The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c24.28

v3.c24.28

Mahmūd reigned peacefully for seventeen years, for the warfare between Jaunpur and Delhi relieved Bengal of the aggressions of its western neighbour, and left the king leisure for the indulgence of his taste in architecture. He rebuilt the old capital, Gaur, and built a mosque at Satgāon, but we know little else of him. He died in 1459, and was succeeded by his son, Rukn-ud-dīn Bārbak, who died in 1474. He was the first king in India to advance African slaves in large numbers to high rank, and is said to have had no less than 8000 of these slaves, who afterwards became a danger to the kingdom. He was succeeded on his death by his son Shams-ud-dīn Yūsuf, a precisian who insisted on the rigid observance of the Islamic law and prohibited the use of wine in his dominions. On his death in 1481 the courtiers raised to the throne his son Sikandar, a youth whose intellect was so deranged that he was almost immediately deposed in favour of his great-uncle, Jalāl-ud-dīn Fath Shāh, a son of Mahmūd. Fath Shāh was a wise and beneficent ruler, but incurred the hostility of the African slaves who thronged the court by curbing their insolence and punishing their excesses. The malcontents elected as their leader a eunuch named Sultān Shāhzāda, and took advantage of the absence from court, on a distant expedition, of Indīl Khān, who, though an African, was a loyal subject of Fath Shāh and an able military commander, to compass the king’s death. The guard over the palace consisted of no less than 5000 men, and it was the king’s custom to appear early in the morning at the relief of the guard and receive the salutes of both guards. The eunuch corrupted the officers of the palace guards, and one morning in 1486, when the king came forth, as usual, to take the salute, caused him to be assassinated and usurped the throne under the title of Bārbak Shāh.