History of India, Medieval India from the Mohammedan Conquest to the Reign of Akbar the Great E-Book

Stanley Lane Poole

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 291

Beschreibung

Pyrrhus Press specializes in bringing books long out of date back to life, allowing today’s readers access to yesterday’s treasures.

Das E-Book History of India, Medieval India from the Mohammedan Conquest to the Reign of Akbar the Great wird angeboten von Charles River Editors und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
muhammad; islam; conquest; indian; muslim

Leseprobe

History of India, Medieval India from the Mohammedan Conquest to the Reign of Akbar the Great

Stanley Lane-Poole

About Pyrrhus Press

Pyrrhus Press specializes in bringing books long out of date back to life, allowing today’s readers access to yesterday’s treasures.

Sidney Lane-Poole’s History of India, Medieval India from the Mohammedan Conquest to the Reign of Akbar the Great is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of India and the region during the rise of Islam during the Middle Ages and the changes it had on the Indian subcontinent.

As the preface notes, “The Medieval Period of Indian history, though it does not exactly correspond with the Middle Age of Europe, is not less clearly defined. It begins when the immemorial systems, rule, and customs of Ancient India were invaded, subdued, and modified by a succession of foreign conquerors who imposed a new rule and introduced an exotic creed, strange languages, and a foreign art. These conquerors were Moslems, and with the arrival of the Turks under Mahmud of Ghazni at the beginning of the eleventh century, India entered upon her Middle Age. From that epoch for nearly eight hundred years her history is grouped round the Mohammedan rulers who gradually brought under their control nearly the whole country from the Himalayas to the Krishna River. The period ends when one of the last of these rulers, oppressed by the revival of Hindu ascendency, placed himself under English protection, and Modern India came into being.”

Introduction by the Editor

The rise of Mohammed and the spread of Islam were events fraught with momentous consequences for the East and for the history of the world. India came in for her share in the changes thus brought about and was subjected to the religious and political sway of this great movement whose impulse she first felt in the eighth century of the Christian era. So important in general and so far-reaching were the influences exerted that few readers will object to the fact that three volumes of the present series are devoted to this period of Indian history which is commonly designated as the Medieval Period.

The first of the three forms part of the work of Professor Stanley Lane-Poole, and deals with the successive invasions that began when the Arabs landed in Sind and were later followed by the Moslem Afghans, who made inroad after inroad into Hindustan and gave place in turn to the raiding Turks, and they again to the Mongols. The history of these events, which led up to the founding of the great Moghul Empire in the sixteenth century of our era, is vividly portrayed by Dr. Lane-Poole, whose work is to be commended to the reader as giving a most graphic picture of the rise and establishment of a mighty force in India’s life and development.

As editor I have followed the same general plan that was adopted in the previous volumes to make the text conform with the needs of the series. Special care has been taken as before to illustrate the period appropriately, and for aid in this matter – Outside of my own collection of photographs – I desire to express acknowledgments again to others who have made several sources available for use.

A. V. Williams Jackson.

Author's Preface

The Medieval Period of Indian history, though it does not exactly correspond with the Middle Age of Europe, is not less clearly defined. It begins when the immemorial systems, rule, and customs of Ancient India were invaded, subdued, and modified by a succession of foreign conquerors who imposed a new rule and introduced an exotic creed, strange languages, and a foreign art. These conquerors were Moslems, and with the arrival of the Turks under Mahmud of Ghazni at the beginning of the eleventh century, India entered upon her Middle Age. From that epoch for nearly eight hundred years her history is grouped round the Mohammedan rulers who gradually brought under their control nearly the whole country from the Himalayas to the Krishna River. The period ends when one of the last of these rulers, oppressed by the revival of Hindu ascendency, placed himself under English protection, and Modern India came into being.

Distinct and clearly marked as the Medieval or Mohammedan Period is, the transition implies no violent change. History is always continuous; there can be no “fresh start”; and each new period carries on much of what preceded it. In India, as ever in the East, change is so gradual as to be almost imperceptible. Ancient India was too deeply rooted in its traditions to wither even under the storm of Moslem conquest. The old Indian life survived the shock of the new ideas, which it modified at least as much as it was modified; it outlived the Moslem Period, and still endures, but little altered, in the modern age of English domination. It never really assimilated the foreigners or their ideas. Despite the efforts of a few wide-seeing men like Akbar, no true or permanent union, except occasionally among the official and ruling classes, ever took place between the Moslems and the Hindus; and the ascendant races, whether Turks, Persians, Afghans, or Moghuls, remained essentially an army of occupation among a hostile or at least repellent population.

The history of the Mohammedan Period is, therefore, necessarily more a chronicle of kings and courts and conquests than of organic or national growth. The vast mass of the people enjoy the doubtful happiness of having no history, since they show no development; apparently they are the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. Nor was there any such marked change even in the principles and methods of government as might be expected from the diversity of successive rulers of various races. English Collector-Magistrates follow much the same system, in essential outline, as that which Akbar adopted from his Hindu Chancellor, and many executive details and most of the principles of local administration have their origin in probably prehistoric custom. But in the character and life of the rulers there is infinite variety, and it is round the lives of great men – and a few great women, though such seldom emerge before the public gaze in the East – that the chief interest of the Medieval Period centres. A history of the people is usually assumed, in the present day, to be more stimulating and instructive than the record of kings and courts; but even if true, this can only be understood of Western peoples, of peoples who strive to go forward, or at least change. In the East the people does not change, and there, far more than among progressive races, the “simple annals of the poor,” however moving and pathetic, are indescribably trite and monotonous compared with the lives of those more fortunate beings to whom much has been given in opportunity, wealth, power, and knowledge. Such contrasted characters as those of Ala-ad-din, Mohammad Taghlak, Babar, Akbar, and Aurangzib may rival any that could be named in Europe in the same four centuries; and in the lives and policies, the wars and studies, the habits and ceremonies of such leaders the imagination finds ample scope for the realization of strangely vivid and dramatic situations.

Chapter 1 - Mohammedan Invasion - The Arabs in Sind - 712 A.D.

The population of India in the present day is over three hundred millions, and every sixth man is a Moslem. Nine hundred years ago there were no Mohammedans east of the Indus, where now there are more than fifty millions and the King of England rules twice as many Moslem subjects as the Sultan of Turkey and the Shah of Persia together. For six centuries the Hindus submitted to the sovereignty of Mohammedan kings, and when the great effort was made in 1857 to throw off the British yoke, it was round the Mohammedan Emperor of Delhi, though but a shadow of a famous name, that the mutineers rallied. How the Moslems, foreigners both in creed and race, came to conquer India, and how this small but increasing minority imposed its will upon the greater part of the people of the land, is the subject of this and the succeeding volume.

When we speak of the Mohammedans as foreigners, we mean of course the original conquerors. The present Moslem population is almost as native as the Hindus themselves. The invaders consisted of armies of men, very few of whom brought their women with them. They married Hindu wives, and the mixed race thus formed intermarried further with the natives, and each generation became more and more Indian. Besides the Moslems descended from the successive armies of invaders and their native wives, a very large proportion of the Indian Moslems were and are native converts from Hinduism. It has been estimated that about fifty thousand Hindus “turn Turk” annually, and neither the religion nor the rule of the Moslems has proved intolerable to the natives. Islam commended itself to the Indian intellect as a more congenial faith than Christianity, and the disorder and corruption of Mohammedan government were not distasteful to a people who had never known anything better.

Yet the real Mohammedan conquerors of India were not Arabs, but Turks. When the armies of the Saracens spread out over the ancient world in the seventh century, they overcame most human obstacles, but nature itself was sometimes impregnable. They overran North Africa, but the inhospitable desert of the Sahara discouraged any southern expansion; they occupied Spain, but the Atlantic checked their progress west, and being but indifferent sailors they left to their European successors the glory of discovering the New World. In the East they conquered Persia as far as the great rivers of Central Asia, but the icy walls of the Hindu Kush saved India. The famous Arab general Ali Tigin subdued Bokhara and Samarkand, but he did not venture to surmount the snows that barred the way to Hindustan. The Arabs never opened that perilous northwest passage from Afghanistan, which has poured so many foreign hordes into the teeming plains below.

The only Arab attempt upon India came from a different quarter. Little as the Moslems of the desert relished the dangers of the deep, there were seafaring traders on the Arabian coasts to whom the ports of Western India had been familiar from the earliest times. Arab merchants sailed from Siraf and Hurmuz in the Persian Gulf, coasting along till they came to the mouth of the Indus, and thence on to Sapera and Cambay; or they even struck boldly across from their harbours at Kalhat and Kurayyat in Oman to Calicut and other ports on the Malabar coast. These men brought back tidings of the wealth and luxury of India, of gold and diamonds, of jewelled idols and gorgeous religious rites, and of a wonderful civilization. The temptation of such wealth was sanctioned by the zeal of the iconoclast, and the spoliation of the idolaters became a means of grace. At a time when the armies of Islam were overrunning the known world, such a field of operations as India could not be overlooked, and accordingly we find a pillaging expedition visiting Tana (near the present Bombay) as early as 637, during the reign of the caliph Omar, the second successor of Mohammed the Prophet. Other forays followed, for the Arabs of the Persian Gulf were a venturesome folk.

All these, however, were mere raids. Plunder, not conquest, was their aim, and they led to nothing more.

The only serious invasion of the Arabs was by land from Mekran, the most eastern province of the caliphate on the Persian coast, whose Mohammedan governors frequently came to blows with the Indians across the frontier, where no natural barrier intervened. The invasion was belated, compared with the other campaigns, for the caliphs’ hands were full of more pressing affairs. The tremendous successes of the first sweep of Arab conquest are apt to blind us to the tedious and toilsome progress of their arms in all but the earliest campaigns. No doubt their triumph over the degenerate empires of Rome and Persia was comparatively swift. Five years sufficed for the subjugation of Syria, seven more saw Persia at their feet, and two were enough for the conquest of all Egypt. But when the Arabs were opposed by tribes as untamed and warlike as themselves, their advance was slow and difficult, and every mile was obstinately disputed. Carthage, for example, was all but reached within a few years of the conquest of Egypt, but it did not actually fall for nearly half a century, and the vigorous resistance of the Berber tribes delayed the progress of the Moslems in Africa till the close of the seventh century. It was the same in the East. While Persia was speedily overcome as far as the river Oxus, it was not till the first decade of the eighth century, almost two hundred years later, that the country beyond its banks was added to the settled provinces of the caliphate. The Arabs were too few for all the work they attempted in widely separated lands, and up to 700 A.D. they had quite enough to do without burdening themselves with such an enterprise as the conquest of India.

The first and only Arab invasion of the land of the Ganges coincided in date with two other signal successes of Mohammedan arms in distant parts of the globe. Gothic Spain was shattered at the battle of the Guadalete in 710; the standards of Islam were carried from Samarkand to Kashghar in 711–14; and the valley of the Indus was invaded in 712. These three steps mark the zenith of the power of the Omayyad caliphate, and coincide with the administration of one of the ablest and most relentless of all Moslem statesmen. Al-Hajjaj, the governor of Chaldea, sent Kutaiba north to spread Islam over the borders of Tartary, and at the same time despatched his own cousin, Mohammad ibn Kasim, to India. The reigning caliph consented unwillingly; he dreaded the distance, the cost, the loss of life. Even in those days, to adapt modern phrases, there were the opposing policies of “Little Arabians” and “Imperialists.” Al-Hajjaj was imperialist to the core, and to him the Arabs owed the impulse which gave them all they ever won in India.

The story of Mohammad ibn Kasim’s adventures is one of the romances of history. He was but seventeen, and he was venturing into a region scarcely touched as yet by Saracen spears, a land inhabited by warlike races, possessed of an ancient and deeply rooted civilization – there to found a government which, however successful, would be the loneliest in the whole vast Mohammedan empire, a province cut off by sea, by mountains, and by desert from all peoples of kindred race and faith. Youth and high spirit, however, forbade alike fear and foreboding. The young general had at least six thousand picked horsemen at his back, chosen from the caliph’s veterans, with an equal number of camelry, and was supplied with a baggage-train of three thousand Bactrian camels. Marching through Mekran, along the Persian coast, he was joined by the provincial governor with more troops; and five stone-slings for siege-work were sent by sea to meet him at Daibul, or Debal, in Sind, the great medieval port of the Indus valley and forerunner of the modern city of Karachi

There at Daibul, in the spring of 712, Mohammad ibn Kasim set up his catapults and dug his trench. A description of this siege has come down to us from the early historian al-Baladhuri (about 840), from which it appears that the Arab spearmen were drawn up along the trench, each separate company under its own banner, and that five hundred men were stationed to work the heavy catapult named “the Bride.” A great red flag flaunted on the top of a tall Hindu temple, and the order came from Hajjaj, with whom the general was in constant communication, to “fix the stone-sling and shorten its foot and aim at the flagstaff.” So the gunners lowered the trajectory and brought down the pole with a shrewd shot. The fall of the sacred flag dismayed the garrison; a sortie was repulsed with loss; the Moslems brought ladders and scaled the walls, and the place was carried by storm. The governor fled, the Brahmans were butchered, and after three days of carnage a Mohammedan quarter was laid out, a mosque built, and a garrison of four thousand men detached to hold the city.

After the storming of Daibul, the young general marched up the right bank of the Indus in search of the main body of the enemy. Discovering their outposts on the other side, he tied a string of boats together, filled them with archers, made one end fast to the west bank, and then let the whole floating bridge drift down and across, like an angler’s cast of flies, till it touched the opposite side, where it was made fast to stakes under cover of the archers’ arrows. The enemy, unable to oppose the landing, fell back upon Rawar, where the Arabs beheld for the first time the imposing array of Hindu chiefs, mounted on armoured war-elephants, and led by their king Dahir. Naphtha arrows, however, threw the elephants into confusion and set fire to the howdahs; the king was slain, the Hindus fled, and “the Moslems were glutted with slaughter.” The Indian women showed the desperate courage for which they were famous. The king’s sister called them together, on seeing the defeat of their men; and, refusing to owe their lives to the “vile cow-eaters” at the price of dishonour, they set their houses ablaze and perished in the flames. Another victory at Brahmanabad opened the way to Multan, the chief city of the upper Indus, which surrendered at discretion, but not without an exhausting siege. The fighting men were massacred, and the priests, workmen, women, and children were made captives.

The fall of Multan laid the Indus valley at the feet of the conqueror. The tribes came in, “ringing bells and beating drums and dancing,” in token of welcome. The Hindu rulers had oppressed them heavily, and the Jats and Meds and other tribes were on the side of the invaders. The work of conquest, as often happened in India, was thus aided by the disunion of the inhabitants, and jealousies of race and creed conspired to help the Moslems.

To such suppliants Mohammad ibn Kasim gave the liberal terms that the Arabs usually offered to all but inveterate foes. He imposed the customary poll-tax, took hostages for good A’.14” conduct, and spared the people’s lands and lives. He even left their shrines undesecrated: “The temples,” he proclaimed, “shall be inviolate, like the churches of the Christians, the synagogues of the Jews, and the altars of the Magians.” There was worldly wisdom in this toleration, for the pilgrims’ dues paid to the temples formed an important source of revenue, and the Moslems found it expedient to compound with idolatry, as a vain thing but lucrative, in the interests of the public treasury. Occasional looting of Hindu fanes took place – we read of “a cart-load of four-armed idols”

sent as a suitable gift to the caliph, who no doubt preferred specie – but such demonstrations were probably rare sops to the official conscience, and as a rule the Mohammedan government of Multan was at once tolerant and economic. The citizens and villagers were allowed to furnish the tax-collectors themselves; the Brahmans were protected and entrusted with high offices, for which their education made them indispensable; and the conqueror’s instructions to all his officers were wise and conciliatory: – “Deal honestly,” he commanded, “between the people and the governor; if there be distribution, distribute equitably, and fix the revenue according to the ability to pay. Be in concord among yourselves, and wrangle not, that the country he not vexed.”

The young general’s fate was tragic. A new caliph succeeded who was no friend to the conqueror of Sind. Hajjaj was dead, and there was none to oppose factious intrigues at the distant court of Damascus. In spite of his brilliant achievements. Mohammad ibn Kasim was disgraced and put to death. The story runs that he was accused of having made too free with the captive daughters of Dahir before presenting them to the caliph’s harem, and that he was punished for the presumption by being sewn up alive in a raw cowhide. “Three days afterward the bird of life arose from his body and soared to heaven;” and the hide with its noble burden was sent to Damascus. The young hero had made no protest, never questioned the death-warrant, but submitted to the executioners with the fearless dignity he had shown throughout his short but valiant life. When the sacrifice was accomplished, however, the Indian princesses, moved perhaps by the courage of a victim brave as their own devoted race, confessed that their tale was deliberately invented to avenge their father’s death upon his conqueror. The caliph in impotent fury had them dragged at horses’ tails through the city till they perished miserably, but the second crime was no expiation for the first.

The Arabs had conquered Sind, but the conquest was only an episode in the history of India and of Islam, a triumph without results. The Indus province, it is true, is as large as England, but it consists chiefly of desert, and the Arabs made no attempt to extend their dominion into the fertile plains beyond. It has been supposed that the crude civilization and austere creed of the Moslems stood aghast before the rich and ancient culture, the profound philosophy, and the sensual ritual of the Hindus; but these contrasts did not check the later successes of Islam in the same land. The more obvious explanation of the Arabs’ failure is found in the as yet unbroken strength of the Rajput kings on the north and east, and in the inadequate forces despatched by the caliphs for so formidable a project as the conquest of India. After the first expedition under the ill-fated Mohammad ibn Kasim we hear of no reinforcements, and twenty years after his death the Arabs were still so insecure on the Indus that they built a city of refuge as a retreat in times of jeopardy. The province was not only imperfectly subdued but extremely poor, and the caliphs soon abandoned it in all but name, as too unremunerative to be worth maintaining. The Arab settlers formed independent dynasties at Multan and at the new city of Mansura, which Mohammad ibn Kasim’s son founded in lower Sind; and when the traveller Mas’udi visited the valley of the Indus in the tenth century, he found chiefs of the Prophet’s tribe of the Kuraish ruling both the upper and the lower province. A little later another traveller, Ibn Haukal, explored Sind, where he heard Arabic and Sindi spoken, and observed much friendly toleration between the Moslem and Hindu population. Soon afterward Multan became a refuge for scattered bands of Karmathians, when the power of those Mohammedan sectaries waned before the rising ascendency of the Fatimid caliphs of Egypt, and when Arabia was delivered from the Karmathian reign of terror. But the meagre annals of this limited and ineffectual occupation of an unimportant province need not long detain us. The Arab conquest of Sind led to nothing, and left scarcely a vestige, save in the names of certain Arab families and in the ruins of the buildings they destroyed. The Arab cities have perished, but the wrecks of the castles and cities of their predecessors, which formed as usual the quarries for the conquerors’ buildings, still bear witness to the civilization which they uprooted.

Chapter 2 - The Idol-Breaker - Mahmud of Ghazni - 997-1030 A.D.

The Arab invasion was a failure. It attacked from the wrong quarter, occupied the least productive province, and was too feebly supported to spread farther. We hear no more of the Arabs as conquerors in India. The role devolved upon the Turks, and when we speak of the Mohammedan empire in India we mean the rule of the Turks. Their invasion was no part of the expansion of Islam as a religious movement. It was merely the overflow of the teeming cradle-land of Central Asia, the eastern counterpart of those vast migrations of Huns, Turks, and Mongols, which from time to time swept over Europe like a locust cloud. Huns and Scythians had poured into India in prehistoric ages through those grim north-western passes which every now and then opened like sluice-gates to let the turbid flood of barbarians down into the deep calm waters of the Indian world. Their descendants still muster in tribes and clans on the borders of Hindustan, and bring strange customs and beliefs to mingle with that old religion of the Vedas which the Aryan forefathers of the Brahmans and Rajputs bore with them through the same narrow entry.

Following in their track, Alexander the Great led his armies to meet Porus on the Hydaspes; and after him came Greco-Bactrian legions to inspire new ideas of art and civilization, and to learn perhaps more than they taught. Finally the Moslem Turks discovered the same road, and when once they had become familiar with the way, they came again and again on successive inroads, until the whole of India, save the very apex of the south, owned their sway.

The southerly migration of the Turks was the master-movement in the Mohammedan empire in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Hitherto the caliphate had remained undisturbed by armed invasion. On the fall of the Omayyad line, the seat of government had been moved from Damascus to the new capital founded by their successors the Abbasid caliphs at Baghdad, and the change had been followed by a large influx of Persian ideas into the Arab system. Persian officials, better educated and shrewder men of affairs, replaced Arabs in many of the chief posts of government, and as the central authority grew weaker and more effeminate, Persian governors acquired almost independent power in the more distant provinces and began to found hereditary dynasties, one of the most powerful and enlightened being that of the Samanid princes in the country about the Oxus.

The increase, peaceful as it was, of Persian influence, when combined with the constant jealousies and truculence of the Arab tribes settled in Mesopotamia, induced the caliphs to provide themselves with a guard of mercenaries closely attached to the throne, and for this purpose the warlike and handsome young Turks captured on the northern frontier supplied all that was desired in valour and ability. Surrounded by such praetorians the caliphs indulged their love of luxury free from the dread of Persian usurpation or Arab revolt. But ere long the Turkish guard became the masters of the caliphs; Turkish officers gradually acquired the control of provinces; and throughout the Mohammedan empire, from Egypt to Samarkand, the Turks became the dominant race.

Their success attracted others of their kind, and soon they invited their brethren to come and share their prosperity. Turks overflowed into Persia from their native steppes; the Samanid kingdom, after two centuries of power well employed, degenerated into a mad rivalry of Turkish adventurers, and this scramble led to the invasion of India.

Among the Turkish condottieri who rose to high office in Northern Persia was one Alptagin, who, falling out with his Samanid lord, established himself with a couple of thousand followers in the fortress of Ghazni in the heart of the Afghan mountains (A.D. 962). Here, in a kind of no-man’s-land, secure from interference, he made his little kingdom, and here after an interval his slave Sabuktagin reigned in his stead (976). The new ruler was not content with the original stronghold of his master. He gathered under his banner the neighbouring Afghan tribes, added whole provinces to his dominions – Laghman to the east in the Kabul valley and Sistan on the Persian side – and, when called to support the tottering Samanid prince of Bokhara against the encroaching Turks, he turned the occasion to his own advantage and placed his son Mahmud in command of the rich province of Khorasan. Sabuktagin was the first Moslem who attempted the invasion of India from the northwest. He went but a little way, it is true; his repeated defeat of Jaipal, the Brahman raja of the Panjab, in the Kabul valley, ended only in the temporary submission of the Indian king and the payment of tribute; but it pointed the way to Hindustan.

Sabuktagin died in 997 before he could accomplish any larger scheme, but his son more than realized his most daring dreams Mahmud had all his father’s soldierly energy and spirit of command, joined to a restless activity, a devouring ambition, and the temper of a zealot. Zeal for Islam was the dominant note of the tenth century Turks, as of most new converts. The great missionary creed of Mohammed, which to the Arabs and Persians had become a familiar matter of routine, was a source of fiery inspiration to the untutored men of the steppes. To spread the faith by conquest doubled their natural zest for battle and endowed them with the devoted valour of martyrs. Mahmud was a staunch Moslem, and if his campaigns against the idolaters brought him rich store of treasure and captives, it was in his eyes no more than the fit reward of piety; and in the intervals between his forays into heathendom he would sit down and copy Korans for the welfare of his soul. The caliph of Baghdad, who had probably outgrown such illusions, was not the man to balk a willing sword. He sent Mahmud his pontifical sanction and the official diploma of investiture as rightful lord of Ghazni and Khorasan, and in the height of satisfaction Mahmud vowed that every year he would wage a Holy War against the infidels of Hindustan.

If he did not keep the letter of his vow, he fell little short. Between the years 1000 and 1026 he made at least sixteen distinct campaigns in India, in which he ranged across the plains from the Indus to the Ganges. His first attack was, of course, upon the frontier towns of the Khaibar pass. His father’s old enemy, Jaipal, endeavoured in vain to save Peshawar. Mahmud sent out 15,000 of his best horsemen and utterly routed him, despite his larger forces and his 300 elephants. Jaipal and fifteen of his kindred were brought captives before the conqueror. Their jewelled necklaces, worth, it is said, 180,000 dinars, or almost £90,000 apiece, were torn off, and half a million of slaves, and booty past all reckoning,according to the florid statements of the Oriental historians, fell into the hands of the Moslems. Mahmud was not cruel; he seldom indulged in wanton slaughter; and when a treaty of peace had been concluded, the raja and his friends were set free. With the proud despair of his race, Jaipal refused to survive his disgrace. Preferring death to dishonour, he cast himself upon a funeral pyre.

There were many other kings besides Jaipal, however; and when, after a successful raid upon Bhira, where “the Hindus rubbed their noses in the dust of disgrace,” and another to Multan, whose Mohammedan (or rather Karmathian) ruler fled aghast, Mahmud appeared again at the mouth of the Khaibar in 1008, he found all the rajas of the Panjab, backed by allies from other parts of Hindustan, mustered to resist him with Anandpal, the son of Jaipal, at their head. Mahmud had never yet encountered such an army, and he hastily entrenched his camp and waited forty days, facing the constantly swelling forces of the enemy. His first move, probably a mere reconnaissance, was disastrous. The thousand archers he sent forward were driven back into the camp, followed by a charging mob of wild Gakkars – a fierce Scythian tribe whose outbreaks troubled the peace of the northwest frontier as late as 1857, and whose savage aspect, bareheaded and barefoot, and barbarous habits of infanticide and polyandry, struck terror and disgust among the Moslems. These frantic hillmen rushed the trenches and slashed right and left; man and horse fell before their onslaught, and the Turks were well-nigh panic-stricken. The Rajputs were already advancing under cover of the Gakkars’ charge, and Mahmud was about to sound the retreat, when one of those lucky accidents happened which have often turned the fortune of a day. Anandpal’s elephant took fright; the rumour ran that the raja was flying from the field; vague suspicions and distrust spread, and a general stampede ensued. Instead of retreating before a victorious army, in the turn of an instant Mahmud found himself pursuing a routed horde. For two days the Moslems slew, captured, and despoiled to their hearts’ content. “They had come through fire and through water, but their Lord had brought them into a wealthy place.”

On a spur of the snow mountains, surrounded by a moat, stood the fortress of Kangra (Nagarkot), deemed impregnable by mortal power. Here the rajas and wealthy men of India were wont to store their treasure, and hither the triumphant Moslems came, hot with pursuit and victory. The panic that had dissolved the hosts of the Panjab seized the garrison of the fortress, weakened as it must have been by the general levy to oppose the invaders. At Mahmud’s blockade the defenders “fell to the earth like sparrows before the hawk.” Immense stores of treasure and jewels, money and silver ingots, were laden upon camels, and a pavilion of silver and a canopy of Byzantine linen reared upon pillars of silver and gold were among the prizes of the Holy War. The booty was displayed in the court of the palace at Ghazni, “jewels and unbored pearls and rubies, shining like sparks or iced wine, emeralds as it were sprigs of young myrtle, diamonds as big as pomegranates.” The Eastern chroniclers tell of seventy million silver dirhams, and hundreds of thousands of pounds’ weight of silver cups and vessels; and, with every allowance for exaggeration, the spoils must have been colossal All the world flocked to Ghazni to gaze upon the incredible wealth of India.