Sharqi Sultanate of Jaunpur

A eunuch's province

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928)formation

Malik Sarvar's rise began as loyal service, not rebellion. In March 1393 the eunuch minister, known by the title Khvaja Jahan, placed his own choice of candidate — Nasir-ud-din Mahmud, grandson of Firuz Tughluq — on the throne of Delhi. He then put down Hindu rebellions across the Gangetic Doab and Oudh on his new sultan's behalf, extending his own authority as he went west to Koil and east into Tirhut and Bihar. The king of Bengal, alarmed at how close this advance had come to his own frontier, sent tribute — elephants owed by treaty to Delhi — directly to Khvaja Jahan instead, since Delhi was no longer strong enough to insist the payment go where it was nominally owed.

A province that stopped asking permission

At some point in this process — the sources do not mark the exact moment — Khvaja Jahan simply stopped deferring to the throne he had just installed. When Timur attacked Delhi in 1398, he sent no help and the record does not show him taking any notice of the invasion at all. He died the following year, leaving his territory intact to an adopted son, Malik Qaranful, who took the royal style Mubarak Shah, struck his own coin, and had the khutba read in his own name — the formal declarations of sovereignty a eunuch founder, with no heir of his own body, could only pass to a son he had chosen rather than fathered.

Two brothers, one throne

Mubarak died suddenly in 1402 while preparing to repel a threatened invasion, and was succeeded by his younger brother, who took the throne as Shams-ud-din Ibrahim Shah. The pattern was already set: a dynasty founded by a man who could produce no natural heirs, continuing itself through adoption and fraternal succession rather than any fixed rule, in a kingdom whose entire claim to independence rested on nothing more than having once, quietly, stopped taking orders from the capital it had been sent to pacify.

The Shiraz of India

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Ibrahim Shah reigned for thirty-four years, longer than any other Sharqi king, and spent a good part of that time doing what most of his neighbours could not afford to: patronising scholarship rather than only making war.

A court built for learning

Ibrahim was, by every account, a genuinely cultured prince, and his court became a refuge for theology and law at a moment when both needed one. Works on both subjects issued from Jaunpur in numbers that later gave the city its lasting epithet: the Shiraz of India, a comparison to the great Persian centre of poetry and scholarship that no other Indian court of the period earned. It is a striking legacy for a dynasty whose kings, on the evidence Haig weighs and does not dismiss, were themselves of African descent — Malik Sarvar a eunuch, his adopted sons probably slaves, Mubarak's own name before his accession, Qaranful, "the Clove," a term of address applied to African slaves. No portrait of the period survives to settle the question further, but nothing in the record argues against it either.

Wars fought without losing the capital

None of this scholarly patronage kept Ibrahim out of the field. Delhi's own weakness twice tempted its rulers to try to reclaim Jaunpur outright, and Ibrahim met both attempts — expelling one Delhi governor from Kanauj after a four-month siege, and forcing a diplomatic retreat from a planned march on Delhi itself when he heard that Gujarat's own sultan had come to his rival's aid. He annexed the district of Sambhal east of the Ganges, and in 1433 raced Hoshang Shah of Malwa to claim the contested town of Kalpi — and lost the race when a report of an attack on Jaunpur forced him to turn back before he could complete the annexation himself.

The campaign that stopped short of conquest

His most consequential foreign venture was a war he never intended to fight to a finish. Between 1409 and 1414, urged on by the Muslim saint Qutb-ul-Alam, Ibrahim invaded Bengal to punish Raja Ganesh, a Hindu chieftain who had accumulated more real power there than the kingdom's nominal ruler and was using it to persecute Bengal's Muslims. Ganesh, cornered, negotiated his way out through the same saint who had brought the invasion down on him — and Ibrahim, satisfied with the appearance of a settlement, withdrew his army rather than press the advantage to outright annexation. It would prove, in hindsight, the furthest Jaunpur's arms ever reached under a ruler more interested in what his court could produce than in what his army could hold.

The army that had been his own

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Ibrahim's son Mahmud Shah reigned twenty-one years, fought an inconclusive war with Malwa over the misconduct of a minor vassal, and made the mistake, late in his career, of attacking Bahlul Lodi of Delhi — a rash venture whose consequences would outlast him. He died in 1457 just as he was about to face Bahlul in the field, and the throne passed to his son Bhikan, who took the title Muhammad Shah.

A brother murdered, a mother taunted

Muhammad Shah proved, almost immediately, both violent and reckless. After making a truce with Bahlul Lodi, he ordered the chief magistrate of Jaunpur to execute his own younger brother Hasan Khan and a captive Lodi kinsman. The magistrate refused — the king's own mother was sheltering the condemned men — so Muhammad lured her out of the city with a false promise of consultation over his brother's future, and had Hasan Khan murdered the moment she was gone. When she remained at Kanauj to mourn, Muhammad sent word that she might as well grieve for her other sons at the same time, since they would soon join Hasan in the grave.

The threat that turned an army against him

The taunt reached the princes it was meant to threaten, and they moved first. Convincing their brother that Bahlul was planning a night attack, they persuaded him to place thirty thousand horse and thirty elephants under their command to meet it — and used the force to defect outright. Bahlul, watching the movement, correctly read it as a threat to his own communications and pursued. Muhammad, discovering his brothers gone, retreated toward the Ganges and found, on nearing Kanauj, that his power had already evaporated: his surviving elder brother Husain had been acclaimed king there in his place. Deserted by what few nobles remained loyal, Muhammad Shah died trying to defend himself against an attack from the army that had, only days before, still answered to him.

What the fratricide actually cost

Husain Shah, the new king, made peace with Bahlul on favourable terms — recovering his captured brother in exchange for the Lodi kinsman Muhammad had originally wanted dead — and the two rulers observed a four-year truce neither had any real reason to break yet. But the episode had shown Bahlul something Jaunpur's own kings had not fully reckoned with: a throne whose last transfer of power had been decided by an army changing sides rather than by any settled rule of succession was not a stable enough neighbour to leave alone indefinitely.

Nothing left to retreat to

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Husain Shah's military resources, on the figures the chroniclers give, far exceeded Bahlul Lodi's. After the four-year truce that followed his brother's death, he assembled — if the numbers can be trusted at all — an army of three hundred thousand men and fourteen hundred elephants for a predatory campaign into Orissa, marching through Tirhut and along the frontier of Bengal itself to get there, and returned with an immense ransom in elephants, horses and treasure that Muslim chroniclers preferred to describe as tribute rather than plunder.

Twice within reach of Delhi, twice turned back

None of that scale of resources translated into a decisive victory over Bahlul. Twice Husain advanced on Delhi with what looked like overwhelming force, and twice the campaign ended without the conquest it seemed to promise. The first time, in 1479, he agreed to withdraw after an appeal to his own filial memory of his mother's kindness toward a captured Lodi hostage — a moment of misplaced sentiment Bahlul immediately exploited, attacking the retreating army in violation of the very terms he had just granted and capturing a large part of its baggage, its elephants, and forty of Husain's principal nobles.

A retreat that never found solid ground again

That betrayal marked the turn of the whole war. Bahlul pursued the demoralised army of Jaunpur, annexed one district after another, and beat Husain again and again — at Chhibramau, at Suhnuh, at Rapri — each defeat pushing Husain's frontier further back and his following further into disarray. He lost wives and children fording the Jumna in flight, was plundered by a predatory tribe on the Chambal, and was kept in the field only by the loyalty of a Gwalior raja who supplied him money, troops and an escort. Bahlul, for his part, simply kept coming: he took Etawah after a three-day siege, forced the Ganges when a local raja's support gave him a ford, and finally marched directly on Jaunpur itself, taking the city and installing his own governor.

The end of the line

Husain rallied one more time while Bahlul was occupied elsewhere, retaking Jaunpur briefly before Bahlul's return forced him out again — and, at last "despairing of recovering his kingdom," fled into Bihar with Bahlul in pursuit as far as the Ganges near Ballia. With his flight, the Sharqi line of Jaunpur ended. Bahlul installed his own son Barbak as governor with the right to coin money and use the royal title, and Husain lived out the rest of his life in Bengal under the protection of its own sultan, making no further attempt to reclaim his kingdom beyond quietly encouraging a succession dispute between Barbak and his brother Sikandar — a hope Sikandar's own victory and formal absorption of Jaunpur into Delhi finally extinguished. Husain died in exile in 1500, eighty years and more after Malik Sarvar had first stopped taking orders from the city that, in the end, absorbed everything he had built.