Vijayanagar Empire Established

Today’s installment concludes The Beginning of the Vijayanagar Empire,
our selection from A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar by Robert Sewell published in 1900.

If you have journeyed through the installments of this series so far, just one more to go and you will have completed a selection from the great works of five thousand words. Congratulations! For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in The Beginning of the Vijayanagar Empire.

Time: 1336
Place: Vijayanagar, India

The slightest opposition to his will drove him into almost insane fury, and in these fits he allowed his natural ferocity full play. His whole life was spent in visionary schemes pursued by means equally irrational. He began by distributing enormous sums of money amongst his nobles, spending, so it is said, in one day as much as [pound sterling]500,000. He bought off the invading Moghuls by immense payments instead of repelling them by force of arms. Shortly after this he raised a huge army for the conquest of Persia, his cavalry, according to Firishtah, numbering 370,000 men. But nothing came of it except that the troops, not receiving their pay, dispersed and pillaged the country. Then he decided to try and conquer China and sent 100,000 men into the Himalayas, where almost all of them miserably perished; and when the survivors returned in despair the king put them all to death. He tried to introduce a depreciated currency into his territories as a means to wealth, issuing copper tokens for gold, which resulted in entire loss of credit and a standstill of trade. This failing to fill the treasury he next destroyed agriculture by intolerable exactions; the husbandmen abandoned their fields and took to robbery as a trade, and whole tracts became depopulated, the survivors living in the utmost starvation and misery and being despoiled of all that they possessed. Muhammad exterminated whole tribes as if they had been vermin. Incensed at the refusal of the inhabitants of a certain harassed tract to pay the inordinate demands of his subordinates, he ordered out his army as if for a hunt, surrounded an extensive tract of country, closed the circle towards the center, and slaughtered every living soul found therein. This amusement was repeated more than once, and on a subsequent occasion he ordered a general massacre of all the inhabitants of the old Hindu city of Kanauj.* These horrors led of course to famine, and the miseries of the Hindus exceeded all power of description. On his return from Devagiri on one occasion he caused a tooth which he had lost to be interred in a magnificent stone mausoleum, which is still in existence at Bhir.

[* Elphinstone, “History of India,” ii. 62.]

But perhaps the best known of his inhuman eccentricities was his treatment of the inhabitants of the great city of Delhi. Muhammad determined to transfer his capital thence to Devagiri, whose name he changed to Doulatabad. The two places are six hundred miles apart. The king gave a general order to every inhabitant of Delhi to proceed forthwith to Devagiri, and prior to the issue of this order he had the entire road lined with full-grown trees, transplanted for the purpose. The unfortunate people were compelled to obey, and thousands — including women, children, and aged persons — died by the way. Ibn Batuta, who was an eye-witness of the scenes of horror to which this gave rise, has left us the following description: —

The Sultan ordered all the inhabitants to quit the place (Delhi), and upon some delay being evinced he made a proclamation stating that what person soever, being an inhabitant of that city, should be found in any of its houses or streets should receive condign punishment. Upon this they all went out; but his servants finding a blind man in one of the houses and a bedridden one in the other, the Emperor commanded the bedridden man to be projected from a balista, and the blind one to be dragged by his feet to Daulatabad, which is at the distance of ten days, and he was so dragged; but his limbs dropping off by the way, only one of his legs was brought to the place intended, and was then thrown into it; for the order had been that they should go to this place. When I entered Delhi it was almost a desert.”

[Lee’s translation, p. 144.]

It is characteristic of Muhammad’s whimsical despotism that shortly afterwards he ordered the inhabitants of different districts to go and re-people Delhi, which they attempted to do, but with little success. Batuta relates that during the interval of desolation the king mounted on the roof of his palace, and seeing the city empty and without fire or smoke said, “Now my heart is satisfied and my feelings are appeased.”

Ibn Batuta was a member of this king’s court, and had every opportunity of forming a just conclusion. He sums up his qualities thus:

Muhammad more than all men loves to bestow gifts and to shed blood. At his gate one sees always some fakir who has become rich, or some living being who is put to death. His traits of generosity and valor, and his examples of cruelty and violence towards criminals, have obtained celebrity among the people. But apart from this he is the most humble of men and the one who displays the most equity; the ceremonies of religion are observed at his court; he is very severe in all that concerns prayer and the punishment that follows omission of it … his dominating quality is generosity…. It rarely happened that the corpse of someone who had been killed was not to be seen at the gate of his palace. I have often seen men killed and their bodies left there. One day I went to his palace and my horse shied. I looked before me and I saw a white heap on the ground, and when I asked what it was one of my companions said it was the trunk of a man cut into three pieces…. Every day hundreds of individuals were brought chained into his hall of audience, their hands tied to their necks and their feet bound together. Some were killed, and others were tortured or well beaten.”

[Sir H. Elliot’s “History of India,” iii. 215.]

A man of these seemingly opposite qualities, charity, generosity, and religious fervour linked to unbridled lust for blood and an apparently overmastering desire to take life, possesses a character so bizarre, so totally opposed to Hindu ideals, that he would almost of necessity be accounted as something superhuman, monstrous, a saint with the heart of a devil, or a fiend with the soul of a saint. Hence Muhammad in the course of years gathered round his memory, centuries after his death, all the quaint tales and curious legends which an Oriental imagination could devise; and whenever his name is mentioned by the old chroniclers it is always with some extraordinary story attached to it.

Nuniz, therefore, though accurate in the main, was a century too early in his opening sentence. His “Togao Mamede” can be none other than Muhammad Taghlaq.

[If we add together the number of years of the reigns of kings of Vijayanagar given by Nuniz prior to that of Krishna Deva Raya (“Crisnarao”), we find that the total is 180 (Senhor Lopes, Introduction, p. lxx.). The date of the beginning of the reign of Krishna Deva Raya is known to be 1509 — 10 A.D.; whence we obtain 1379 — 80 A.D. as the foundation of the empire in the person of “Dehorao” according to the chronicle. This is not quite accurate, but it helps to prove that “1230” is a century too early.]

This ends our series of passages on The Beginning of the Vijayanagar Empire by Robert Sewell from his book A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar published in 1900. This blog features short and lengthy pieces on all aspects of our shared past. Here are selections from the great historians who may be forgotten (and whose work have fallen into public domain) as well as links to the most up-to-date developments in the field of history and of course, original material from yours truly, Jack Le Moine. – A little bit of everything historical is here.

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