In 1206, Qutb-ud-din Aibak, a formerly enslaved military commander who had risen to govern the Indian territories of the Ghurid sultan Muhammad of Ghor, declared himself an independent ruler in Delhi after his patron's death. Aibak's rise came out of the Ghurid conquest of North India, during which another Ghurid commander, Bakhtiyar Khalji, raided Bihar around 1200 and went on to take Bengal, the campaign usually blamed for the ruin of Nalanda, the great Buddhist university. That act is conventionally treated as the founding of the Delhi Sultanate, a state that, under five successive dynasties, dominated large parts of North India for the next three centuries: the Mamluk or "Slave" dynasty (1206-1290), the Khalji dynasty (1290-1320), the Tughlaq dynasty (1320-1414), the Sayyid dynasty (1414-1451), and the Lodi dynasty (1451-1526) (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Delhi Sultanate"[2]).
The five dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate in order
| Dynasty | Years | Founder | Best-known rulers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mamluk ("Slave") | 1206–1290 | Qutb-ud-din Aibak | Iltutmish, Razia, Balban |
| Khalji | 1290–1320 | Jalal-ud-din Khalji | Alauddin Khalji |
| Tughlaq | 1320–1414 | Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlaq | Muhammad bin Tughlaq, Firuz Shah Tughlaq |
| Sayyid | 1414–1451 | Khizr Khan | Khizr Khan, Mubarak Shah |
| Lodi | 1451–1526 | Bahlul Lodi | Sikandar Lodi, Ibrahim Lodi |
Each new dynasty came to power by overthrowing or outlasting the one before, usually through a coup by a powerful noble or general. The first three were the strong ones. By the time the Sayyids took over, after Timur's sack of Delhi in 1398, the sultanate had shrunk to a regional kingdom around Delhi and the Punjab, and the Lodis, Afghans rather than Turks, never fully restored it (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Delhi Sultanate"[2]).
How did Iltutmish and Razia hold the new state together?
Aibak's successor Iltutmish (reigned 1211-1236) is generally credited with making the conquest into a working state. He secured recognition from the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, organized a system of land assignments (iqtas) to pay and control nobles and soldiers, and completed the Qutb Minar, the red sandstone and marble minaret at Delhi that Aibak had begun; repaired and raised by later sultans, it stands roughly 73 metres tall (Archaeological Survey of India, "Qutb Minar and its Monuments"[3]). After Iltutmish's death, his daughter Razia briefly ruled as sultan (1236-1240), which was unusual for the period. Contemporary chroniclers wrote with a mix of respect and unease about a woman holding the throne in her own right rather than as a regent. Her reign ended in rebellion and her death, and rule passed through several more Mamluk sultans before the dynasty was overthrown by the Khaljis in 1290.
Why did Alauddin Khalji control market prices?
The Khalji sultan Alauddin Khalji (reigned 1296-1316) expanded the sultanate's territory deep into the Deccan through military campaigns, but he is remembered at least as much for an unusual peacetime policy: strict, state-enforced price controls across Delhi's markets, covering grain, cloth, horses, and even everyday items down to needles and combs, backed by government-appointed market supervisors and informants. Historians generally read this as a targeted measure: cheap provisions let him keep a large standing army against repeated Mongol incursions from Central Asia. The Mongols struck the Delhi Sultanate's northwestern frontier several times in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and the 1303 invasion came close to taking Delhi itself. Alauddin's repeated success against these attacks is one reason the Mongols, unlike in much of Central and West Asia, never established lasting rule over North India (Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate[4]).
An empire overstretched: Muhammad bin Tughlaq
The sultanate reached its greatest territorial extent under Muhammad bin Tughlaq (reigned 1325-1351), whose reign is remembered for two disruptive experiments. He ordered the capital shifted roughly 1,100 kilometres south from Delhi to Daulatabad in the Deccan, apparently to better govern and defend his southern territories, then reversed the decision after several years, at considerable cost to the people who had been moved (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Delhi Sultanate"[2]). He also introduced token bronze and copper coins meant to circulate at the value of silver, a policy that collapsed when counterfeiting became widespread and public confidence in the currency failed. The Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, who served for a time as a judge in Muhammad bin Tughlaq's court and left a detailed travel account known as the Rihla, is one of the main outside sources for daily life and court politics in this period. Like any single traveler's memoir, it has to be weighed against other evidence.
Temple destruction under the Delhi Sultanate: religious iconoclasm or political conquest?
Several Delhi Sultanate campaigns, and earlier Ghaznavid and Ghurid raids that preceded the sultanate, involved the destruction or plunder of Hindu and Jain temples, most famously the repeated raids on the Somnath temple in Gujarat. Popular narratives have often framed this simply as religiously motivated iconoclasm. Specialist historians, including Richard Eaton, who catalogued instances of temple desecration across the period, argue that politics often mattered more (Richard M. Eaton, "Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States"[5]). Temples were frequently royal patronage projects that stood for a rival king's sovereignty, so destroying or looting one was a way of defeating that king's claim to rule, as well as, or sometimes more than, an attack on Hindu belief. Some sultans, including Delhi Sultanate rulers, also patronized or protected Hindu and Jain temples and institutions elsewhere in their territories. Contemporary writers sometimes did describe a religious motive, and historians accept that it was real. They warn against a single explanation, and the balance between political and religious motive in particular episodes is still debated. Religious life under the sultans was not only conflict, either: the Chishti Sufi master Nizamuddin Auliya, who died in Delhi in 1325, ran a community kitchen open to people of every faith, part of the Sufi and bhakti devotional movements of these centuries.
How did the Delhi Sultanate end?
The sultanate never fully recovered from the Central Asian conqueror Timur's sack of Delhi in 1398, which left the city's population and administration badly damaged (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Delhi Sultanate"[2]). The weakened Sayyid and then Lodi dynasties that followed ruled a much smaller territory, and even that was contested, as regional sultanates in Bengal, Gujarat, Malwa, and the Deccan, along with the rising Vijayanagara empire in the south, asserted independence. The Delhi Sultanate finally ended in 1526, when the last Lodi ruler, Ibrahim Lodi, was defeated and killed at the First Battle of Panipat by Babur, whose victory opened the way for the Mughal Empire. Its three centuries left buildings such as the Qutb complex, and the iqta system of land revenue assignment, which later Indo-Islamic states, the Mughals among them, built on.
