Delhi Sultanate

The state that made northern India a Persianate world, and the one thing standing between the Mongols and the subcontinent. It began in 1206 when Qutb al-Din Aibak, a Turkic slave-general of the Ghurids, took power at Delhi rather than returning to Afghanistan, founding a sultanate that five successive dynasties held for over three centuries. Its early rulers were mamluks, military slaves, which is why the first is called the Slave Dynasty and why one of them, Raziyya, briefly became the only woman to sit on the throne of Delhi. The Mongols reached the Indus repeatedly between the 1220s and the 1300s, and Alauddin Khalji's defeat of successive invasions is the reason northern India was not incorporated into their empire. Alauddin also ran an experiment in price control and standing-army finance that had no parallel in medieval Eurasia. Muhammad bin Tughlaq moved the capital to the Deccan and back, and issued a token currency that collapsed, in two of the most famous administrative failures in Indian history. The sultanate's provinces broke away one by one during the fourteenth century, forming Bengal, Gujarat, Malwa and the Bahmani kingdom. Timur sacked Delhi in 1398 and the state never recovered its reach. Babur destroyed the last Lodi sultan at Panipat in 1526. The Qutb Minar and the Persian court culture it fostered outlasted it by centuries. Delhi was rebuilt as a series of separate walled cities, seven of which are usually counted. Persian was the language of administration throughout. Amir Khusrau, writing at the sultanate's court, is credited with much of the early Hindustani poetic tradition. The Tughlaqabad and Siri fortifications still stand in ruins.

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