Journey
Ghurid conquest & the Delhi Sultanate
Tarain in 1192 put the Delhi and Ajmer axis into Ghurid hands, and within a single century their Turkish slave successors had reached Bengal, the Deccan and the Tamil country, turned back the Mongols outright when no other state in Asia could, and moved the capital six hundred miles south and back again.
Stops (13)
- Prithvīrāja Chauhān · 1178–1192
The Chahamana ruler of Ajmer and Delhi, who beat Muhammad of Ghor at Tarain in 1191 and was beaten and killed by him there the next year. Almost everything popularly told about him comes from a bardic epic compiled centuries later; the contemporary Sanskrit record is a handful of inscriptions and one unfinished court poem.
- Tarain · 1191 and 1192
Two battles on the same ground near Thanesar, fourteen months apart. The first was a Chahamana victory and the Ghurids were allowed to withdraw; the second was decided by feigned retreat and mounted archery against a slower Rajput host. The difference between them is that one side came back and the other assumed it would not.
- Qila Rai Pithora · 1180s
Prithviraj's enlargement of the Tomar Lal Kot, an enormous rubble circuit whose line can still be traced across south Delhi. It is the last Hindu fortification of the city, and the Qutb complex was built immediately inside it out of the material of the temples it had contained — the new sovereignty housed within the defeated one's walls.
- Qutb complex, Delhi · from 1192
Qutbuddin Aibak's Quwwat-ul-Islam, raised from the columns of demolished temples with the fourth-century iron pillar left standing in its court, and the minar begun beside it and finished by Iltutmish. Delhi becomes a capital rather than a frontier post here, and the Sultanate's architecture starts as reused Indian material. The Sultanate's architecture starts as reused Indian material, cut by Indian masons who had not yet been taught the true arch.
- Gaur (Lakhnauti) · 1204
Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji took Nadia and then Lakhnauti with a raiding force, and Bengal was under Muslim rule for the next five and a half centuries. Gaur, on an old channel of the Ganges, became its capital and the brick city whose mosques and gateways now stand in Malda's farmland.
- Nālandā mahāvihāra · c. 1200
Nalanda's monastic complex was sacked in the eastern campaigns, and the Tibetan accounts describe libraries burning. The mahavihara had already been in decline, but this is where organised Buddhist learning in the Ganges plain stops; the lineages continue in Tibet, carried by monks who left before or during the wars.
- Ranthambore Fort · 1301
Alauddin Khalji besieged Ranthambore for a year and took it from Hammiradeva, the strongest Chahamana successor state and the last one capable of resisting Delhi in the field. The fort is a plateau above forest with a jauhar tradition attached to it, and its fall opened Rajasthan and, through Rajasthan, Gujarat and the route south into Malwa.
- Amroha · December 1305
Alauddin's generals destroyed a Chagatai army near Amroha and executed the prisoners at Delhi. The Mongols had reached the Yamuna three times and besieged Delhi twice; this was the engagement that stopped them coming. Delhi is one of very few states anywhere to have halted Mongol expansion by force rather than by submission.
- Alai Darwaza · 1311
Alauddin's gateway to the Quwwat-ul-Islam, the first true arch and dome in India built on proper voussoirs rather than corbelled, with red sandstone, marble inlay and Seljuq-derived ornament. It is the architectural dividend of the Mongol wars and the Deccan campaigns: money and confidence spent on a new structural vocabulary.
- Warangal Fort · 1310 and 1323
Malik Kafur extracted tribute from the Kakatiya Prataparudra in 1310, and Ulugh Khan annexed Warangal outright in 1323, deporting the ruler. The fort's four ceremonial gateways still stand in open ground with nothing between them, which is what a capital looks like when the city inside it is deliberately dismantled.
- Madurai Meenakshi · 1311
Malik Kafur reached Madurai in 1311 and looted the Pandya capital, and a breakaway Madurai sultanate ruled the far south from 1335 to 1378 before Vijayanagara's general Kumara Kampana displaced it. The Meenakshi temple standing today is largely a Nayaka rebuilding of the sixteenth century, after all of this. What the raids took was portable — elephants, horses and temple treasure, carried back to Delhi and spent on Alauddin's building.
- Tughlaqabad · 1321–1325
Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq's fortified city, built in four years with sloping rubble walls on a rock outcrop and abandoned within a generation. It is the third of Delhi's cities and the point at which the Sultanate's building becomes defensive rather than triumphal — the Mongol threat had gone, and the danger was now internal.
- Daulatabad · 1327
Muhammad bin Tughlaq moved the capital and much of Delhi's population six hundred miles south to Devagiri, renamed Daulatabad, to govern the newly annexed Deccan from inside it, then moved back. The scheme failed, but the Muslim population it left behind is the origin of the Deccan sultanates and of Dakhni as a language.