Tughlaq dynasty

The greatest extent

Ghiyath al-Din Tughlaq took the throne in 1320 and campaigned in Bengal and the Telugu country. His son Muhammad bin Tughlaq, who succeeded in 1325, briefly held more of the subcontinent than any ruler between Aśoka and Aurangzeb — from the Punjab to Madurai.

It did not hold. Within fifteen years Bengal, the Deccan and the south had broken away, producing the Bahmani Sultanate, the Madurai Sultanate and Vijayanagara, and the Sultanate never recovered its southern provinces.

Muhammad bin Tughlaq

The sultan's reputation rests on a series of schemes that failed. He ordered the administrative capital moved from Delhi to Daulatabad in the Deccan — a rational choice for governing an empire whose centre of gravity had shifted south, executed in a way that required much of Delhi's population to march a thousand miles, and abandoned after a few years. He issued a token currency of brass and copper at the value of silver, a policy the Chinese and Ilkhanid states had attempted before him, and had to redeem it when forgery became uncontrollable. He raised taxation in the Doab during a famine.

Ibn Battuta, who served as a qadi at his court for years, left the fullest portrait of him: learned, fluent in argument, generous beyond measure and lethally arbitrary. Modern assessments differ on whether he was a visionary undone by execution or simply a poor judge of what was possible; both readings have long histories, and the sources make it hard to settle.

Firuz Shah and the end

Firuz Shah Tughlaq, who ruled from 1351 to 1388, gave up on reconquest and concentrated on administration and building. He constructed canals from the Yamuna and Sutlej that irrigated Haryana — some still in use in modified form — founded Firozabad, Hisar, Jaunpur and Fatehabad, and repaired earlier monuments including the Qutb Minar. He also moved two Aśokan pillars to Delhi, where one stands on his palace terrace at Firoz Shah Kotla; the inscriptions were then unreadable, and he had scholars attempt them without success.

His reign also saw a hardening of religious policy — the extension of the jizya to brahmins, previously exempt, and his own memoir's account of the destruction of certain temples.

The dynasty collapsed in succession disputes after his death, and in 1398 Timur sacked Delhi, massacring much of its population. The Sultanate never regained its position, and the fifteenth century belongs to the regional sultanates that had already broken away.