The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c20.504

v3.c20.504

In 1377 Fīrūz was engaged in repressing a rebellion in the Etāwah district, where the revenue could seldom be collected but by armed force; and two years later found it necessary to take precautions against a threatened inroad of the Mughuls, which his preparations averted. In the same year his usually mild nature was stirred to a deed of vengeance worthy of his predecessor. Kharkū, the raja of Katehr, had invited to his house Sayyid Muhammad, governor of Budaun, and his two brothers, and treacherously slew them. In the king’s pious estimation the heinousness of the crime was aggravated by the descent of the victims, and in the spring of 1380 he marched into Katehr and there directed a massacre of the Hindus so general and so indiscriminate that, as one historian says, ‘the spirits of the murdered Sayyids themselves arose to intercede.’ Kharkū fled into Kumaun and was followed by the royal troops who, unable to discover his hiding place, visited their disappointment on the wretched inhabitants, of whom vast numbers were slain and 23,000 captured and enslaved. The approach of the rainy season warned Fīrūz to retire from the hills of Kumaun, but his thirst for vengeance was not yet sated. Before leaving for Delhi he appointed an Afghān to the government of Sambhal, and ordered him to devastate Katehr annually with fire and sword. He himself visited the district every year for the next five years and so supplemented the Afghān’s bloody work that ‘in those years not an acre of land was cultivated, no man slept in house, and the death of the three Sayyids was avenged by that of countless thousands of Hindus.’