The Foundation of Muslim Rule in India: A History of the Establishment and Progress of the Turkish Sultanate of Delhi, 1206–1290 A.D. c8.140

c8.140

an ex-slave, could leave the crown to his sons, is a measure of his constructive statesmanship. Great realism, steadfastness and foresight marked his conduct of foreign affairs. Medieval India owed him not a little gratitude for helping her to escape the Mongol fury which had uprooted more powerful and far older empires. His firm and energetic action unified the kingdom and saved it from initial dismemberment. Against the Rajputs his forward policy achieved great success and yielded results of great moral value; it constituted an effective answer to the first challenge directed by the Hindus against the newly established Muslim state. Beyond recovering Muizzuddin's conquests he made appreciable advances into Rajputana and the trans-Gangetic tracts and also towards reorganising the Indus valley frontier. A calculating and skilful organiser, to him the Sultanate owed the first outline of its administrative system. He laid the foundations of an absolutist monarchy that was to serve later as the instrument of a military imperialism under the Khaljis. By a clever compromise with religions leaders', he disarmed moral opposition, while the military class found profit and occupation in his expansionist schemes. Not merely his crown and his dynasty, but also the state obtained its final sanction, and his ambition its crowning fulfilment, when, on the 22nd Rabi, I, 626/19th February, 1229, emissaries from the Abbaside Caliph arrived from Baghdad to invest him with the powers of an Islamic king². Aibak's objective was at last achieved and the Delhi state thus became a full legal entity. To describe Iltutmish as great would no doubt be an overstatement, but he was an unusually able ruler who left his mark on every aspect of the Sultanate's activity. Even long after he was gone and his dynasty supplanted, people fondly looked back to his "prosperous and glorious reign"¹. Aibak outlined the Delhi Sultanate and its sovereign status; Iltutmish was unquestionably its first king.