History of Kanauj to the Moslem Conquest c18.s1.2

c18.s1.2

We have seen above that the successors of Trilocanapāla were mere nonentities shorn of all dignity and power, and under their weak rule the kingdom of Kanauj seems to have suffered much from the rapacity of a succession of invaders. The Moslems, who had now become a permanent feature of the political situation in the north, repeated their cruelties in the Doab, for we are told in the *Tārīkh-us-Subuktigin* of Baihaki that in the summer of 424 *Hijri* or 1033 A. D. Ahmad Nialtigin, the governor of the Panjab, led an expedition against Benares in order to further his schemes of independence from Ghazni by getting hold of the accumulated riches of its myriad temples¹. Marching down the Ganges he suddenly arrived in Benares, which was then in possession of ‘Gang’, and which no Moslem army is said to have reached before. The city was plundered of its gold, silver, perfumes and jewels from “morning to mid-day prayer,” and overrunning the intervening territories Nialtigin soon returned to Lahore by way of Indar-dar-bandi² (Indar-bedi) or Antarvedi, which appears from Kalhaṇa to signify the land between the Ganges and the Jumna with Gādhipur or Kānyakubja as its chief town.¹