Alauddin Khalji Expands the Delhi Sultanate
Alauddin Khalji ruled the Delhi Sultanate for twenty years, extended it further south than any Indian state had reached in centuries, and stopped the Mongols. He came to power in 1296 by inviting his uncle and father-in-law, the sultan, to a riverside meeting and having him beheaded there. His reign was organised around two facts: the Mongols raided northern India repeatedly and nearly took Delhi twice, and an army large enough to stop them had to be paid for. His answer was a set of measures that have no real parallel elsewhere in the medieval world. He fixed the prices of grain, cloth, horses, slaves and cattle by decree, backed by state granaries, licensed merchants, registered supply from the countryside, and inspectors with the authority to punish short weight severely. He raised the land tax to half the produce and collected it in kind in the core provinces, and he confiscated religious endowments and private wealth on the argument that rich subjects made rebellions. The army was large, paid in cash, and branded its horses to stop fraud. It worked. Six Mongol invasions were defeated between 1297 and 1306, and the last of them ended with prisoners trampled by elephants outside Delhi. His generals, notably Malik Kafur, took Gujarat, Ranthambore, Chittor, Warangal and the Deccan, reaching Madurai in the far south and returning with enormous plunder. The system depended entirely on him and collapsed within a few years of his death in 1316. His court was also where the poet Amir Khusrau worked, and the Alai Darwaza at Delhi is his. He is remembered in India largely through a sixteenth-century poem about the siege of Chittor and its queen, a legend that has been fought over in courts and cinemas as recently as 2018.
- Year: 1296 CE
- Category: Military
