IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Cathay and the Way Thither : vol.2 |
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Citation Information
1
INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 405
capricious, as cruel, bloodthirsty, and unjust as Nero or Caligula. Incensed at anonymous pasquinades against his oppressions, he on one occasion ordered the removal of the seat of government, and of all the inhabitants of Dehli, to Daulatabad in the Dekkan,' forty days' journey distant ; and after the old city had been gradually reoccupied, and he had himself re-established his court there for some years, he repeated the same mad caprice a second time.' " So little did he hesitate to spill the blood of God's creatures, that when anything occurred which excited him to proceed to that horrid extremity, one might have supposed his object was to exterminate the species altogether. No single week passed without his having put to death one or more of the learned and holy men who surrounded him, or some of the secretaries who attended him." Or as Ibn Batuta pithily sums up a part of the contradictions of his character, there was no day that the gate of his palace failed to witness the elevation of some abject to affluence, the torture and murder of some living soul.3 Mahomed
the Inspector of Buildings, so that when approached on a certain side by the weighty bodies of elephants the whole would fall. After the king had alighted and was resting in the pavilion with his favourite son Mahmud, Mahomed proposed that the whole of the elephants should pass in review before the building. When they came over the fatal spot the structure came down on the heads of Tughlak Shah and his young son. After intentional delay the ruins were removed, and the king's body was found bending over that of his boy as if to shield him. It was carried to Tuglakabad, and laid in the tomb which he had built for himself. This still stands, one of the simplest and grandest monuments of Mahomedan antiquity, rising from the middle of what is now a swamp, but was then a lake. It is said that the parricide'Mahomed is also buried therein. This strange story of the murder of Tughlak Shah is said to have been re-enacted in our own day (1841 or 1842), when Nao Nihal Singh, the successor of Ranjit, was killed by the fall of a gateway as he entered Lahore.
Ahmed Bin Ayas, the engineer of the older murder, became the Wazir of Mahomed, under the titles of Ma1i1 -Zâda and Khwâja Jahân (Ibn Bat., iii, 213-14).
1 A description of the prodigious scale on which the new city, which was to be called the Capital of Islam, was projected and commenced, is given by an eyewitness in the Masdlak-al-Abscir, translated in Not. et Extraits, xiii, 172.
2 Briggs, pp. 420-422 ; Ibn. Bat., iii, 314. Elphinstone says the move
was made three times (ii, 67). If so, I have overlooked it in Briggs.
3 Briggs, 411, 12 ; Ibn Bat., iii, 216.
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