Bahmani Sultanate

A ploughman, a chain, and a crown

formationDrafted from Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829)

Zafar Khan, a Delhi-born officer known to history as Hasan, served in the Deccan under Muhammad bin Tughluq, sultan of Delhi, a ruler whose capricious punishments had made his own governors afraid to obey his summons. When the sultan tried to recall his Deccan officers to Gujarat, the messenger sent to fetch them treated them with such open contempt that they chose open revolt over returning "like sheep to the slaughter." The rebellion spread quickly, drawing in disaffected local rajas along with the officers themselves, and by the time it reached its climax the rebels held Daulatabad and much of the Deccan outright.

Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829) · Koba-chan · CC BY-SA 4.0

A throne offered rather than seized

Nasir-ud-din Ismail, the rebels' own interim king, noticed that his officers and soldiers deferred to his general Zafar Khan more readily than to himself, and rather than contest it, called a meeting and proposed that Zafar Khan be elected king in his place. The assembly agreed unanimously. On a Friday judged auspicious by the court astrologers — 3 August 1347 — Zafar Khan was crowned Ala-ud-Din Hasan Bahman Shah, taking a black canopy in imitation of the Abbasid caliphs and making Gulbarga his capital.

Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829) · Deen Dayal · Public domain

A pedigree the chronicler himself doubted

The new king's name drew on a story of his own rise: as a young servant to a Brahmin astrologer named Gangu, he had once turned up a buried hoard of gold coins while plowing a field, and reported the find honestly to his master rather than keeping it for himself. Gangu is said to have predicted great things for him and asked only that, if those predictions came true, Hasan take the name Gangu for himself and keep him as finance minister — a promise Hasan kept. Some court genealogists later traced Hasan's own ancestry to Bahman, a king of ancient Persia, and the dynasty took its name from that claim. Firishta, writing centuries later, records having seen such a pedigree in the royal library at Ahmadnagar, but doubts it was anything but a flattering invention: Hasan's own origins, he judges, were too obscure ever to trace with any confidence, and the name Bahmani more plausibly honored Gangu the Brahmin than any Persian king.

A war of extermination

expansionDrafted from Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829)

Ala-ud-Din Hasan's son Muhammad Shah inherited a kingdom the Rajas of Vijayanagara and Warangal still hoped to roll back. Early in his reign he found Hindu bankers in both kingdoms melting down Bahmani gold and silver coin so that only Hindu currency would circulate in the Deccan; he put a number of them to death and restricted the mint and the banking trade to a few families descended from Delhi emigrants. When the two Rajas then demanded the return of territory his father had won, Muhammad Shah stalled through eighteen months of embassies while he shored up his own treasury and purged officers he distrusted, then went to war and won a quick victory that forced tribute and elephants from both rivals.

Münzkabinett, Berlin · Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829) · Reinhard Saczewski · Public domain

A jest, an oath, and a war without mercy

The peace did not last. A drunken order for a lavish gift drawn on the Vijayanagara treasury, and the Raja's contemptuous refusal to honor it, gave Muhammad Shah his pretext. After the Raja's own troops massacred every inhabitant of the frontier town of Mudkal, the sultan swore never to sheathe his sword until a hundred thousand "infidels" had died in revenge, crossed the Krishna with a picked force, and routed the Hindu camp in a night attack that Firishta - a court historian writing two centuries later, and no neutral witness by his own account's admission - says left seventy thousand dead in a single morning. The war dragged on with such severity that Firishta records the sultan halting for three days of celebration each time his own armies had killed another twenty thousand, until the Raja finally sued for the peace that ended it. It was, by Firishta's own aside, the first time a Delhi-descended Muhammadan king had led an army across the Tungabhadra and into Vijayanagara's own territory in person.

A war fought at arm's length over Warangal

Muhammad Shah's dealings with Warangal followed the same rhythm as his war with Vijayanagara - alliance when it suited both kingdoms against a common Delhi threat, and open war when it did not. A raja's son, Vinaik Dew, seized horses being carried to the Bahmani court and provoked a punitive campaign that plundered deep into Telangana before a large indemnity bought peace again. Warangal itself would not fall to the Bahmanis outright for another sixty years, but Muhammad Shah's reign fixed the pattern - punishing raids answered by tribute, never a lasting conquest - that would define the frontier for a generation after him.

A farmer's daughter and a crown jewel

expansionDrafted from Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829)

Taj ud-Din Firuz Shah, who came to the throne in 1397, was by Firishta's own account the Bahmani dynasty's most accomplished king - fought twenty-four campaigns, took the fortress of Bankapur, and brought much of Telangana under Bahmani rule for the first time. He was also the first Deccan king to wear a jeweled crown in the Persian style, and Firishta records him consulting his own religious scholars on how far Islamic law would let him indulge an appetite for women that outran the four wives the law permitted - a private vanity that sat alongside the same energy he brought to war and administration.

A war begun over a stolen bride, and a marriage that ended it

Early in his reign a botched attempt to seize a farmer's daughter from the border town of Mudkal for his own household gave the Raja of Vijayanagara grounds to raid Bahmani territory in return. Firuz Shah answered by besieging Vijayanagara itself for months, ravaging the country around it and reducing Bankapur, until the Raja bought peace with an immense indemnity, the permanent loss of that fortress, and his own daughter's hand in marriage - a match Firishta notes was contrary to Hindu custom, which married daughters only within caste. The peace did not hold; war broke out again within Firuz Shah's own reign, severe enough at one point that Firishta says the survival of the Bahmani kingdom itself was in question, before the sultan's brother Ahmad finally broke the Hindu army in the field.

A son passed over, a brother crowned

Firuz Shah's mind and health failed him in his final years, and his brother Ahmad Khan, governing as Khan Khanan, moved to claim the throne over the sultan's own son Hasan Khan. The two armies met outside the capital; when a false report of Firuz Shah's death in the fighting swung the soldiers to Ahmad's banner, Firuz retreated into the citadel and, on recovering from a fainting fit brought on by the alarm, judged the contest already lost. He called his son before him, told him that a throne rested on the loyalty of the army and nobility rather than on birthright, and opened the gates. Ahmad ascended the throne as Ahmad Shah ten days before Firuz Shah's own death; Firishta records, without endorsing it, a rumor current in his own time that Ahmad's nephew had the dying king strangled rather than let nature take its course.

Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829) · Rangan Datta Wiki · CC BY-SA 4.0

A festival for every twenty thousand

expansionDrafted from Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829)

Ahmad Shah spent his early reign rebuilding the army for a reckoning with Vijayanagara, still resented for its invasions under his brother. He marched south with forty thousand horse and camped across the Tungabhadra from the Raja's own army for forty days, hoping to draw the Hindus into a set battle on ground of his own choosing; when they would not cross, his officers forded the river by night instead and fell on the Raja's camp at dawn. The Raja himself, found half-dressed fleeing into a stand of sugar cane, was seized by soldiers who mistook him for a villager and made him carry a bundle of cane before them - and so escaped unrecognized in the chaos that followed, reaching his own officers again only by early afternoon.

An occupation without mercy

What followed was not the punitive raid-and-tribute pattern of earlier campaigns. Ahmad Shah overran the open country and, by Firishta's own account, "put to death men, women, and children, without mercy" - breaking with the understanding his brother and Muhammad Shah before him had kept with Vijayanagara's kings, and halting for three days of celebration each time the toll of the dead reached twenty thousand. He tore down temples and destroyed Brahmin colleges as he went. A band of five thousand Hindus, driven to desperation by the destruction of their own shrines, swore an oath to kill the king in revenge and set spies to track his movements, though Firishta's account does not record them succeeding.

A saint's tomb, and a captured city's namesake

Returning north from this campaign, Ahmad Shah stopped to hunt near the old fortress town of Bidar and chose the spot to found a new capital, Ahmadabad Bidar, on the ancient site. He was, in his own lifetime, revered by his subjects as a wali - a saint - for his devotion to the Sufi teacher Geesu Daraz, whom he showered with grants of land near Gulbarga and whose shrine Firishta says became a place of pilgrimage across the Deccan; Firishta calls him, by his own count, only the sixth king in Indian history to carry that title.

Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829) · H Shraddha · CC BY-SA 4.0

A beard grown grey in service

peakDrafted from Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829)

Muhammad Shah III came to the throne at nine years old in 1463, and for most of his reign the kingdom's affairs rested in the hands of two ministers acting under the regency of the queen mother. Chief among them was Mahmud Gawan, a Persian-born former merchant who had turned down offers to serve as vizier to greater courts before settling in the Deccan. By the time the kingdom's territory had grown large enough that its old four-province structure no longer served it, it was Gawan who persuaded the king to divide the realm into eight provinces instead, redrawing administrative boundaries across the entire sultanate and reserving several districts, including Bijapur itself, under his own direct charge.

A minister richer in reputation than in gold

Gawan's own integrity became, after his death, a matter the king could verify for himself. Rivals at court, envious of his standing, had spent years poisoning Muhammad Shah's confidence in him; when the king finally had Gawan's private treasury examined, he found not the concealed fortune his accusers had implied but two accounts, one for official expenses and one, nearly empty of substance beside it, that Gawan called the treasury of the poor. His household kept a modest kitchen, a servant's mat for a bed, and a personal library of three thousand volumes willed entirely to the college he had founded rather than to his own family.

Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829) · Sngmsh8666 · CC BY-SA 4.0

A forgery, a drunken order, and an old man's dignity

None of this integrity was known to the king in the moment that mattered. Rivals produced a letter, bearing what appeared to be Gawan's own seal, addressed to a hostile raja and full of treasonous implications. Warned that the king's fury made the charge dangerous to answer in person, Gawan went to court anyway, telling his own household that a beard "grown grey in the service of the father" would be no less honorably spent in the service of the son. Confronted with the letter, he acknowledged the seal as his but denied any knowledge of the letter itself — a defense the intoxicated king, past reasoning, did not pause to examine. Gawan was executed within the hour, kneeling and professing his faith as the blow fell.

A king's remorse, and an empire that would not forgive it

Muhammad Shah's own investigation of Gawan's estate came only after the execution, and the discovery of his minister's poverty broke him with a grief he could not undo. Provincial governors who had served under Gawan's own administrative reforms began withdrawing from the royal camp within days, accepting the king's belated apologies and further concessions but never fully returning to court. Muhammad Shah died the following year, his own epitaph recording, in a chronogram his court poets composed, that his death spelled "the ruin of the Deccan" — a judgment the years that followed would not contradict.

Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829) · Dev Raj V C · CC BY-SA 4.0

A king who ruled nothing

endDrafted from Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829)

The provincial governors who had drifted from court after Mahmud Gawan's execution never fully returned to Bahmani obedience. Over the following decades their own governorships hardened into outright kingdoms: Bijapur under a line calling itself Adil Shahi, Ahmadnagar under the Nizam Shahis, Golconda under the Qutb Shahis, Berar under the Imad Shahis, and Bidar itself, the Bahmani capital, eventually under a line of Barid Shahis descended from the sultanate's own last powerful ministers. None of them formally deposed the Bahmani throne outright; they simply stopped answering to it while continuing, for a time, to issue documents in a Bahmani king's nominal name.

A minister who kept his king as a prisoner

By the time Kalimullah Shah came to the throne, styled king in name only, real power at Bidar belonged entirely to the minister Amir Barid, who kept the young sovereign confined to his own palace and permitted him no part in government at all. When Kalimullah once tried to gain more freedom of movement, Barid tightened his confinement rather than loosen it.

Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829) · iMahesh · CC BY-SA 4.0

An appeal to Delhi's new master

In 1526 the Mughal prince Babur conquered Delhi, and the rulers of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar and Golconda — former Bahmani governors turned independent kings in every practical sense — sent their own embassies to the new power, seeking recognition on equal terms. Kalimullah, still nominally their sovereign, sent an appeal of his own: a secret petition, carried by a disguised companion, describing his kingdom as usurped and his own person confined by rebellious servants, and offering to cede Daulatabad and Berar to Babur in exchange for rescue. Babur, still occupied subduing Malwa and Gujarat, did not act on it.

An exile that closed the dynasty

Amir Barid learned of the mission and answered it by confining Kalimullah more rigidly still. The king escaped his own captivity and fled to his uncle, Ismail Adil Shah of Bijapur, hoping for shelter from family rather than a minister's mercy; dissatisfied with his reception there, he moved on to the court of Burhan Nizam Shah at Ahmadnagar, who at first paid him the courtesy of standing in his presence before concluding that the gesture only advertised a defect in his own claim to kingship, and dropping the practice. Kalimullah remained at Ahmadnagar until his death, in exile from a capital he had never actually ruled — and with him, the source states plainly, the Bahmani dynasty came to its end, in a Deccan already divided, in substance if not yet fully in name, among the five kingdoms his own governors had built out of its fragments.

Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829) · Kiran Sasidharan · CC BY-SA 3.0