The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c30.36

v3.c30.36

Fīrūz Shāh, the third of the Tughluq kings, was an indefatigable builder. Shams-i-Sirāj enumerates a long list, and Firishta a still longer, of the cities, forts, palaces, embankments, mosques, tombs and other edifices of which he was the author; and the former supplies us with the names of the two chief architects, Malik Ghāzī Shahna and ‘Abdu-l-Ḥaqq, who assisted him in carrying out his schemes. One of the best known of his palace-cities, which he founded on his way to Bengal, was Jaunpur; others, hardly less famous, were Fathābād and Ḥiṣār Fīrūza. At Delhi he built the palace-fort of Fīrūzābād, which henceforth became his official residence at the capital, and for the convenience of Muslim travellers he provided no less than 120 rest-houses. But most valuable of all his public works were the canals (one of which, the ‘Old Jumna Canal,’ is still in use) by which he brought water to his new settlements and at the same time irrigated the intervening tracts. Nor did these undertakings, numerous as they were, exhaust the sum of his activities. With a piety all too rare among Oriental potentates, he renovated or rebuilt many of the monuments of former times which had fallen into disrepair, and even went so far, as he tells us in his autobiography¹, as to give these works precedence over his own building schemes.