Person · Delhi Sultan · India
Shams-ud-Din Iltutmish
Also known as Iltutmish, Shams al-Din Iltutmish, Altamash
Mamluk Sultan of Delhi 1211 to 1236, bought as a slave in Bukhara, raised through Qutb-ud-Din Aibak's service, and after Aibak's death the actual founder of the Delhi Sultanate as a functioning state — he consolidated the Ghurid frontier against Chinggisid Mongol pressure, defeated his rival Nasir ad-Din Qabacha of Sindh, received investiture from the Abbasid Caliph in 1229 which legitimised the sultanate in the wider Islamic world, and ran the first stable Mamluk administration out of Mehrauli. He completed the Qutb Minar at Delhi (which Aibak had begun), built the Hauz-i-Shamsi tank at Mehrauli, and sited his own tomb beside the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque — the first monumental Islamic funerary building in India.
- Date
- 1180–1236
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Mamluk Sultanate
- Tradition
- Standard reference and biographical literature; contemporary chronicles.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
He nominated his daughter Razia as his successor in preference to his sons, and his will specifying her was unusual enough that the Delhi nobles accepted her for four years before deposing her. The Hauz-i-Shamsi tank still holds water from the catchment he engineered, and his sandstone tomb at Mehrauli with its Kufic inscriptions is the earliest extant Islamic royal mausoleum in India.
About the place
Placed at Delhi (Mehrauli, where his tomb stands).
Connections (6)
- Built atQutb complex, Delhi
Iltutmish completed the Qutb Minar at Mehrauli which Aibak had begun, built his own sandstone tomb beside the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque — the first monumental Islamic royal mausoleum in India — and engineered the Hauz-i-Shamsi tank nearby for the Mehrauli catchment. The Qutb complex as it stands owes its central structures to his reign.
- SucceededQutb-ud-Din Aibak
Iltutmish, Qutbuddin Aibak's slave and son-in-law, succeeded him in 1211 after a brief interregnum, inheriting the Mamluk state that Aibak had reigned over for four years. Iltutmish is the actual founder of the Delhi Sultanate as a stable polity — Aibak's four years had been continuation of Ghurid viceroyalty rather than independent sultanate.
- Father ofRazia Sultan
Iltutmish nominated his daughter Razia as successor in his will of 1236, specifying her in preference to his sons on the ground of her capacity to rule. The Delhi nobility accepted the will for four years before deposing her in 1240 — the single documented case of a father Sultan explicitly designating a daughter as heir in medieval Islamic India.
- Completed byQutb Minar
Iltutmish continued the Qutb Minar after Qutb-ud-Din Aibak's 1210 death, adding three storeys and completing the minaret during his 1211–1236 reign — the balconies' muqarnas corbels and the Kufic-Naskh Quranic inscriptions at the storey transitions are from his phase. The minaret as it stood through the medieval period is almost entirely Iltutmish's work; Firoz Shah Tughlaq added the fifth marble storey only in 1368 after lightning damage.
- Built byIltutmish's Tomb, Delhi
Iltutmish built his own tomb at the Qutb complex around 1235, during his own lifetime — the earliest extant Islamic royal mausoleum in India. The square sandstone chamber is lined inside with densely carved Kufic Quranic verses and corbelled squinches that attempt a dome the technology of the moment could not sustain; the dome collapsed early and was never rebuilt, so the sanctuary is now open to the sky. His sarcophagus is in the centre of the chamber.
- Built byHauz-i-Shamsi
Iltutmish built the Hauz-i-Shamsi at Mehrauli in 1230 to hold the catchment of the Mehrauli ridge and supply the Qutb complex and the walled city below it. The tank was one of the earliest substantial Islamic hydraulic works in the subcontinent and the single largest Delhi water body of the thirteenth century. Tradition from Ibn Battuta's 1333 visit onward holds that Iltutmish laid out the tank on the spot where a dream of the Prophet mounted on al-Buraq had come to him.