Part 16 (1/2)
And no one, apparently, remembered that she herself was the daughter of a Turki slave who achieved empire.
Byram was the next brother to ascend the throne. The two years, one month, and fifteen days before he also ”sipped the cup of fate” is a welter of crimes. Enemies were trodden under foot of elephants, slaves suborned to feign drunkenness and a.s.sa.s.sinate friends; in short, ”these proceedings, without trial or public accusation, justly alarmed every one,” so Masud, the next brother, had his innings. A poor one, though it lasted twice as long as Byram's. He found time in it, however, to repel the first Moghul invasion by way of Tibet into Bengal. This was in A.D. 1244, and it was followed by a similar incursion the next year, by way of Kandahar and Sinde. Masud seems to have become imbecile over wine and women, and when deposed, was contemptuously allowed to live by his brother, Nasir-ud-din, the only one of Altamish's sons who appears to have been worth anything; possibly because he had pa.s.sed the whole of the last four reigns in prison!
Adversity may be a hard, but she is a good taskmistress, and in Nasir-ud-din she had evidently good mettle on which to work. He was a man, distinctly, of original parts, for while in prison he had always preferred supporting himself by his writings to accepting any public allowance; a ”whimsical habit” which he continued after he came to the throne. He was also almost scandalously moral according to the orthodoxy of the day in refusing to have more than one wife, and in cutting down all outward show and magnificence on the ground that, being only G.o.d's trustee for the State, he was bound not to burden it with useless extravagance.
As he reigned for no less than twenty years, he had time to gather together the _disjecta membra_, of the Indian empire which Eibuk had built up, and which was fast coming to be a series of semi-independent provinces, and even once more to annex Ghuzni to the kingdom of Delhi.
He followed his predecessors' example also in rousing yet again the Rajput resistance. During the previous reigns the clans had recovered themselves, and, from the Mahomedan point of view, needed a lesson. So some few thousands were killed in battle, some few hundred chiefs put to death, and innumerable smaller fry condemned to perpetual slavery.
And yet a story is told of Nasir-ud-din which shows him not devoid of heart.
A worthy old scholar, criticising the king's penmans.h.i.+p, pointed out a fault. He, smiling, erased the word, but when the critic was gone, began to restore it, remarking that it was right, but it was better to spoil paper than the self-confidence of an old man.
He died, after a long illness, in A.D. 1266, and thereinafter Ghia.s.s-ud-din the _wazir_, who had married a sister of Sultana Razia's, ascended the throne, possibly in the absence of more direct heirs. He must have been nearly sixty at the time, for he died twenty-one years after in his eightieth year.
He also was a Turki slave, first employed as falcon-master by Altamish, who promoted him again and again; wherefore, Heaven knows, for history gives us but a poor character of him. He appears to have been a pious, narrow-minded, intolerant, selfish tyrant, with a hypocritical dash of virtue about him which took in his world completely. Circ.u.mstances also aided him in posing as perfection; for about this time the Moghul invasion had reached the western borderlands, and hundreds of ill.u.s.trious and literary fugitives crowded thence, to find in Delhi the only stable Mahomedan government.
These, flattering and fawning, helped to noise his fame abroad as a paragon. Then the son of his old age, Prince Mahomed, was a potent factor in his popularity. The apple of his father's eye, he seems to have been an Admirable Crichton, and his death, in the moment of victory, not only ”drew tears from the meanest soldier to the General,” but came as a final blow to the old king, ”who was so much distressed that life became irksome to him.”
This great affection between father and son--for ”Prince Mahomed always behaved to him with the utmost filial affection and duty”--is, indeed, the one human interest of a life devoted to pious pretences, to pomp and pose.
His grandson Keik-obad came to the throne at his death, and promptly gave the reins to pleasure and the guidance of public affairs to his _wazir_. He succeeded in painting Old Delhi very red indeed during his short reign of three years. ”Every shady grove was filled with women and parties of pleasure, every street rang with riot and tumult; even the magistrates were seen drunk in public, and music was heard in every house.”
His minister kept him at this task also; for, perceiving a faint check in the pursuit of pleasure, he ”collected graceful dancers, beautiful women, and good singers from all parts of the kingdom, whom he occasionally introduced as if by accident.”
So, finally, the three-year-old Prince Kei-omurs--the only child of a miserable father who was now paralytic--was smuggled out of the harem to be King-designate, while the wretched, debauched, half-dying man had his brains beaten out with bludgeons while he was lying on his bed helpless; and so, battered out of all recognition, his body was hastily rolled up in the bed-clothes, and flung through the window into the sliding river.
A horrid tale, with which the history of the Slave Kings fitly comes to an end.
They were not a good breed. Even Ferishta the historian, who has a weakness for kings, feels this, for he ends his account of them with the sphinx-like remark: ”Eternity belongs only to G.o.d, the great Sovereign of the Earth!”
THE TARTAR DYNASTIES
A.D. 1288 TO A.D. 1398
As can easily be imagined, India at the end of those ten Slave reigns (which between them lasted but eighty-two years) was a very different place to what India had been when Eibuk's iron hand first closed on it. Half the Punjab, almost all Rajputana, and the better part of the United Provinces, had run red with Hindu blood in those days; but as the stream subsided, the terrible legacy of the flood had remained as a lesson welding the whole land into apathetic acquiescence, until absorption set in with the years, and as time went on, the crushed, half-dead organism began once more to feel life in its veins. For Hinduism is India--India is Hinduism. When the last trace of the metaphysical Monism which underlies every aspiration, every action, has disappeared, India and Hinduism will have disappeared also, but not till then.
So as time crept on, and under slack rule Mahomedan began to fight Mahomedan, each petty governor playing for his own hand, his own independence, the Rajputs raised their dejected heads, and, seizing every opportunity, strove to recover part at least of their own.
Gwalior with its rock,--that almost impregnable fort--for instance, changed hands many times, and, save during the reign of Nasir-ud-din, no attempt was made on the part of the Mahomedans after the time of Altamish, either to increase their conquests, or do more than temporarily bolster up their rule.
Nor when the Slave dynasty ended, and one Jelal-ud-din, of the House of Khilji, established himself on the throne of Delhi by the murder of the three-year-old Kei-omurs, was there any change of policy. He was seventy years old; old for kings.h.i.+p in any country, extraordinarily so for India. And he was weak, hesitating. For a while distracted by feeble remorse he refused royal honours, and after a very short time delegated his authority to his nephew, Allah-ud-din, who succeeded him, and who for many years prior to his uncle's death arrogated to himself almost absolute independence.
The seven years of Jelal-ud-din's reign, then, are but a prelude to Allah-ud-din's twenty.
A vigorous man this, and an unscrupulous. One of his first emprises was the conquest of the Dekkan which, as yet, had been untouched by Mahomedan adventure.
He got no further, however, than Deogiri, the capital of the Maharajah of the Mahrattas. Far enough, however, for pillage _a la_ Kutb-din-Eibuk. He found the Rajputs unprepared--they had strict scruples of honour regarding the necessity for a formal declaration of war, by which their adversaries were not bound--and the usual slaughter took place. For the first time, also, mention is made of merchants being tortured to make them disclose their treasures.
”_L'appet.i.t vient en mangeant_,” and a rich Hindu _banya_ was to the Mahomedan what the Jew was to a Crusader.