps of chaff, or make quaint images out of the straw.
At times, again, but not often, it has come, as it did in the Mutiny days, when the bare burnt fields lie idle, resting against next crop-season, and the peasant women sit outside the breathless village, picking and carding and spinning. But the cause is always the same: a knot of hurried horsemen showing on the level horizon, messengers, as it were, from the outside world beyond village ken.
"The Toork! The Toork!" rises the cry, and in an instant jewels are torn off and hidden, everything that can be concealed concealed, and with a wild prayer to some god for protection, the ultimate atom of India awaits destruction or dishonour or death in apathetic despair.
It must have needed a bitter biting indeed to have engraven this fear so indelibly on the Hindu heart.
Yet looking back on the four hundred years of Mahomedan inroads which we have just followed, small wonder can be felt at the persistence of this terror. How many times had not this knot of horsemen appeared, done their worst, and disappeared, leaving behind them miserable, dishonoured women, maddened by the sight of their murdered husbands, and the very dead boy-babies at their breasts.
A horrible legacy of fear, in truth!
And of late, in addition to the endless incursions of the Mahomedans proper, there had been persistent appearances and reappearances of the yellow-skinned Moghuls. From north, from east, from west, this rising race had ridden, had ravaged, and had returned whence they came.
In truth they were more of a rising race than these poor peasants knew; more so than the effete monarchies and nobilities of Mahomedan India realised. Close on a hundred and fifty years before, Chengiz Khân, a Moghul chief, had barbarously swept through the plains of North-Western Asia, and now his descendant Timur--though born in comparatively civilised times, and by profession a Mahomedan--was to carry on the destruction which his ancestor had begun. History hardly presents a more terrible personality than that of this man, as judged by the autobiography he left behind him. It is one of the most remarkable records ever written. Here is no mere rude barbarian, but a wily man of the world, ready to practise on every weakness of his fellows, ready with cant, with real devotion, full of courage as well as full of address, and with and through it all the most unscrupulous selfishness, the utmost admiration for his own perfidies.
But he was a great man; in his way, a genius. There is nothing in its way finer than the record he gives in this autobiography of his--which he entitles, "Political and Military Institutions of Tamârleng," or the Lame Timur--of his reasons for advancing on India, and his experiences there.
"I ordered 1,000 swift-footed camels, 1,000 swift-footed horses, and 1,000 swift-footed infantry to bring me word respecting the princes of India. I learnt that they were at variance one with the other.... The conquest appeared to me easy, though my soldiers thought it dangerous.
"Resolved to undertake it, and make myself master of the Indian Empire.
"Did so."
Brief to the point almost of bathos; but surely a brevity which brings with it a shiver as at something inhuman in its strength.
So in September 1398 the "admirably regulated horse and foot post" which Mahomed Toghluk had given to India, brought news that a huge host of Turks and Tartars and Moghuls, led by Timur in person, had crossed the river Indus by a bridge of rafts and reeds.
The tidings seem to have brought about no concerted action in India. It was too much given over to anarchy for cohesion. And so the celebrated march of the "Lame Firebrand of the World" began in earnest.
It is a horrid record of brutal butchery. As if fascinated by some unholy spell, the inhabitants of India seem to have yielded their necks to the smiter, without, as Ferishta puts it, "making one brave effort to save their country, their lives, or their property."
His first halt was at Talûmba, a strong fort and city at the junction of the Chenâb and the Râvi rivers. He plundered the town, but as the fort was strong, left it comtemptuously alone and went forward on his path of desolation and destruction. Not a village was left unburnt, not a male left alive, not a female unravished. The next pause was at a town famous for the shrine of a Mahomedan saint, for whose sake he spared the inhabitants, and after (doubtless) saying his prayers, dutifully pressed on to Bhatnîr, the headquarters of the Great Lunar Race of Râjputs. This he reached in two days by forced marches, the last being one of close on 100 miles. Here his ferocity broke beyond bounds. He slew by thousands the helpless country folk who had fled for protection to their Râjah, and who, overcrowding the city, were huddled together like sheep beyond its walls. The garrison gave battle, but, hard-pressed, sought refuge in the citadel, and Timur, gaining the gates of the town ere they could be shut, drove the unfortunates from street to street. Overmastered by numbers, by sheer terror, the place capitulated on terms. To no purpose. For, even while the Tartar was receiving the delegates and accepting their presents, orders were given to sack and slay. Whereupon, struck with horror, with despair, the cry, "Johâr! Johâr!" arose from the men, wives and children were slain, and the Râjputs sought nothing but revenge and death. "The scene," says Ferishta, "was awful. The inhabitants in the end were cut off to a man, though not before some thousands of the Moghuls had fallen."
This so exasperated Timur that every living soul in the city was massacred, and the place itself reduced to ashes.
To Sarâswati, to Fatehâbad, to Râjpur, he carried his flaming sword; then at Kâitul he rejoined the main body of his army--for he had only commanded a flying column hitherto--and settled his face fairly towards his goal--Delhi.
But now abject fear was beforehand with him, and he marched through desolate fields, deserted houses, empty cities.
A strange march of Death indeed! The young green wheat showing green as ever, the hearth fires still burning bravely, the litter and leavings of human life lying about in the sunlight; but life itself?--nowhere! Everything, gold, gems, home, country left, but that had gone. It must have angered the horde of butchers to find no blood with which to wet their swords, to hear no piteous cries for mercy as they rode. The very hands must have grown listless as they gathered in the unresisting spoils.
Perhaps that was the reason why Timur, arriving within touch of Delhi, sought to revive his soldiery by an order for the wholesale slaughter of all prisoners.
And all this time at Delhi the puppet-king Mahmûd, the last degenerate scion of the House of Toghluk, had sate in the massive palace of his forefathers, waiting.
"Delhi dûr ust."
["It is a far cry to Delhi."]
This had been his hope as he waited. But early in January an old man--for Timur was now past sixty years of age, and his life had been a strenuous one--crossed the river with a small body of seven hundred horse, and calmly reconnoitered Tôghlukabad.
Seven hundred horse only! Mahmûd took courage, sallied out with five thousand, was contemptuously driven within the walls again, until Timur, "having made the observations he wished, repassed the river, and rejoined his army."
A good general this, trusting to no Intelligence Department, but to his own eyes.
That night the one thousand prisoners (the figure is that given by Mahomedan historians) were slain in cold blood. Next day, 13th January, he and his army forded the river without opposition and entrenched themselves close to the gates of Tôghlukabad. Despising the astrologers, who pronounced the 15th of January to be an unlucky day, Timur chose it for his attack, and drew up his army in order of battle. His foes were barely worthy of such trouble. They certainly returned the challenge by marching out, elephants covered in mail, warriors in armour, pennants flying, drums sounding; but at the first charge of Moghul horsemen, the elephants' drivers were unseated, and leviathan in terror fled to the rear, communicating confusion to the ranks.
So almost without a blow the Tartar found himself by nightfall at the very gates of the city.
A fateful night! The king fled in it, the chief men in the city resolved during it on submission, and were promised protection on payment of a heavy indemnity.
Next morning, Timur was proclaimed Emperor in every mosque, guards were placed at Treasury and gates, and troops sent to enforce immediate payment.
What followed may have been due to insubordination on the part of the pillaging soldiery; on the other hand, it occurred far too often in Timur's career to make us quite unsuspicious of perfidy. Anyhow, whether by collision between the populace and the troops, or by mere wanton violence, resistance was aroused even amid the panic-stricken inhabitants, and the greatest tragedy Delhi has ever seen began. Once more the cry, "Johâr! Johâr!" echoed out helplessly, the gates were overpowered by mob-force and closed, the houses were set on fire, and while women and children perished in the flames, the men fought desperately to death in the streets, hand to hand with their butchers. The lanes were barricaded by the bodies of the dead, lives were sold dear, and a scene of carnage beyond description ensued; until the gates being once more forced, the whole Moghul army was let loose, to deal inevitable death on the almost unarmed crowd.
Five days afterwards Timur offered up to God "his sincere and humble tribute of grateful praise for his victory" in the splendid mosque of marble which Ferôze Toghluk had built on the banks of the Jumna.
Once more we are reminded of that idle rhyme--
"Three thousand Frenchmen sent below,
Praise God from whom all blessings flow."
The primitive passions change very little.
After that he departed, his work accomplished, his task done. He took with him plunder inconceivable, and with a few minor excursions to "put every inhabitant to the sword," made his way back to Samarkhûnd by the Kâbul route. To the last exposing himself to every fatigue, every privation which he imposed upon his army.
So he quitted India, taking no trouble to make provision for holding the empire he had won. He left anarchy, famine, pestilence, behind him. For two months Delhi was a city of the dead, and for thirty-six years India owned no government either in name or in reality. Dazed, depopulated, despairing, she dreamt evil dreams--dreams almost worse than the nightmare of the past.
No greater proof of the totality of Timur's destruction is needed than this--a whole generation had to pass away ere men could be found with hope enough wherewith to face the future.