Alauddin Khalji

Alauddin Khalji seized the throne of the Delhi Sultanate in 1296 by murdering his uncle and ruled it until his death twenty years later. In that time he beat back repeated Mongol invasions, pushed the sultanate's armies deep into Rajasthan, Gujarat and the Deccan, and imposed some of the most sweeping fiscal and market controls of medieval India. He remains a divisive figure, and much of what is popularly believed about him comes from later poetry rather than the historical record.

Born Ali Gurshasp, probably around 1266 (the date rests on a single later chronicler's statement of his age), he was the nephew of Jalaluddin Khalji, who took power in Delhi in 1290 and raised him, and he married one of Jalaluddin's daughters. Made governor of Kara in 1291, he raided the Paramara town of Bhilsa in 1293 and, in 1296, the rich Yadava capital of Devagiri in the Deccan. He used the plunder to build an army. In July 1296 he lured Jalaluddin to Kara with professions of loyalty and had him killed as they met. Marching on Delhi while scattering gold to win followers, he was proclaimed sultan there on 21 October 1296. The surviving members of Jalaluddin's family were then blinded or killed, and in 1297 the nobles who had changed sides to join him were themselves purged.

The Mongols of the Chagatai Khanate raided the Punjab repeatedly. Alauddin's commanders defeated them in 1298, at Kili near Delhi in 1299, at Amroha in 1305 and on the Ravi in 1306; in 1303 a Mongol army sacked the outskirts of Delhi while the sultan held out in his camp at Siri. In the same years his armies took Gujarat, raided in 1299 and annexed in 1304, the Rajput fortresses of Ranthambore (1301) and Chittor (1303), Malwa (1305), Siwana (1308) and Jalore (1311). According to his court poet Amir Khusrau, some 30,000 Hindus were massacred after the fall of Chittor. His general Malik Kafur, a slave captured in Gujarat, led expeditions south of the Vindhyas that forced the rulers of Devagiri, Warangal and Dwarasamudra to pay tribute and plundered the Pandya lands as far as Madurai. Temples were destroyed in several campaigns.

To pay for a large standing army, Alauddin took about half of the farm produce of much of northern India as land tax, collected directly from cultivators rather than through local chiefs. He fixed prices in the Delhi markets, built state granaries and punished traders who cheated. He banned alcohol in the capital, forbade nobles to meet or marry without his permission and ran a network of informers. The chronicler Barani, writing decades later, saw these measures as aimed partly at impoverishing Hindu landholders; others at court, such as Khusrau, presented them as serving the public good. In 1311, after a reported Mongol plot, he ordered a massacre of converted Mongols living in the sultanate. He also built the Siri fort, the Hauz-i-Alai reservoir and the Alai Darwaza gateway in Delhi, completed in 1311.

Ill in his final years, Alauddin relied increasingly on Malik Kafur, who became viceroy. Experienced officials were removed, two of the sultan's sons were blinded and his brother-in-law Alp Khan was killed. Alauddin died on 4 January 1316; Barani reports a rumour that Kafur murdered him. Kafur set up a young son as a puppet but was soon killed, and another son, Mubarak Shah, took the throne. Some of Alauddin's revenue methods influenced later rulers, including Akbar.

In 1540 the Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi made Alauddin the villain of Padmavat, in which he besieges Chittor to win its queen, Padmini. Most modern historians regard that story as legend, not history, though it lives on in films such as Padmaavat (2018). In modern India he is often discussed through nationalist and communal lenses; the historical record shows both a ruthless conqueror and an unusually energetic administrator.

Our 1300 map shows the Delhi Sultanate during his reign, with the Chagatai Khanate to its north-west.