Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India, A.D. 1000–1800 c6.s1.41

c6.s1.41

Reference has already been made to Firoz Tughlaq’s counting the killed in Bengal. In the Assam campaign “khani-khanan ordered that the prisoners should have the heads of the slain tied round them, and be thus exposed to the derision of the camp...and afterwards put to death”.²⁹ Similarly the sultans sometimes gave cash awards for ‘hunting’ the heads of the enemy, and the amount disbursed would have provided a sure way of finding the number of casualties.³⁰ To gloat over the success of their patrons or just to please them by crediting them with extraordinary achievements, medieval chroniclers sometimes might have over-estimated the numbers killed by them, but they always gave figures and data on the basis of some source, official or private, which they knew to be reliable.