Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India, A.D. 1000–1800 c11.2

c11.2

The demographic recovery noticed by Shams Siraj Afif was short-lived. After Firoz there was a spectacular decline in India's population. His successors fought a long-drawn out civil war for one full decade in which "the people were dispersed and the learned scattered."¹ Timur invaded the country in 1398-99 and swept everything before him. His invasion resulted in a loss of thousands of people killed and captives carried away. But while the trend of the population was only downward in the late fourteenth century, there was progressive depopulation throughout the fifteenth.