The Foundation of Muslim Rule in India: A History of the Establishment and Progress of the Turkish Sultanate of Delhi, 1206–1290 A.D. c15.1

c15.1

From what has been said above in connection with the central government it will have been noticed that the Memeluke state had of necessity to be a decentralised system. It was a loose structure, made up of military commands, and not all of them were set up under one single direction or within a given time To these commands wide latitude of action had to be conceded, for it was to the single-handed initiative of men like Bakhtiyar that the Turkish state owed its territorial expansion and also preservation from the by no means passive Hindu powers. The continuity of the occupation process, spreading, as we have seen, over generations, permitted little governmental planning.