"The Empire of Delhi was founded by a slave."
So runs the well-known jibe. And it is true; for although India, despite the combined resistance of the Râjputs, was overcome during the reign of Mahomed Shahâb-ud-din Ghori, the real glory of conquest belongs by rights to Eîbuk, the slave; Eîbuk of the "broken little finger," who took the name of Kutb-ud-din, or Pole-star of the Faith.
To those who know India the name conjures up one of the most marvellous sights in the world. A dark December morning in the Punjâb, when the Christmas rain-clouds gather black on the horizon, and on them, above the rolling, brick-strewn ridges of Old Delhi, rises a thin shaft of light--the Kutb Minâr, the finest pillar in the world.
It was built by the Turki slave Eîbuk, and one can forgive him much in that he left the world such a thing of beauty to be a joy for ever.
And yet as one stands beneath it, marking here and there the half-obliterated traces of previous cutting on the stones of the wonderful tapering pillar, all corbeilled with encircling balconies, and banded in dexterous art with interlaced lettering; as one looks round on the dismantled ruins of still more ancient temples, the mind suddenly ceases to give the glory to Kutb-ud-din, and turns almost with amaze to the thought of the Hindu architects who built it to order out of their dishonoured shrines.
Think of it! Art, true Art rising superior to Self! Surely as they chiselled at those interlaced attributes of the One Unknowable, Unthinkable, they must have been conscious that though all things in this life were--as their religion told them--but Illusion, behind that Illusion lay Reality.
And so their work comforted them.
How much of India is built into this watch tower of her gods? The best of her, anyhow, and English civilisation can scarcely add an additional story to this record of her past.
To Kutb-ud-din Eîbuk, however, belongs the glory of inception; therefore also some forgiveness, which, in truth, he sorely needs. For from the beginning his attitude towards strict morality is, to say the least of it, doubtful. He was a beautiful Turki slave, the avowed pet and plaything of his master Shahâb-ud-din, who gave him "his particular notice, and daily advanced him in confidence and favours."
He appears to have been diplomatic, for on one occasion, being questioned by the king as to why he had divided his share of a general distribution of presents amongst the other retainers, he kissed the ground of Majesty's feet, and replied, that being amply supplied already by that Majesty's favours, he desired no superfluities.
This brought him the Master of the Horse-ship, from which he went on to honour after honour, until in the year A.D. 1193 he was left as viceroy in India. Thenceforward he was practically king. It was he who took Delhi after a conflict in which the river Jumna ran red with blood. It was he who commanded the forces at Etawah, and it was his hand which shot the arrow that, piercing the eye of the Benares Râjah, cost him his life and the loss of everything he possessed.
A quaint picture that, by the way, of the search for Jai-Chund's body amidst the huge heaps of the slain, and its final recognition after weary days by "the artificial teeth fixed by golden wires." Had dentistry got as far in the West, I wonder?
Then it was Kutb-ud-din who presented to his master the three hundred elephants taken at Benares; amongst them the famous white one which refused to kneel like the others before the M'lechcha, king though he might be. The beast's independence serving him better than a man's would have done, since it brought no punishment, but the honour of being pad elephant to the viceroy thenceforth.
And it was he who marched his forces hither and thither, "engaged the enemy, put them to flight, and having ravaged the country at leisure, obtained much booty."
The eye wearies over the repetitions of this formula, as the hand turns the pages of Ferishta's history, while the heart grows sick at the thought of what such a war of conversion or extermination meant in those days.
The victorious procession of the Mahomedan troopers was only broken once in Guzerât. Here Kutb-ud-din, despite six wounds, fought stubbornly and with his wonted courage, until forced by his attendants from the field, and carried in a litter to the fort at Ajmîr, where he managed to hold out until reinforcements came to his aid from the King of Ghuzni.
Defeat seems ever to have been the mother of victory with these passionate, revengeful Afghâns, for on the very next occasion on which Kutb-ud-din "engaged the enemy," he is said to have killed fifty thousand of them, and to have gathered into his treasury vast spoils.
Nothing seemed to stop him. Even the swift assassination by his own prime minister of a cowardly râjah who was coming to terms with the M'lechcha instead of resisting the Unclean to the death, did not avail to preserve almost impregnable Kalûnjur; for a spring incontinently dried up in the fort, and there once more was one last sally, and then death for the garrison.
It was in A.D. 1205, after Kutb-din had had twelve years of battles, murders, and sudden deaths, twelve years of absolute if not nominal kingship, that Mahomed Shahâb-ud-din's successor, feeling himself not strong enough to assume the reins of government in India, made a bid for peace for himself in Ghuzni by sending Eîbuk the slave, the drums, the standards, the insignia of royalty, and the title of King of India.
Eîbuk received them all with "becoming respect," and was duly crowned. This fact did not prevent his being crowned again in Ghuzni the following year!
He then, having attained to the height of his ambition, seeing no more worlds to conquer, having for the time being crushed even Râjput resistance, gave himself up "unaccountably to wine and pleasure."
This seems to have irritated the good citizens of Ghuzni. They invited another claimant to the throne to try his luck. He came, found Eîbuk unprepared, possibly drunk. Anyhow, there was no time to attempt a defence. He fled to Lahôre, thus finally severing the Kingship of Ghuzni from that of India.
There, we are told, he became "sensible of his folly," repented, and thereinafter "continued to exercise justice, temperance, morality."
He was killed while playing chaugan (the modern polo) in A.D. 1210. At that time he was supposed to be the richest man in the world; but, unlike Mahmûd, he was generous. "As liberal as Eîbuk" is still a phrase in the mouth of India.
His son Arâm (Leisure) appears to have deserved his name. He never gripped the kingdom, and lost it fatuously after less than a year. Apparently he was not deemed worth the killing, and Altâmish, a favourite slave of the slave Eîbuk, took his place by virtue of being son-in-law to the dead king.
Altâmish was also of Turki extraction. As a youth, the fame of his beauty and talents was noised abroad, and Shahâb-ud-din was in the bidding for him, but hung back at the price; whereupon Eîbuk the Lavish put down the fifty thousand pieces of silver, and carried off the prize.
Years after, he was married to the Princess-Royal, and so, adding Shums-ud-din (Sword of the Faith) to his name, ascended the throne, and reigned for no less than twenty-six years.
So Delhi, indeed, was founded by slaves!
Atlâmish appears to have been of the regulation type. He was, so to speak, Kutb-ud-din and water. The largest number of Hindus he is recorded to have killed at one time is three hundred; a sad falling-off in Ghâzi-dom.[3] On the other hand, he was the barbarian who, taking Ujjain, destroyed the magnificent temple of Mâhâ-Kâli which it had taken three hundred years to build. The idols thereof, and also a "statue of Vikramadîtya, who had been formerly prince of this country, and so renowned that the Hindus have taken an era from his death," were conveyed solemnly to Delhi, and there broken at the door of the great mosque of which the magnificent ruins--spoils of many a Jain and Hindu temple--still lie about the foot of the Kutb Minâr, a monument to the slave Eîbuk who commenced it, the slave Altâmish who finished it.
This solemn smashing was doubtless a fine ceremony, yet as we of the present day contemplate it, regret goes forth, especially for the statue of Vikramadjît. How many a riddle might it not have solved concerning the Unknown King!
We are told that Altâmish was an "enterprising, able, and good prince"; he has, however, another, and in the history of the world, quite unique claim to regard. The father of seven children, six of them in turn mounted the throne with more or less success.
Considerably less as regards the first occupant, Ruku-ud-din (Prop of the Faith), who spent his six months and twenty-eight days tenancy in lavishing his inherited treasures on dancing girls, pimps and prostitutes.
This might have been borne for longer, but the hideous cruelties of his mother, a Turki slave to whom he entrusted the reins of government, were such as to rouse even the dull humanity of a thirteenth-century Mahomedan. She had murdered horribly every one of the dead king's women, and had begun on his son's, when the patience of the various viceroys gave way. They entered into a conspiracy, deposed the king, and threw his mother into prison--a lenient punishment for such a monster of cruelty.
And then? Then they did a thing unheard of in Indian history--they raised a woman to the throne.
But Sultana Râzia Begum was no ordinary mortal! Indeed, there is something so quaint about the recapitulation of her virtues, as given in the pages of Ferishta, that, perforce, one cannot but quote it.
"Râzia Begum (my Lady Content) was possessed of every good quality which usually adorns the ablest princes; and those who scrutinise her actions most severely, will find in her no fault but that she was a woman."
Alas! Poor Lady Content! Of what avail that you changed (as it is solemnly set down) your apparel; that you abandoned the petticoat in favour of the trews; that your father, when he appointed you regent during one of his long absences, defended his action by saying that though a woman, you had a man's head and heart, and were worth more than twenty such sons as he had? All this was of no avail against womanhood. Let this be thy comfort, poor shade of a dead queen, that the argument still holds good against thy sisters in this year of grace 1907!
Setting this aside, the career of Queen-Content matches in tragedy that of Mary Queen of Scots. A clever girl, evidently, her father made her his companion, and while her brothers were dicing and wenching, drinking and twanging the sutara, she was frowning with him over endless pacifications, endless violences, becoming, apparently, an adept at both. For it would have needed great qualifications to ensure the almost unanimous vote of the nobles which placed a woman on the throne.
At first even these contemptuous Mahomedans were satisfied. Then came discontent. Did Râzia Begum really favour the Abyssinian slave whom she allowed--horribile dictum!--to "lift her on her horse by raising her up under the arms"? Or had she really forgotten the petticoat in the trews? Who can say? All we know is that Malik-Altûnia, the Turki governor of Bhattînda--curious how that name crops up in all the really exciting tales of Indian history!--revolted on the plea of the queen's partiality to the Abyssinian; that she marched against the rebel, leading her troops; that a tumultuous conflict occurred in the old place of battles, in which the Abyssinian favourite was killed, the queen taken prisoner, and sent to Altûnia's care in the fort.
So far good. But here affairs take a turn which is fairly breathless, and which gives pause for doubting Altûnia's disinterested care for morality and les convenances.
He promptly married the empress, and with scarce a comma, we find him raising an army to espouse her cause, and fighting her battles, the Bothwell of his time. He failed, and he and his wife were put to death together on the 14th of November A.D. 1239.
A tragic tale indeed! Best finished by another excerpt from the historian.
"The reign of Sultana Râzia Begum lasted three years, six months, and six days. Those who reflect on the fate of this unfortunate princess will readily discover from whence arose the foul blast that blighted all her prospects.--What connection exists between the high office of Amîr-ul Omra and an Abyssinian slave? Or how are we to reconcile the inconsistency of the queen of so vast a territory fixing her affections on so unworthy an object?"
And no one, apparently, remembered that she herself was the daughter of a Turki slave who achieved empire.
Byrâm 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 assassinate friends; in short, "these proceedings, without trial or public accusation, justly alarmed every one," so Masûd, the next brother, had his innings. A poor one, though it lasted twice as long as Byrâm'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 Kandahâr and Sinde. Masûd seems to have become imbecile over wine and women, and when deposed, was contemptuously allowed to live by his brother, Nâsir-ud-din, the only one of Altâmish's sons who appears to have been worth anything; possibly because he had passed the whole of the last four reigns in prison!
Adversity may be a hard, but she is a good taskmistress, and in Nâsir-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 God'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 Eîbuk 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 Râjput 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 Nâsir-ud-din which shows him not devoid of heart.
A worthy old scholar, criticising the king's penmanship, 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 Ghiâss-ud-din the wazîr, who had married a sister of Sultana Râzia'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 Altâmish, 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. Circumstances also aided him in posing as perfection; for about this time the Moghul invasion had reached the western borderlands, and hundreds of illustrious 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 Kêik-obâd came to the throne at his death, and promptly gave the reins to pleasure and the guidance of public affairs to his wazîr. 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 Keî-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 God, the great Sovereign of the Earth!"