Harsha Empire

Prince Siladitya

Drafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)formation

Thanesar had been holy ground since legend's own memory, the "Land of Kuru" and battlefield of heroes long before it became, in the late sixth century, the seat of a raja named Prabhakaravardhana — a man who raised himself to real regional power through successful wars against the Hun settlements of the north-western Punjab and the Gurjara country, helped along by a politically useful advantage: his mother was a princess of Gupta lineage, giving his ambitions a pedigree his own conquests alone would not have supplied.

Two sons, one campaign each

In 604 Prabhakaravardhana sent his elder son Rajyavardhana, a young man just entering manhood, north with a large army against the Huns; his younger son Harsha, four years junior, followed at a distance with a cavalry force. While Rajyavardhana pressed the campaign into the hills, Harsha — fifteen years old — lingered in the foothill forests enjoying the hunting, until a courier reached him with news that changed everything: his father lay dying of a violent fever.

A death, a crown, and a hesitation

Harsha rode back to the capital at speed and found the king past saving. Prabhakaravardhana died before Rajyavardhana, victorious in the field, could return to claim what was his by right. Some at court, in the interval, appear to have favoured the younger son's succession instead — but the intrigue came to nothing once Rajyavardhana arrived and took the throne without contest.

He did not hold it long. Within days a courier brought word that Grahavarman, king of Kanauj and husband of the princes' sister Rajyasri, had been killed by the king of Malwa, who had the princess "confined like a brigand's wife, with a pair of iron fetters kissing her feet." Rajyavardhana marched at once with ten thousand cavalry, left the elephants and heavy troops with his brother, defeated the Malwan king with little difficulty — and was then treacherously murdered under cover of a peace conference by Shashanka, king of Bengal and an ally of the man he had just beaten.

A throne nobody was sure belonged to him

The murdered king left no son old enough to rule, and the nobles of Thanesar hesitated visibly before offering the crown to his younger brother — a hesitation the sources never fully explain, though it is consistent enough with an accession that had no automatic claim behind it. On the advice of Bhandi, a cousin raised alongside the two princes, the council finally settled on inviting Harsha to take up the burden of rule. Harsha, for reasons the record leaves unstated, hesitated in turn — by one account consulting a Buddhist oracle before accepting — and even then declined the royal title itself, styling himself merely Prince Siladitya. He did not formally assume the kingship until 612, five and a half years into what history nonetheless dates, from his actual accession, to October 606.

Under one umbrella

Drafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)expansion

Two tasks faced the new king immediately: avenge his brother's murder, and find his sister. He judged the second more urgent, and pursued it even at the cost of letting Shashanka's assassin escape.

A princess found in the forest

Rajyasri, despairing of rescue, was on the point of burning herself alive with her attendants when Harsha, guided by local tribal chiefs, traced her into the depths of the Vindhyan jungles in time. The campaign against Shashanka himself went nowhere near as decisively — no details of it survive, and Shashanka appears to have escaped with little loss, still ruling Bengal as late as 619. Rajyasri, recovered and safe, turned out to be a young woman of real accomplishment, learned in Buddhist doctrine — and her rescue, rather than the unfinished reckoning with her husband's murderer, is what Harsha's reign actually pivots on next.

A deliberate scheme, not a reaction

With his sister recovered, Harsha turned his considerable energy toward a methodical, sustained campaign aimed at bringing all of northern India, in the phrase his own era used, "under one umbrella." He began the effort with a force of five thousand elephants, twenty thousand cavalry and fifty thousand infantry — already discarding the war-chariots ancient tradition still counted as a fourth arm of a properly organised Indian army, in favour of speed.

Hiuen Tsang, the Chinese pilgrim who would later travel at Harsha's own court, described the resulting campaigns in language that has outlived the battles themselves: "he went from east to west subduing all who were not obedient; the elephants were not unharnessed, nor the soldiers unhelmeted." Within five and a half years the north-west and much of Bengal were his, and his army had grown to match the conquest — sixty thousand war elephants, a hundred thousand cavalry. He kept fighting for thirty years beyond that, his last recorded campaign an assault on the coastal region of Ganjam as late as 643.

The one campaign that did not go his way

Only one adversary stopped him outright. Pulikesin II, the greatest of the Chalukya kings, had built a comparable paramountcy over the Deccan, and Harsha could not tolerate so powerful a rival existing unchallenged. Marching south in person with, in the Chinese pilgrim's phrase, "troops from the five Indies and the best generals from all countries," he found the Chalukya king guarding the passes of the Narmada too effectively to be dislodged. Harsha was forced to retire and accept the river as his southern frontier — the single check on thirty years of otherwise unbroken success, and the boundary his empire never crossed again.

The tower catches fire

Drafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)peak

Harsha met the Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang while in camp in Bengal, and was so taken with the Master's account of Buddhist teaching that he resolved to give it the widest publicity a reigning north Indian paramount could provide: a special assembly at Kanauj, by then his capital, with the pilgrim himself as its centrepiece.

Ninety days to arrive

Harsha marched along the southern bank of the Ganges at the head of an enormous train, while his vassal Kumara, king of Kamarupa, kept pace on the opposite bank with a smaller following of his own. The two processions took ninety days to reach Kanauj, arriving in the early spring of 644. Waiting to receive them were the king of Valabhi, connected to Harsha by marriage, eighteen further tributary rajas, four thousand learned Buddhist monks —a thousand of them from Nalanda alone — and some three thousand Jains and orthodox Brahmans besides.

A king dressed as a god

A monastery and shrine had been built specially on the riverbank, its central tower a hundred feet high, housing a golden image of the Buddha cast to the king's own height. Each day a smaller image was carried in procession, escorted by all twenty vassal rajas and three hundred elephants, its canopy borne by Harsha himself, dressed as the god Indra, while Kumara walked beside him costumed as Brahma. The king scattered pearls and golden flowers as he went, washed the great image with his own hands, and carried it on his shoulder to its tower, where he heaped it with thousands of jewelled silken robes. Each afternoon closed with a public disputation; each evening, the king withdrew to his travelling palace a mile distant.

What the ceremony nearly cost him

The celebration, which ran for many days, ended in violence nobody had planned for. The great temporary monastery caught fire and came close to total destruction before Harsha's own intervention — read by the pious crowd as a miracle — brought the flames under control. Then, descending the steps of the stupa he had climbed to survey the scene, Harsha was rushed by a man with a dagger. The would-be assassin was seized on the spot, and under the king's own interrogation confessed that "heretics" — rivals of the Buddhist establishment Harsha had so conspicuously favoured — had put him up to it.

Five hundred prominent Brahmans were arrested on the strength of that confession and, "straitly questioned" in turn, admitted to having set the fire themselves with burning arrows, hoping to kill the king in the resulting panic. That confession too was almost certainly extracted under torture and almost certainly false in substance — but true or not, it was accepted at face value. The alleged ringleaders were executed and five hundred Brahmans sent into exile, on evidence that would not survive serious examination by any standard except the one that mattered at the time: the king's own.

A second-hand garment

Drafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)aside?What aside means

After the Kanauj assembly closed, Harsha invited his Chinese guest to one further ceremony before letting him begin the long journey home: a quinquennial assembly at Prayaga, the sacred confluence of the Ganges and Jumna at modern Allahabad, where — he explained — it had been his own practice for thirty years, following the custom of his ancestors, to give away everything he had accumulated to the poor and to the religious of every denomination.

Seventy-five days of giving

The 644 assembly, the sixth of the series, drew all of Harsha's vassal kings and a crowd estimated at half a million — the poor, orphans, the destitute, and Brahmans and ascetics of every sect invited from across northern India. The proceedings ran seventy-five days. On the first day an image of the Buddha was set up on the sands and showered with costly clothing and valuables; the Sun and Shiva received similar honour on the second and third days, each at half the value given to the Buddha. Ten thousand selected Buddhist monks received gold coins, pearls and cotton garments on the fourth day. The next twenty days belonged to the Brahmans in their thousands; ten more to Jains and other sects the Chinese pilgrim's own account calls "heretics"; a further ten to mendicants from distant regions; a full month to the poor, the orphaned and the destitute.

What was left when it was over

By the end, in the Chinese record's own words, "the accumulation of five years was exhausted. Except the horses, elephants, and military accoutrements, which were necessary for maintaining order and protecting the royal estate, nothing remained." Harsha gave away his gems, his clothing, his necklaces, his earrings, his bracelets, his chaplets, his own head-jewel — everything, without stint. When it was all gone, he asked his sister Rajyasri for an ordinary second-hand garment, put it on, and paid worship to "the Buddhas of the ten regions," rejoicing that his treasure had been given in the field of religious merit.

An emperor who owned nothing but his army

That is not a ceremonial flourish added to a chronicle for effect — it is the plain, repeated practice of a paramount ruler who had done this five times before and would, had he lived, likely have done it again. Harsha kept enough of a standing military establishment to hold what he had conquered and nothing else on a permanent basis; wealth accumulated between assemblies existed, on his own explanation, in order to be given away at the next one, in public, in a fixed and elaborate order of precedence, until a man who had put a hundred thousand cavalry in the field stood on the sands at Prayaga in a garment he had borrowed from his own widowed sister.

Arjuna's throne

Drafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)end

Harsha kept up diplomatic relations with Tang China throughout his later years. A Brahman envoy he had sent to the imperial court returned in 643 with a Chinese mission bearing a formal reply; that mission stayed in India for a considerable time before starting home in 645. The following year a new Chinese embassy was dispatched under Wang Xuance, second in command of the earlier mission, with a modest escort of thirty horsemen.

A country without its king

Before the new envoys reached Magadha in 648, Harsha had already died — at the very end of 647 or the start of 648, the sources leave the exact moment uncertain — and the removal of what the record calls "his strong arm" had plunged the country into disorder that a simultaneous famine made considerably worse. He left no son to inherit what he had spent forty years assembling.

The minister who took what was left

Arjuna, one of Harsha's own ministers, seized the vacant throne into this vacuum — and gave Wang Xuance's arriving mission a hostile reception entirely out of keeping with the diplomatic relationship it represented. His men massacred the mission's small escort and plundered its goods. Wang Xuance and one companion survived only by escaping under cover of night across the border into Nepal.

What a defeated ambassador did next

That should have been the end of the story — a diplomatic mission destroyed by a usurper taking advantage of a dead king's absence, and two survivors making their way home to report a failure. It was not. What Wang Xuance did instead, and what it cost the man who had attacked him, belongs to its own telling: the dynasty Harsha had spent his life building ended, within months of his death, in an episode no chronicler of early India had noticed until modern scholars went looking specifically for it.

A borrowed army

Drafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)afterlife

Wang Xuance, a Chinese envoy with no troops of his own, no authority beyond his imperial commission, and a usurper's army between him and home, did not go home. He went to the court of Srong-tsan Gampo, the Tibetan king married to a Chinese princess, and asked for help.

Two kingdoms, borrowed for a war of revenge

Srong-tsan Gampo gave it: a thousand Tibetan horsemen, joined by a Nepalese contingent of seven thousand more, placed under the command of a Chinese diplomat whose actual mission had been to deliver imperial courtesies, not to fight a war. With this small, improvised, entirely borrowed army, Wang Xuance descended into the Gangetic plain and besieged the chief city of Tirhut. It fell after three days. Three thousand of the garrison were beheaded; ten thousand more drowned in the neighbouring river attempting to escape.

Arjuna's defeat, twice over

Arjuna fled, gathered a fresh force, and offered battle again. He was beaten a second time and taken prisoner. Wang Xuance beheaded a thousand more captives on the spot, and in a further action captured Arjuna's entire royal family, twelve thousand additional prisoners, and thirty thousand head of cattle. Five hundred and eighty walled towns submitted without a further fight. Kumara, the king of eastern India who had walked beside Harsha at Kanauj four years earlier, sent supplies of cattle, horses and equipment to support the victorious army — an old ally of the dead king backing the foreign envoy who had, in effect, taken up the dead king's own unfinished business.

What became of the usurper, and of the episode

Wang Xuance brought Arjuna to China as a prisoner and was promoted for his service. He returned to India once more in 657, this time on an entirely peaceful mission to make offerings at the Buddhist holy places, entering by the same Nepalese route that had once been his only way out alive.

The whole affair — a Chinese ambassador defeated and humiliated, raising a foreign army on his own initiative, invading a country he held no commission to invade, and returning its usurping king to China in chains — went essentially unnoticed by the historians of India for centuries afterward, surviving instead in Chinese sources that had no reason to connect it to the broader question of what followed Harsha's reign. No paramount power replaced his in the north. The region that Harsha had held under one umbrella for four decades broke, after Wang Xuance's brief and strange intervention, into the regional kingdoms it would remain divided among for centuries — the closing, and by some distance the strangest, chapter in the history of the dynasty a fifteen-year-old prince had once hesitated even to call his own.