147-938: The Delhi Sultanate or the Sultanate of Delhi also known as the Empire of Hindustan was a late medieval empire primarily based in Delhi that stretched over large parts of the Indian subcontinent , for more than three centuries. The sultanate was established around c. 1206–1211 in the former Ghurid territories in India. The sultanate's history is generally divided into five periods: Mamluk (1206–1290), Khalji (1290–1320), Tughlaq (1320–1414), Sayyid (1414–1451), and Lodi (1451–1526). It covered large swaths of territory in modern-day India , Pakistan , Bangladesh , as well as some parts of southern Nepal . The foundation of
294-694: A "centralized structure in the Persian tradition whose task was to mobilize human and material resources for the ongoing armed struggle against both Mongol and Hindu monarchies ". The monarch was not the Sultan of the Hindus or of, say, the people of Haryana, rather in the eyes of the Sultanate's chroniclers, the Muslims constituted what in more recent times would be termed a "Staatsvolk". For many Muslim observers,
441-600: A Dari dialect. In the 19th century, under the Qajar dynasty , the dialect that is spoken in Tehran rose to prominence. There was still substantial Arabic vocabulary, but many of these words have been integrated into Persian phonology and grammar. In addition, under the Qajar rule, numerous Russian , French , and English terms entered the Persian language, especially vocabulary related to technology. The first official attentions to
588-548: A description on the use of water wheels in the Delhi Sultanate. According to historians Arnold Pacey and Irfan Habib , the spinning wheel was introduced to India from Iran during the Delhi Sultanate. Smith and Cothren suggested that it was invented in India during the latter half of the first millennium, but Pacey and Habib said these early references to cotton spinning do not identify a wheel, but more likely refer to hand spinning . The earliest unambiguous reference to
735-418: A dictionary called Words of Scientific Association ( لغت انجمن علمی ), which was completed in the future and renamed Katouzian Dictionary ( فرهنگ کاتوزیان ). The first academy for the Persian language was founded on 20 May 1935, under the name Academy of Iran . It was established by the initiative of Reza Shah Pahlavi , and mainly by Hekmat e Shirazi and Mohammad Ali Foroughi , all prominent names in
882-528: A discriminatory tax on non-Muslims, although even then it is difficult to see how such a measure could have been enforced outside the principal centres of Muslim authority. The Delhi Sultanate also continued the governmental conventions of the previous Hindu polities, claiming paramountcy of some of its subjects rather than exclusive supreme control. Accordingly, it did not interfere with the autonomy and military of certain conquered Hindu rulers and freely included Hindu vassals and officials. The economic policy of
1029-457: A handful of his slaves and family. In 1298, between 15,000 and 30,000 Mongols near Delhi, who had recently converted to Islam, were slaughtered in a single day, due to a mutiny during an invasion of Gujarat. He is also known for his cruelty against kingdoms he defeated in battle. After Ala ud-Din died in 1316 by assassination through his nobles, his general Malik Kafur, who was born to a Hindu family but converted to Islam, assumed de facto power and
1176-505: A language name is first attested in English in the mid-16th century. Farsi , which is the Persian word for the Persian language, has also been used widely in English in recent decades, more often to refer to Iran's standard Persian. However, the name Persian is still more widely used. The Academy of Persian Language and Literature has maintained that the endonym Farsi is to be avoided in foreign languages, and that Persian
1323-417: A literary language considerably different from the spoken Persian of the time. This became the basis of what is now known as "Contemporary Standard Persian". There are three standard varieties of modern Persian: All these three varieties are based on the classic Persian literature and its literary tradition. There are also several local dialects from Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan which slightly differ from
1470-422: A modern "British" period. He argues that there is no clear sharp distinction between when the ancient period ended and when the medieval period began, noting dates ranging from the 7th century to the 13th century. Persian language Russia Persian ( / ˈ p ɜːr ʒ ən , - ʃ ən / PUR -zhən, -shən ), also known by its endonym Farsi ( فارسی , Fārsī [fɒːɾˈsiː] ),
1617-536: A period of several centuries, Ottoman Turkish (which was highly Persianised itself) had developed toward a fully accepted language of literature, and which was even able to lexically satisfy the demands of a scientific presentation. However, the number of Persian and Arabic loanwords contained in those works increased at times up to 88%. In the Ottoman Empire, Persian was used at the royal court, for diplomacy, poetry, historiographical works, literary works, and
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#17327570777561764-599: A speaker of Persian. Persian is a member of the Western Iranian group of the Iranian languages , which make up a branch of the Indo-European languages in their Indo-Iranian subdivision . The Western Iranian languages themselves are divided into two subgroups: Southwestern Iranian languages, of which Persian is the most widely spoken, and Northwestern Iranian languages, of which Kurdish and Balochi are
1911-518: A spinning wheel in India is dated to 1350. The worm gear roller cotton gin was invented in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries; Habib states that the development may likely occurred in peninsular India, before becoming more widespread across India during the Mughal era. The incorporation of the crank handle in the cotton gin may have appeared sometime during the late Delhi Sultanate or the early Mughal Empire. India and China have connections throughout
2058-700: A systematic war of expansion into northern India in 1173. He sought to carve out a principality for himself and expand the Islamic world. Muhammad of Ghor created a Sunni Islamic kingdom of his own extending east of the Indus river, and he thus laid the foundation for the Muslim kingdom called the Delhi Sultanate. Some historians chronicle the Delhi Sultanate from 1192 due to the presence and geographical claims of Muhammad Ghori in South Asia by that time. Muhammad Ghori
2205-482: A town near Delhi named Tughlaqabad . His son Juna Khan and general Ainul Mulk Multani conquered Warangal in south India. According to some historians such as Vincent Smith , he was killed by his son Juna Khan, who then assumed power in 1325. Juna Khan renamed himself as Muhammad bin Tughlaq and ruled for 26 years. During his rule, the Delhi Sultanate reached its peak in terms of geographical reach, covering most of
2352-615: Is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages . Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and used officially within Iran , Afghanistan , and Tajikistan in three mutually intelligible standard varieties , respectively Iranian Persian (officially known as Persian ), Dari Persian (officially known as Dari since 1964), and Tajiki Persian (officially known as Tajik since 1999). It
2499-664: Is a continuation of Middle Persian , an official language of the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE), itself a continuation of Old Persian , which was used in the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE). It originated in the region of Fars ( Persia ) in southwestern Iran. Its grammar is similar to that of many European languages. Throughout history, Persian was considered prestigious by various empires centered in West Asia , Central Asia , and South Asia . Old Persian
2646-628: Is a direct descendant of Middle and Old Persian. Gernot Windfuhr considers new Persian as an evolution of the Old Persian language and the Middle Persian language but also states that none of the known Middle Persian dialects is the direct predecessor of Modern Persian. Ludwig Paul states: "The language of the Shahnameh should be seen as one instance of continuous historical development from Middle to New Persian." The known history of
2793-471: Is also part of a longer trend predating the spread of Islam . Like other settled , agrarian societies in history, those in the Indian subcontinent have been attacked by nomadic tribes throughout its long history. In evaluating the impact of Islam on the subcontinent, one must note that the northwestern subcontinent was a frequent target of tribes raiding from Central Asia in the pre-Islamic era. In that sense,
2940-850: Is also spoken natively in the Tajik variety by a significant population within Uzbekistan , as well as within other regions with a Persianate history in the cultural sphere of Greater Iran . It is written officially within Iran and Afghanistan in the Persian alphabet , a derivative of the Arabic script , and within Tajikistan in the Tajik alphabet , a derivative of the Cyrillic script . Modern Persian
3087-675: Is attested in Old Persian cuneiform on inscriptions from between the 6th and 4th century BC. Middle Persian is attested in Aramaic -derived scripts ( Pahlavi and Manichaean ) on inscriptions and in Zoroastrian and Manichaean scriptures from between the third to the tenth centuries (see Middle Persian literature ). New Persian literature was first recorded in the ninth century, after the Muslim conquest of Persia , since then adopting
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#17327570777563234-425: Is conventionally divided into three stages: Early New Persian remains largely intelligible to speakers of Contemporary Persian, as the morphology and, to a lesser extent, the lexicon of the language have remained relatively stable. New Persian texts written in the Arabic script first appear in the 9th-century. The language is a direct descendant of Middle Persian, the official, religious, and literary language of
3381-528: Is itself subdivided into the early medieval and late medieval eras. In the early medieval period, there were more than 40 different states on the Indian subcontinent, which hosted a variety of cultures, languages, writing systems, and religions . At the beginning of the time period, Buddhism was predominant throughout the area , with the Pala Empire on the Indo Gangetic Plain sponsoring
3528-460: Is not actually attested until 600 years later when it appears in the Sassanid era (224–651 AD) inscriptions, so any form of the language before this date cannot be described with any degree of certainty. Moreover, as a literary language, Middle Persian is not attested until much later, in the 6th or 7th century. From the 8th century onward, Middle Persian gradually began yielding to New Persian, with
3675-475: Is one of Afghanistan's two official languages, together with Pashto . The term Dari , meaning "of the court", originally referred to the variety of Persian used in the court of the Sasanian Empire in capital Ctesiphon , which was spread to the northeast of the empire and gradually replaced the former Iranian dialects of Parthia ( Parthian ). Tajik Persian ( форси́и тоҷикӣ́ , forsi-i tojikī ),
3822-585: Is one of the earliest attested Indo-European languages. According to certain historical assumptions about the early history and origin of ancient Persians in Southwestern Iran (where Achaemenids hailed from), Old Persian was originally spoken by a tribe called Parsuwash , who arrived in the Iranian Plateau early in the 1st millennium BCE and finally migrated down into the area of present-day Fārs province. Their language, Old Persian, became
3969-495: Is the appropriate designation of the language in English, as it has the longer tradition in western languages and better expresses the role of the language as a mark of cultural and national continuity. Iranian historian and linguist Ehsan Yarshater , founder of the Encyclopædia Iranica and Columbia University 's Center for Iranian Studies, mentions the same concern in an academic journal on Iranology , rejecting
4116-491: The Encyclopædia Iranica notes that the Iranian, Afghan, and Tajiki varieties comprise distinct branches of the Persian language, and within each branch a wide variety of local dialects exist. The following are some languages closely related to Persian, or in some cases are considered dialects: More distantly related branches of the Iranian language family include Kurdish and Balochi . The Glottolog database proposes
4263-506: The Kalila wa Dimna . The language spread geographically from the 11th century on and was the medium through which, among others, Central Asian Turks became familiar with Islam and urban culture. New Persian was widely used as a trans-regional lingua franca , a task aided due to its relatively simple morphology, and this situation persisted until at least the 19th century. In the late Middle Ages, new Islamic literary languages were created on
4410-616: The British colonization , Persian was widely used as a second language in the Indian subcontinent . It took prominence as the language of culture and education in several Muslim courts on the subcontinent and became the sole "official language" under the Mughal emperors . The Bengal Sultanate witnessed an influx of Persian scholars, lawyers, teachers, and clerics. Thousands of Persian books and manuscripts were published in Bengal. The period of
4557-684: The Ghurid Empire and founded the Delhi Sultanate which ruled until the 16th century. As a consequence, Buddhism declined in South Asia , but Hinduism survived and reinforced itself in areas conquered by Muslim empires. In the far South, the Vijayanagara Empire resisted Muslim conquests, sparking a long rivalry with the Bahmani Sultanate . The turn of the 16th century would see introduction of gunpowder and
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4704-533: The Muslim conquests of the Indian subcontinent and the decline of Buddhism, the eventual founding of the Delhi Sultanate and the creation of Indo-Islamic architecture , followed by the world's major trading nation, the Bengal Sultanate . The start of the Mughal Empire in 1526 marked the beginning of the early modern period of Indian history, often referred to as the Mughal era. Sometimes,
4851-618: The Sultanate of Rum , Turkmen beyliks of Anatolia , Delhi Sultanate , the Shirvanshahs , Safavids , Afsharids , Zands , Qajars , Khanate of Bukhara , Khanate of Kokand , Emirate of Bukhara , Khanate of Khiva , Ottomans , and also many Mughal successors such as the Nizam of Hyderabad . Persian was the only non-European language known and used by Marco Polo at the Court of Kublai Khan and in his journeys through China. A branch of
4998-713: The Turkic , Armenian , Georgian , & Indo-Aryan languages . It also exerted some influence on Arabic, while borrowing a lot of vocabulary from it in the Middle Ages. Some of the world's most famous pieces of literature from the Middle Ages, such as the Shahnameh by Ferdowsi , the works of Rumi , the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám , the Panj Ganj of Nizami Ganjavi , The Divān of Hafez , The Conference of
5145-491: The ezāfe construction, expressed through ī (modern e/ye ), to indicate some of the relations between words that have been lost with the simplification of the earlier grammatical system. Although the "middle period" of the Iranian languages formally begins with the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the transition from Old to Middle Persian had probably already begun before the 4th century BC. However, Middle Persian
5292-535: The " Persianized " Turko-Mongol dynasties during the 12th to 15th centuries, and under restored Persian rule during the 16th to 19th centuries. Persian during this time served as lingua franca of Greater Persia and of much of the Indian subcontinent . It was also the official and cultural language of many Islamic dynasties, including the Samanids, Buyids , Tahirids , Ziyarids , the Mughal Empire , Timurids , Ghaznavids , Karakhanids , Seljuqs , Khwarazmians ,
5439-450: The 16th century to the 18th century, is often referred to as the early modern period , but is sometimes also included in the 'late medieval' period. An alternative definition, often seen in those more recent authors who still use the term at all, brings the start of the medieval times forward, either to about 1000 CE, or to the 12th century. The end may be pushed back to the 18th century, Hence, this period can be effectively considered as
5586-681: The Birds by Attar of Nishapur , and the miscellanea of Gulistan and Bustan by Saadi Shirazi , are written in Persian. Some of the prominent modern Persian poets were Nima Yooshij , Ahmad Shamlou , Simin Behbahani , Sohrab Sepehri , Rahi Mo'ayyeri , Mehdi Akhavan-Sales , and Forugh Farrokhzad . There are approximately 130 million Persian speakers worldwide, including Persians , Lurs , Tajiks , Hazaras , Iranian Azeris , Iranian Kurds , Balochs , Tats , Afghan Pashtuns , and Aimaqs . The term Persophone might also be used to refer to
5733-840: The Buddhist faith's institutions. One such institution was the Buddhist Nalanda mahavihara in modern-day Bihar , India , a centre of scholarship and brought a divided South Asia onto the global intellectual stage. Another accomplishment was the invention of the Chaturanga game which later was exported to Europe and became Chess . In Southern India, the Tamil Hindu Kingdom of Chola gained prominence with an overseas empire that controlled parts of modern-day Sri Lanka , Malaysia , and Indonesia as overseas territories, and helped spread Hinduism and Buddhism into
5880-550: The Central Asian steppes and raising many of them to become loyal army slaves called Mamluks . Soon, Turks were migrating to Muslim lands and becoming Islamicized . Many of the Turkic Mamluk slaves eventually rose to become rulers and conquered large parts of the Muslim world , establishing Mamluk Sultanates from Egypt to present-day Afghanistan , before turning their attention to the Indian subcontinent. It
6027-658: The Deccan region also marked campaigns of destruction and desecration temples, for example, the Svayambhu Shiva Temple and the Thousand Pillar Temple in Warangal . Revolts against Muhammad bin Tughlaq began in 1327, continued over his reign, and over time the geographical reach of the Sultanate shrunk. The Vijayanagara Empire originated in southern India as a direct response to attacks from
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6174-936: The Delhi Sultanate into southern India with the help of Indian slave generals such as Malik Kafur and Khusro Khan . They collected much war booty (anwatan) from those they defeated. His commanders collected war spoils and paid ghanima (Arabic: الْغَنيمَة, a tax on spoils of war), which helped strengthen the Khalji rule. Among the spoils was the Warangal loot that included the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond. Ala ud-Din Khalji changed tax policies, raising agriculture taxes from 20% to 50% (payable in grain and agricultural produce), eliminating payments and commissions on taxes collected by local chiefs, banning socialization among his officials as well as inter-marriage between noble families to help prevent any opposition forming against him, and he cut salaries of officials, poets, scholars. These tax policies and spending controls strengthened his treasury to pay
6321-793: The Delhi Sultanate was characterized by greater government involvement in the economy relative to the Classical Hindu dynasties, and increased penalties for private businesses that broke government regulations. Alauddin Khalji replaced the private markets with four centralized government-run markets, appointed a "market controller", and implemented strict price controls on all kinds of goods, "from caps to socks ; from combs to pins ; from vegetables to soups , from sweetmeats to chapatis " (according to Ziauddin Barani [c. 1357]). The price controls were inflexible even during droughts. Capitalist investors were completely banned from participating in
6468-471: The Delhi Sultanate was responsible for making India more multicultural and cosmopolitan. The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in India has been compared to the expansion of the Mongol Empire and called "part of a larger trend occurring throughout much of Eurasia, in which nomadic people migrated from the steppes of Inner Asia and became politically dominant". According to Angus Maddison , between
6615-510: The Delhi Sultanate were left in a state of anarchy, chaos, and pestilence. Nasir ud-Din Mahmud Shah Tughlaq, who had fled to Gujarat during Timur's invasion, returned and nominally ruled as the last ruler of the Tughlaq dynasty, as a puppet of the various factions at the court. The Sayyid dynasty was founded by Khizr Khan and it ruled the Delhi Sultanate from 1415 to 1451. Members of the dynasty derived their title, Sayyid , or
6762-524: The Delhi Sultanate, and liberated south India from the Delhi Sultanate's rule. In the 1330s, Muhammad bin Tughlaq ordered an invasion of China, sending part of his forces over the Himalayas . However, they were defeated by the Kangra State . During his reign, state revenues collapsed from his policies such as the base metal coins from 1329 to 1332. Famines, widespread poverty, and rebellion grew across
6909-592: The Delhi Sultanate, the Mongol Empire may have been successful in invading India. The strength of the armies changes according to time. Historians state the Delhi sultanate during the Khalji dynasty maintained 300,000–400,000 horse cavalry and 2500–3000 war elephant as a standing army. Its successor state, the Tughlaq dynasty further expanded into 500,000 horse cavalry in their force. Some historians argue that
7056-415: The Delhi Sultanate. He was succeeded by Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1351–1388), who tried to regain the old kingdom, boundary by waging a war with Bengal for 11 months in 1359. However, Bengal did not fall. Firuz Shah ruled for 37 years. His reign was marked with prosperity much of which was due to the wise and capable Grand Vizier, Khan-i-Jahan Maqbul, a South Indian Telugu Muslim. His reign attempted to stabilize
7203-598: The Ghurid territories amongst themselves. Khalji and Tughlaq rule ushered a new wave of rapid and continual Muslim conquests deep into South India . The sultanate finally reached the peak of its geographical reach during the Tughlaq dynasty, occupying most of the Indian subcontinent under Muhammad bin Tughluq . A major political transformation occurred across North India , triggered by the Central Asian king Timur 's devastating raid on Delhi in 1398, followed soon afterwards by
7350-763: The Hindu rulers. He also attacked, defeated, executed Taj al-Din Yildiz , who asserted his rights as heir to Mu'izz ad-Din Muhammad Ghori. Iltutmish's rule lasted until 1236. Following his death, the Delhi Sultanate saw a succession of weak rulers, disputing Muslim nobility, assassinations, and short-lived tenures. Power shifted from Rukn ud-Din Firuz to Razia Sultana and others, until Ghiyas ud-Din Balban came to power and ruled from 1266 to 1287. Ghiyasuddin Balban destroyed
7497-574: The Indian subcontinent. Muhammad bin Tughlaq was an intellectual, with extensive knowledge of the Quran, Fiqh , poetry and other fields. He was also deeply suspicious of his kinsmen and wazirs (ministers), extremely severe with his opponents, and took decisions that caused economic upheaval. For example, he ordered the minting of coins from base metals with face value of silver coins – a decision that failed because ordinary people minted counterfeit coins from base metal they had in their houses and used them to pay taxes and jizya . Muhammad bin Tughlaq chose
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#17327570777567644-521: The Indian subcontinent. India previously already had highly sophisticated agriculture, food crops, textiles, medicine, minerals, and metals. Water wheels also previously existed in India, as described by various Chinese monks and Arab travellers and writers in their books. During the Delhi Sultanate, various mechanical devices were introduced from the Islamic world to India, such as geared water-raising wheels and other machines with gears, pulleys , cams , and cranks . Later, Mughal emperor Babur provided
7791-400: The Mamluk dynasty. Aibak reigned as the Sultan of Delhi for four years, from 1206 to 1210. Aibak was praised by the contemporary and later accounts for his generosity and due to this was called with the sobriquet of Lakhbaksh . (giver of lakhs) After Aibak died, Aram Shah assumed power in 1210, but he was assassinated in 1211 by Aibak's son-in-law, Shams ud-Din Iltutmish . Iltutmish's power
7938-500: The Middle Ages, and is because of the lack of the phoneme /p/ in Standard Arabic. The standard Persian of Iran has been called, apart from Persian and Farsi , by names such as Iranian Persian and Western Persian , exclusively. Officially, the official language of Iran is designated simply as Persian ( فارسی , fārsi ). The standard Persian of Afghanistan has been officially named Dari ( دری , dari ) since 1958. Also referred to as Afghan Persian in English, it
8085-492: The Mughal era is also referred as the 'late medieval' period. Modern historical works written on medieval India have received some criticism from scholars studying the historiography of the period. E. Sreedharan argues that, from the turn of the century until the 1960s, Indian historians were often motivated by Indian nationalism . Peter Hardy notes that the majority of modern historical works on medieval India up until then were written by British and Hindu historians, whereas
8232-416: The Muslim intrusions and later Muslim invasions were not dissimilar to those of the earlier invasions during the 1st millennium. By 962 AD, Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms in South Asia faced a series of raids from Muslim armies from Central Asia. Among them was Mahmud of Ghazni , the son of a Turkic Mamluk military slave, who raided and plundered kingdoms in northern India from east of the Indus river to west of
8379-429: The Ottoman Empire all spoke Persian, such as Sultan Selim I , despite being Safavid Iran's archrival and a staunch opposer of Shia Islam . It was a major literary language in the empire. Some of the noted earlier Persian works during the Ottoman rule are Idris Bidlisi 's Hasht Bihisht , which began in 1502 and covered the reign of the first eight Ottoman rulers, and the Salim-Namah , a glorification of Selim I. After
8526-459: The Persian language can be divided into the following three distinct periods: As a written language , Old Persian is attested in royal Achaemenid inscriptions. The oldest known text written in Old Persian is from the Behistun Inscription , dating to the time of King Darius I (reigned 522–486 BC). Examples of Old Persian have been found in what is now Iran , Romania ( Gherla ), Armenia , Bahrain , Iraq , Turkey, and Egypt . Old Persian
8673-425: The Persian language, a language historically called Dari, emerged in present-day Afghanistan. The first significant Persian poet was Rudaki . He flourished in the 10th century, when the Samanids were at the height of their power. His reputation as a court poet and as an accomplished musician and singer has survived, although little of his poetry has been preserved. Among his lost works are versified fables collected in
8820-401: The Persian model: Ottoman Turkish , Chagatai Turkic , Dobhashi Bengali , and Urdu, which are regarded as "structural daughter languages" of Persian. "Classical Persian" loosely refers to the standardized language of medieval Persia used in literature and poetry . This is the language of the 10th to 12th centuries, which continued to be used as literary language and lingua franca under
8967-487: The Perso-Arabic script. Persian was the first language to break through the monopoly of Arabic on writing in the Muslim world , with Persian poetry becoming a tradition in many eastern courts. It was used officially as a language of bureaucracy even by non-native speakers, such as the Ottomans in Anatolia , the Mughals in South Asia, and the Pashtuns in Afghanistan. It influenced languages spoken in neighboring regions and beyond, including other Iranian languages,
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#17327570777569114-428: The Sasanian Empire (224–651). However, it is not descended from the literary form of Middle Persian (known as pārsīk , commonly called Pahlavi), which was spoken by the people of Fars and used in Zoroastrian religious writings. Instead, it is descended from the dialect spoken by the court of the Sasanian capital Ctesiphon and the northeastern Iranian region of Khorasan , known as Dari. The region, which comprised
9261-427: The Sassanids (who were Persians, i.e. from the southwest) from the preceding Arsacids (who were Parthians, i.e. from the northeast). While Ibn al-Muqaffa' (eighth century) still distinguished between Pahlavi (i.e. Parthian) and Persian (in Arabic text: al-Farisiyah) (i.e. Middle Persian), this distinction is not evident in Arab commentaries written after that date. "New Persian" (also referred to as Modern Persian)
9408-407: The Seljuks, the Sultanate of Rum , took Persian language, art, and letters to Anatolia. They adopted the Persian language as the official language of the empire. The Ottomans , who can roughly be seen as their eventual successors, inherited this tradition. Persian was the official court language of the empire, and for some time, the official language of the empire. The educated and noble class of
9555-497: The Sultanate was established by the Ghurid conqueror Muhammad Ghori , who routed the Rajput Confederacy , led by Ajmer ruler Prithviraj Chauhan , in 1192 near Tarain in a reversal of an earlier battle . As a successor to the Ghurid dynasty, the Delhi Sultanate was originally one of several principalities ruled by the Turkic slave-generals of Muhammad Ghori, including Taj al-Din Yildiz , Qutb ud-Din Aibak , Bahauddin Tughril and Nasir ad-Din Qabacha , that had inherited and divided
9702-414: The Turco-Afghani regular units named Wajih , which were composed of elite household cavalry archers who came from slave backgrounds. A major military contribution of the Delhi Sultanate was their successful campaigns repelling the Mongol Empire 's invasions of India , which could have been devastating for the Indian subcontinent, like the Mongol invasions of China , Persia and Europe . Were it not for
9849-477: The Yamuna river seventeen times between 997 and 1030. Mahmud of Ghazni raided the treasuries but retreated each time, only extending Islamic rule into western Punjab. The series of raids on northern and western Indian kingdoms by Muslim warlords continued after Mahmud of Ghazni. The raids did not establish or extend the permanent boundaries of the Islamic kingdoms. In contrast, the Ghurid Sultan Mu'izz ad-Din Muhammad Ghori (commonly known as Muhammad of Ghor) began
9996-489: The amirs and chiefs. Ibrahim Lodi was unable to consolidate his power, and after Jalal Khan's death, the governor of Punjab, Daulat Khan Lodi , reached out to the Mughal Babur and invited him to attack the Delhi Sultanate. Babur defeated and killed Ibrahim Lodi in the Battle of Panipat in 1526. The death of Ibrahim Lodi ended the Delhi Sultanate, and the Mughal Empire replaced it. The historian Peter Jackson explains in The New Cambridge History of Islam : "The elite of
10143-441: The area of Lake Urmia in the records of Shalmaneser III . The exact identity of the Parsuwash is not known for certain, but from a linguistic viewpoint the word matches Old Persian pārsa itself coming directly from the older word * pārćwa . Also, as Old Persian contains many words from another extinct Iranian language, Median , according to P. O. Skjærvø it is probable that Old Persian had already been spoken before
10290-408: The beginning of Muslim domination to British India . Or the "early medieval" period as beginning in the 8th century, and ending with the 11th century. The use of "medieval" at all as a term for periods in Indian history has often been objected to, and is probably becoming more rare (there is a similar discussion in terms of the history of China ). It is argued that neither the start nor the end of
10437-513: The city of Deogiri in the present-day Indian state of Maharashtra (renaming it Daulatabad ), as the second administrative capital of the Delhi Sultanate. He ordered a forced migration of the Muslim population of Delhi, including his royal family, the nobles, Syeds, Sheikhs and 'Ulema to settle in Daulatabad. The purpose of transferring the entire Muslim elite to Daulatabad was to enrol them in his mission of world conquest. He saw their role as propagandists who would adapt Islamic religious symbolism to
10584-457: The code fas for the dialects spoken across Iran and Afghanistan. This consists of the individual languages Dari ( prs ) and Iranian Persian ( pes ). It uses tgk for Tajik, separately. In general, the Iranian languages are known from three periods: namely Old, Middle, and New (Modern). These correspond to three historical eras of Iranian history ; Old era being sometime around the Achaemenid Empire (i.e., 400–300 BC), Middle era being
10731-512: The collapse of the Sassanid state, Parsik came to be applied exclusively to (either Middle or New) Persian that was written in the Arabic script . From about the 9th century onward, as Middle Persian was on the threshold of becoming New Persian, the older form of the language came to be erroneously called Pahlavi , which was actually but one of the writing systems used to render both Middle Persian as well as various other Middle Iranian languages. That writing system had previously been adopted by
10878-603: The construction of the Qutb Minar but died before it was completed. It was later completed by his son-in-law, Iltutmish. The Quwwat-ul-Islam (Might of Islam) Mosque was built by Aibak, now a UNESCO world heritage site. The Qutub Minar Complex was expanded by Iltutmish, and later by Ala ud-Din Khalji in the early 14th century. During the Mamluk dynasty, many nobles from Afghanistan and Persia migrated and settled in India, as West Asia came under Mongol siege. The Khalji dynasty
11025-476: The descendants of the Islamic prophet, Muhammad , based on the claim that they belonged to his lineage through his daughter Fatima . Abraham Eraly thinks his forebears were likely that Khizr Khan's ancestors were likely descendants of an Arab family who had long ago settled in the region of Multan during the early Tughluq period, but he doubts his Sayyid lineage. A.L. Srivastava shares a similar viewpoint. According to Richard M. Eaton and Simon Digby , Khizr Khan
11172-692: The development of the Hindustani language and Indo-Islamic architecture . It was also one of the few powers to repel attacks by the Mongols (from the Chagatai Khanate ) and saw the enthronement of one of the few female rulers in Islamic history , Razia Sultana , who reigned from 1236 to 1240. Their treatment of Hindus, Buddhists, and other dharmic faiths are generally perceived to be unfavourable, as mass forcible conversions were popular during
11319-485: The early Delhi sultanate comprised overwhelmingly first-generation immigrants from Iran and Central Asia : Persians , Turks , Ghūrīs , Khalaj from the hot regions ( garmsīr ) of modern Afghanistan ". Medieval scholars such as Isami and Barani suggested that the prehistory of the Delhi Sultanate lay in the Ghaznavid state and that its ruler, Mahmud Ghaznavi, provided the foundation and inspiration integral in
11466-547: The extent of its influence on certain languages of the Indian subcontinent. Words borrowed from Persian are still quite commonly used in certain Indo-Aryan languages, especially Hindi - Urdu (also historically known as Hindustani ), Punjabi , Kashmiri , and Sindhi . There is also a small population of Zoroastrian Iranis in India, who migrated in the 19th century to escape religious execution in Qajar Iran and speak
11613-925: The food supply and reduce famines by commissioning an irrigation canal from the Yamuna river. An educated sultan, Firuz Shah left a memoir. In it he wrote that he banned the practice of torture, such as amputations, tearing out of eyes, sawing people alive, crushing people's bones as punishment, pouring molten lead into throats, setting people on fire, driving nails into hands and feet, among others. He also wrote that he did not tolerate attempts by Rafawiz Shia Muslim and Mahdi sects from proselytizing people into their faith, nor did he tolerate Hindus who tried to rebuild temples that his armies had destroyed. Firuz Shah Tughlaq also lists his accomplishments to include converting Hindus to Sunni Islam by announcing an exemption from taxes and jizya for those who convert, and by lavishing new converts with presents and honours. He also vastly expanded
11760-399: The form of grain were stored in the kingdom's storage. During famines that followed, these granaries ensured sufficient food for the army. Historians note Ala ud-Din Khalji as being a tyrant . Anyone Ala ud-Din suspected of being a threat to this power was killed along with the men, women, and children of that family. He grew to eventually distrust the majority of his nobles and favoured only
11907-577: The formation of many modern languages in West Asia, Europe, Central Asia , and South Asia . Following the Turko-Persian Ghaznavid conquest of South Asia , Persian was firstly introduced in the region by Turkic Central Asians. The basis in general for the introduction of Persian language into the subcontinent was set, from its earliest days, by various Persianized Central Asian Turkic and Afghan dynasties. For five centuries prior to
12054-476: The formation of the Achaemenid Empire and was spoken during most of the first half of the first millennium BCE. Xenophon , a Greek general serving in some of the Persian expeditions, describes many aspects of Armenian village life and hospitality in around 401 BCE, which is when Old Persian was still spoken and extensively used. He relates that the Armenian people spoke a language that to his ear sounded like
12201-473: The growth of Agra continued during the Mughal Empire, after the end of the Delhi Sultanate. Sikandar Lodi died a natural death in 1517, and his second son Ibrahim Lodi assumed power. Ibrahim did not enjoy the support of Afghan and Persian nobles or regional chiefs. Ibrahim attacked and killed his elder brother Jalal Khan, who was installed as the governor of Jaunpur by his father and had the support of
12348-625: The historic cultural area of Southeast Asia . In this time period, neighbouring regions such as Afghanistan , Tibet , and Southeast Asia were under South Asian influence . During the late medieval period, a series of Islamic invasions by the Arabs , the Ghaznavids and the Ghurids conquered large portions of Northern India. Turkic general Qutb ud-Din Aibak declared his independence from
12495-407: The horse trade, animal and slave brokers were forbidden from collecting commissions, and private merchants were eliminated from all animal and slave markets. Bans were instituted against hoarding and regrating , granaries were nationalized and limits were placed on the amount of grain that could be used by cultivators for personal use. Various licensing rules were imposed. Registration of merchants
12642-533: The keep of his growing army; he also introduced price controls on all agricultural produce and goods in the kingdom, as well as controls on where, how, by whom these goods could be sold. Markets called "shahana-i-mandi" were created. Muslim merchants were granted exclusive permits and monopoly in these "mandis" to buy and resell at official prices. No one other than these merchants could buy from farmers or sell in cities. Those found violating these "mandi" rules were severely punished, often by mutilation. Taxes collected in
12789-545: The kingdom. In 1338 his nephew rebelled in Malwa, whom he attacked, caught, flayed alive, and killed ultimately. By 1339, the eastern regions under local Muslim governors and southern parts led by Hindu kings had revolted and declared independence from the Delhi Sultanate. Muhammad bin Tughlaq did not have the resources or support to respond to the shrinking kingdom. The historian Walford chronicled that Delhi and most of India faced severe famines during Muhammad bin Tughlaq's rule in
12936-466: The language of the Persians. Related to Old Persian, but from a different branch of the Iranian language family, was Avestan , the language of the Zoroastrian liturgical texts. The complex grammatical conjugation and declension of Old Persian yielded to the structure of Middle Persian in which the dual number disappeared, leaving only singular and plural, as did gender. Middle Persian developed
13083-467: The latter of which resulting in conversion of significant parts of the population to Islam. The death of Firuz Shah Tughlaq created anarchy and disintegration of the kingdom. Firuz Shah's successor, Ghiyath-ud-Din Shah II was young and inexperienced and gave himself up to wine and pleasure. The nobles rose against him killed the Sultan and his vizier, and installed Abu Bakr Shah on the throne. However,
13230-598: The making of the Delhi regime. The Mongol and Hindu monarchies were the great "Others" in these narratives and the Persianate and class-conscious, aristocratic virtues of the ideal state were creatively memorialized in the Ghaznavid state, now the templates for the Delhi Sultanate. Cast within a historical narrative it allowed for a more self-reflective, linear rooting of the Sultanate in the great traditions of Muslim statecraft. Over time, successive Muslim dynasties created
13377-429: The massacre by Timur in Delhi range from 100,000 to 200,000 people. Timur had no intention of staying in or ruling India. He looted the lands he crossed, then plundered and burnt Delhi. Over fifteen days, Timur and his army raged a massacre. Then he collected wealth, captured women and men and children, and enslaved people (particularly skilled artisans), and returning with this loot to Samarkand. The people and lands within
13524-432: The middle-period form only continuing in the texts of Zoroastrianism . Middle Persian is considered to be a later form of the same dialect as Old Persian. The native name of Middle Persian was Parsig or Parsik , after the name of the ethnic group of the southwest, that is, "of Pars ", Old Persian Parsa , New Persian Fars . This is the origin of the name Farsi as it is today used to signify New Persian. Following
13671-536: The most widely spoken. The term Persian is an English derivation of Latin Persiānus , the adjectival form of Persia , itself deriving from Greek Persís ( Περσίς ), a Hellenized form of Old Persian Pārsa ( 𐎱𐎠𐎼𐎿 ), which means " Persia " (a region in southwestern Iran, corresponding to modern-day Fars ). According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the term Persian as
13818-466: The nationalist movement of the time. The academy was a key institution in the struggle to re-build Iran as a nation-state after the collapse of the Qajar dynasty. During the 1930s and 1940s, the academy led massive campaigns to replace the many Arabic , Russian , French , and Greek loanwords whose widespread use in Persian during the centuries preceding the foundation of the Pahlavi dynasty had created
13965-499: The necessity of protecting the Persian language against foreign words, and to the standardization of Persian orthography , were under the reign of Naser ed Din Shah of the Qajar dynasty in 1871. After Naser ed Din Shah, Mozaffar ed Din Shah ordered the establishment of the first Persian association in 1903. This association officially declared that it used Persian and Arabic as acceptable sources for coining words. The ultimate goal
14112-414: The next period most officially around the Sasanian Empire , and New era being the period afterward down to present day. According to available documents, the Persian language is "the only Iranian language" for which close philological relationships between all of its three stages are established and so that Old, Middle, and New Persian represent one and the same language of Persian; that is, New Persian
14259-433: The nobility. Khusro Khan's reign lasted only a few months, when Ghazi Malik, later to be called Ghiyath al-Din Tughlaq , defeated and killed him and assumed power in 1320, thus ending the Khalji dynasty and starting the Tughlaq dynasty. The Tughlaq dynasty was a Turko-Mongol or Turkic Muslim dynasty, which lasted from 1320 to 1413. The first ruler was Ghiyath al-Din Tughlaq . Ghiyath al-Din ruled for five years and built
14406-732: The northern part of Greece). Vardar Yenicesi differed from other localities in the Balkans insofar as that it was a town where Persian was also widely spoken. However, the Persian of Vardar Yenicesi and throughout the rest of the Ottoman-held Balkans was different from formal Persian both in accent and vocabulary. The difference was apparent to such a degree that the Ottomans referred to it as "Rumelian Persian" ( Rumili Farsisi ). As learned people such as students, scholars and literati often frequented Vardar Yenicesi, it soon became
14553-687: The number of slaves in his service and those of Muslim nobles, who were converted to Islam, taught to read and memorize the Quran, and employed in many offices especially in the military, out of which he was able to amass a large army. These slaves were known as the Ghulaman-i-Firuz Shahi formed an elite guard which later became influential in the state. The reign of Firuz Shah Tughlaq was marked by reduction in extreme forms of torture, elimination of favours to select parts of society, but also increased intolerance and persecution of targeted groups,
14700-542: The official language of the Achaemenid kings. Assyrian records, which in fact appear to provide the earliest evidence for ancient Iranian (Persian and Median) presence on the Iranian Plateau, give a good chronology but only an approximate geographical indication of what seem to be ancient Persians. In these records of the 9th century BCE, Parsuwash (along with Matai , presumably Medians) are first mentioned in
14847-702: The old Ghulaman-i-Firuz Shahi turned against Abu Bakr, who fled, and on their invitation Nasir-ud-Din Muhammad Shah was installed on the throne. The anamalous institution of the Ghulaman-i-Firuz Shahi became a corrupting influence on the successive Sultans following Firuz Shah. The last rulers of this dynasty both called themselves Sultan from 1394 to 1397: Nasir ud-Din Mahmud Shah Tughlaq , the grandson of Firuz Shah Tughlaq who ruled from Delhi, and Nasir ud-Din Nusrat Shah Tughlaq , another relative of Firuz Shah Tughlaq who ruled from Firozabad , which
14994-613: The paper may have arrived in Bengal from a separate route, as 15th-century Chinese traveller Ma Huan remarked that Bengali paper was white and made from "bark of a tree" similar to the Chinese method of papermaking (as opposed to the Middle-Eastern method of using rags and waste material), suggesting a direct route from China for the arrival of paper in Bengal and paper was already very well established and widespread in that part of
15141-493: The period from the 6th century, the first half of the 7th century, or the 8th century up to the 16th century, essentially coinciding with the Middle Ages of Europe. It may be divided into two periods: The 'early medieval period' which lasted from the 6th to the 13th century and the 'late medieval period' which lasted from the 13th to the 16th century, ending with the start of the Mughal Empire in 1526. The Mughal era, from
15288-572: The period really mark fundamental changes in Indian history, comparable to the European equivalents. Burton Stein still used the concept in his A History of India (1998), referring to the period from the Guptas to the Mughals, but most recent authors using it are Indian. Understandably, they often specify the period they cover within their titles. The start of the period is typically taken to be
15435-620: The period. The rise of the Delhi Sultanate in India was part of a wider trend affecting much of the Asian continent, including the whole of southern and western Asia: the influx of nomadic Turkic peoples from the Central Asian steppes . This can be traced back to the 9th century when the Islamic Caliphate began fragmenting in the Middle East , where Muslim rulers in rival states began enslaving non-Muslim nomadic Turks from
15582-672: The power of the Corps of Forty , a council of 40 Turkic slaves who had played a role as kingmakers and had been independent of the Sultan. He was succeeded by 17-year-old Muiz ud-Din Qaiqabad , who appointed Jalal ud-Din Firuz Khalji as the commander of the army. Khalji assassinated Qaiqabad and assumed power in the Khalji Revolution , thus ending the Mamluk dynasty and starting the Khalji dynasty. Qutb al-Din Aibak initiated
15729-467: The power of the Sayyid dynasty faltering, Islam's history on the Indian subcontinent underwent a profound change, according to Schimmel. The previously dominant Sunni sect of Islam became diluted, alternate Muslim sects such as Shia rose, and new competing centres of Islamic culture took roots beyond Delhi. In the course of the late Sayyid dynasty, the Delhi Sultanate shrank until it became a minor power. By
15876-694: The present territories of northwestern Afghanistan as well as parts of Central Asia, played a leading role in the rise of New Persian. Khorasan, which was the homeland of the Parthians, was Persianized under the Sasanians. Dari Persian thus supplanted Parthian language , which by the end of the Sasanian era had fallen out of use. New Persian has incorporated many foreign words, including from eastern northern and northern Iranian languages such as Sogdian and especially Parthian. The transition to New Persian
16023-496: The re-emergence of rival Hindu powers such as Vijayanagara and Mewar asserting independence, and new Muslim sultanates such as the Bengal and Bahmani Sultanates breaking off. In 1526, Timurid ruler Babur invaded northern India and conquered the Sultanate , leading to its succession by the Mughal Empire . The establishment of the Sultanate drew the Indian subcontinent more closely into international and multicultural Islamic social and economic networks, as seen concretely in
16170-588: The region during the following centuries. Persian continued to act as a courtly language for various empires in Punjab through the early 19th century serving finally as the official state language of the Sikh Empire , preceding British conquest and the decline of Persian in South Asia. Beginning in 1843, though, English and Hindustani gradually replaced Persian in importance on the subcontinent. Evidence of Persian's historical influence there can be seen in
16317-549: The reign of Sultan Ghiyathuddin Azam Shah is described as the "golden age of Persian literature in Bengal". Its stature was illustrated by the Sultan's own correspondence and collaboration with the Persian poet Hafez ; a poem which can be found in the Divan of Hafez today. A Bengali dialect emerged among the common Bengali Muslim folk, based on a Persian model and known as Dobhashi ; meaning mixed language . Dobhashi Bengali
16464-600: The rhetoric of empire, and that the Sufis could by persuasion bring many of the inhabitants of the Deccan to become Muslim. Tughluq cruelly punished the nobles who were unwilling to move to Daulatabad seeing their non-compliance with his order as equivalent to rebellion. According to Ferishta, when the Mongols arrived in Punjab, the Sultan returned the elite to Delhi, although Daulatabad remained an administrative centre. One result of
16611-613: The rise of a new Muslim empire—the Mughals , as well as the establishment of European trade posts by the Portuguese colonists . Mughal Empire was one of the three Islamic gunpowder empires , along with the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Persia . The subsequent cultural and technological developments transformed Indian society, concluding the late medieval period and beginning the early modern period . One definition includes
16758-572: The ruler, then proceeded east to make claims on Bihar . The Muslim governors of Bihar agreed to pay tribute and taxes but operated independently of the Delhi Sultanate. Sikandar Lodi led a campaign of destruction of temples, particularly around Mathura . He also moved his capital and court from Delhi to Agra , an ancient Hindu city that had been destroyed during the plunder and attacks of the early Delhi Sultanate period. Sikandar thus erected buildings with Indo-Islamic architecture in Agra during his rule, and
16905-668: The site of a flourishing Persianate linguistic and literary culture. The 16th-century Ottoman Aşık Çelebi (died 1572), who hailed from Prizren in modern-day Kosovo , was galvanized by the abundant Persian-speaking and Persian-writing communities of Vardar Yenicesi, and he referred to the city as a "hotbed of Persian". Many Ottoman Persianists who established a career in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul ) pursued early Persian training in Saraybosna, amongst them Ahmed Sudi . The Persian language influenced
17052-537: The slow collapse of the Gupta Empire from about 480 to 550, ending the "classical" period , as well as "ancient India", although both these terms may be used for periods with widely different dates, especially in specialised fields such as the history of art or religion. Another alternative for the preceding period is "Early Historical" stretching "from the sixth century BC to the sixth century AD", according to Romila Thapar . At least in northern India, there
17199-573: The standard Persian of Tajikistan, has been officially designated as Tajik ( тоҷикӣ , tojikī ) since the time of the Soviet Union . It is the name given to the varieties of Persian spoken in Central Asia in general. The international language-encoding standard ISO 639-1 uses the code fa for the Persian language, as its coding system is mostly based on the native-language designations. The more detailed standard ISO 639-3 uses
17346-777: The standard Persian. The Hazaragi dialect (in Central Afghanistan and Pakistan), Herati (in Western Afghanistan), Darwazi (in Afghanistan and Tajikistan), Basseri (in Southern Iran), and the Tehrani accent (in Iran, the basis of standard Iranian Persian) are examples of these dialects. Persian-speaking peoples of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan can understand one another with a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility . Nevertheless,
17493-502: The subcontinent. Medieval India Medieval India refers to a long period of post-classical history of the Indian subcontinent between the "ancient period" and "modern period". It is usually regarded as running approximately from the break-up of the Gupta Empire in the 6th century CE to the start of the early modern period in 1526 with the start of the Mughal Empire , although some historians regard it as both starting and finishing later than these points. The medieval period
17640-461: The sultanate's rule and large-scale desecrations of Hindu and Buddhist temples, including universities and libraries took place. Mongolian raids on West and Central Asia set the scene for centuries of migration of fleeing soldiers, intelligentsia, mystics, traders, artists, and artisans from those regions into the subcontinent , thereby establishing Islamic culture there. Although conventionally named after its principal capital city, Delhi ,
17787-399: The terminology applied to domains under Delhi Sultanate was often unspecified. It was called as "Empire of Delhi" ( Persian : Mamalik-i-Delhi) by Juzjani and Barani while Ibn Battuta called the empire under Muhammad bin Tughlaq as " Hind and Sind ". The Delhi Sultanate was also known as the "Empire of Hindustan " ( Persian : Mamalik-i-Hindustan) , a name that gained currency during
17934-406: The thousands of years of history. Paper had already reached some parts of India as early as the 6th or 7th century, initially through Chinese travellers and the ancient silk road which India was very well connected with. Earlier some historians believed that paper failed to catch on as palmyra leaves and birch bark remained far more popular but this theory was discredited later on. On the other hand,
18081-404: The time of the last Sayyid ruler, Alam Shah (whose name translated to "king of the world"), this resulted in a common northern Indian witticism, according to which the "kingdom of the king of the world extends from Delhi to Palam ", i.e. merely 13 kilometres (8.1 mi). Historian Richard M. Eaton noted that this saying showcased how the "once-mighty empire had become a joke". The Sayyid dynasty
18228-558: The traders. A network of spies was instituted to ensure the implementation of the system; even after price controls were lifted after Khalji's death, Barani claims that the fear of his spies remained and that people continued to avoid trading in expensive commodities. The sultanate enforced Islamic religious prohibitions on anthropomorphic representations in art. The army of the Delhi sultans initially consisted of nomadic Turkic Mamluk military slaves belonging to Muhammad of Ghor. The nucleus of this Southeast Asian sultanate military were
18375-563: The transfer of the elite to Daulatabad was the hatred of the nobility to the Sultan, which remained in their minds for a long time. The other result was that he managed to create a stable Muslim elite and result in the growth of the Muslim population of Daulatabad who did not return to Delhi, without which the rise of the Bahmanid kingdom to challenge the Vijayanagara kingdom would not have been possible. Muhammad bin Tughlaq's adventures in
18522-550: The ultimate justification for any ruler within the Islamic world was the protection and advancement of the faith. For the Sultans, as for their Ghaznavid and Ghurid predecessors, this entailed the suppression of heterodox Muslims, and Firuz Shah attached some importance to the fact that he had acted against the ashab-i had-u ibadat (deviators and latitudinarians). It also involved plundering and extorting tribute from, independent Hindu principalities. Firuz Shah, who believed that India
18669-485: The use of Farsi in foreign languages. Etymologically, the Persian term Farsi derives from its earlier form Pārsi ( Pārsik in Middle Persian ), which in turn comes from the same root as the English term Persian . In the same process, the Middle Persian toponym Pārs ("Persia") evolved into the modern name Fars. The phonemic shift from /p/ to /f/ is due to the influence of Arabic in
18816-427: The work of modern Muslim historians was under-represented. He argues that some of the modern Muslim historiography on medieval India at the time was motivated by Islamic apologetics , attempting to justify "the life of medieval Muslims to the modern world." Ram Sharan Sharma has criticised the simplistic manner in which Indian history is often divided into an ancient "Hindu" period, a medieval "Muslim" period, and
18963-468: The years 1000 and 1500, India's GDP , of which the sultanates represented a significant part, grew nearly 8% to $ 60.5 billion in 1500. Though the overall the percentage of the GDP share reduced from 33% to 22% According to Maddison's estimates, India's population grew from 85 million in 1200 to 101 million in 1500 AD in the period. The Delhi Sultanate period coincided with more use of mechanical technology in
19110-932: The years after the base metal coin experiment. In 1335, Jalaluddin Ahsan Khan, a Sayyid native of Kaithal in North India, revolted and founded the Madurai Sultanate in South India. By 1347, the Bahmani Sultanate had become independent through the rebellion of Ismail Mukh . It became a competing Muslim kingdom in the Deccan region of South Asia, founded by Ala-ud-Din Bahman Shah . Muhammad bin Tughlaq died in 1351 while trying to chase and punish people in Gujarat who were rebelling against
19257-637: Was a Punjabi chieftain from Khokhar clan. The Timurid invasion and plunder had left the Delhi Sultanate in shambles, and little is known about the rule by the Sayyid dynasty. Annemarie Schimmel notes the first ruler of the dynasty as Khizr Khan, who assumed power as a vassal of the Timurid Empire . His authority was questioned even by those near Delhi. His successor was Mubarak Khan, who renamed himself Mubarak Shah, discontinued his father's nominal allegiance to Timur and unsuccessfully tried to regain lost territories in Punjab from Khokhar warlords. With
19404-528: Was a few miles from Delhi. The battle between the two relatives continued until Timur's invasion in 1398. Timur , also known as Tamerlane in Western scholarly literature, was the Turkicized Mongol ruler of the Timurid Empire . He became aware of the weakness and quarrelling of the rulers of the Delhi Sultanate, so he marched with his army to Delhi, plundering and killing all the way. Estimates for
19551-597: Was already complete by the era of the three princely dynasties of Iranian origin, the Tahirid dynasty (820–872), Saffarid dynasty (860–903), and Samanid Empire (874–999). Abbas of Merv is mentioned as being the earliest minstrel to chant verse in the New Persian tongue and after him the poems of Hanzala Badghisi were among the most famous between the Persian-speakers of the time. The first poems of
19698-466: Was assassinated in 1206, by Ismāʿīlī Shia Muslims. After the assassination, one of Ghori's slaves (or Mamluks), the Turkic Qutb al-Din Aibak, assumed power, becoming the first Sultan of Delhi. Qutb al-Din Aibak , a former slave of Mu'izz ad-Din Muhammad Ghori , was the first ruler of the Delhi Sultanate. Aibak was of Turkic Cuman - Kipchak origin, and due to his lineage, his dynasty is known as
19845-403: Was changed into a Muslim nation, declared that "no zimmi living in a Musalman country might dare to act". The Hindu kingdoms who submitted to Islamic rule qualified as "protected peoples" according to the wide spectrum of the educated Muslim community within the subcontinent. The balance of the evidence is that in the latter half of the fourteenth century, if not before, the jizyah was levied as
19992-492: Was conquered by the Grand Vizier Nusrat Khan Jalesari , the kingdom of Malwa by Ainul Mulk Multani , as well as Rajputana . However, these victories were cut short because of Mongol attacks and plunder raids from the northwest. The Mongols withdrew after plundering and stopped raiding northwest parts of the Delhi Sultanate. After the Mongols withdrew, Ala ud-Din Khalji continued to expand
20139-590: Was displaced by the Lodi dynasty in 1451, however, resulting in a resurgence of the Delhi Sultanate. The Lodi dynasty was an Afghan, or Turco-Afghan dynasty, related to the Pashtun ( Afghan ) Lodi tribe . The founder of the dynasty, Bahlul Khan Lodi , was a Khalji of the Lodi clan. He started his reign by attacking the Muslim Jaunpur Sultanate to expand the influence of the Delhi Sultanate and
20286-500: Was murdered in 1296 by Muhammad Salim of Samana, on the orders of his nephew and son-in-law Juna Muhammad Khalji , who later came to be known as Ala ud-Din Khalji. Ala ud-Din began his military career as governor of Kara province, from where he led two raids on the Kingdom of Malwa (1292) and Devagiri (1294) for plunder and loot. After he acceded to the throne, expansions towards these kingdoms were renewed including Gujarat which
20433-431: Was no larger state until the Delhi Sultanate , or certainly the Mughal Empire, but there were several different dynasties ruling large areas for long periods, as well as many other dynasties ruling smaller areas, often paying some form of tribute to larger states. John Keay puts the typical number of dynasties within the subcontinent at any one time at between 20 and 40, not including local rajas . This period follows
20580-449: Was of Turko-Afghan heritage. They were originally Turkic, but due to their long presence in Afghanistan, they were treated by others as Afghan as they adopted Afghan habits and customs. The first ruler of the Khalji dynasty was Jalal ud-Din Firuz Khalji . He was around 70 years old at the time of his ascension and was known as a mild-mannered, humble and kind monarch to the general public. Jalal ud-Din Firuz ruled for 6 years before he
20727-445: Was partially successful through a treaty. Thereafter, the region from Delhi to Varanasi (then at the border of Bengal province), was back under the influence of the Delhi Sultanate. After Bahlul Lodi died, his son Nizam Khan assumed power, renamed himself Sikandar Lodi and ruled from 1489 to 1517. One of the better-known rulers of the dynasty, Sikandar Lodi expelled his brother Barbak Shah from Jaunpur, installed his son Jalal Khan as
20874-597: Was patronised and given official status under the Sultans of Bengal , and was a popular literary form used by Bengalis during the pre-colonial period, irrespective of their religion. Following the defeat of the Hindu Shahi dynasty, classical Persian was established as a courtly language in the region during the late 10th century under Ghaznavid rule over the northwestern frontier of the subcontinent . Employed by Punjabis in literature, Persian achieved prominence in
21021-435: Was precarious, and several Muslim amirs (nobles) challenged his authority as they had been supporters of Qutb al-Din Aibak. After a series of conquests and brutal executions of opposition, Iltutmish consolidated his power. His rule was challenged several times, such as by Qubacha, and this led to a series of wars. Iltutmish conquered Multan and Bengal from contesting Muslim rulers, as well as Ranthambore and Sivalik from
21168-422: Was required, and expensive goods such as certain fabrics were deemed "unnecessary" for the general public and required a permit from the state to be purchased. These licenses were issued to amirs , maliks , and other important persons in government. Agricultural taxes were raised to 50%. Traders regarded the regulations as burdensome, and violations were severely punished, leading to further resentment among
21315-521: Was supported by non-Khalji nobles like Kamal al-Din Gurg . However, he lacked the support of the majority of Khalji's nobles who had him assassinated, hoping to take power for themselves. However, the new ruler had the killers of Kafur executed. The last Khalji ruler was Ala ud-Din Khalji's 18-year-old son Qutb ud-Din Mubarak Shah Khalji , who ruled for four years before he was killed by Khusro Khan, another slave-general with Hindu origins, who reverted from Islam and favoured his Hindu Baradu military clan in
21462-488: Was taught in state schools, and was also offered as an elective course or recommended for study in some madrasas . Persian learning was also widespread in the Ottoman-held Balkans ( Rumelia ), with a range of cities being famed for their long-standing traditions in the study of Persian and its classics, amongst them Saraybosna (modern Sarajevo , Bosnia and Herzegovina), Mostar (also in Bosnia and Herzegovina), and Vardar Yenicesi (or Yenice-i Vardar, now Giannitsa , in
21609-425: Was to prevent books from being printed with wrong use of words. According to the executive guarantee of this association, the government was responsible for wrongfully printed books. Words coined by this association, such as rāh-āhan ( راهآهن ) for "railway", were printed in Soltani Newspaper ; but the association was eventually closed due to inattention. A scientific association was founded in 1911, resulting in
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