The History of the Renaissance World (39 page)

Muhammad Ghuri had mounted at least one campaign against the mountain state of the Nizari, and it is certainly possible that a
fidawi
was dispatched to remove him. But other accounts credit the Ghurid king’s death to an attack of conquered and resentful Khokars from the Punjab, or perhaps the machinations of one of his own officials. Whoever carried it out, Muhammad’s death brought an immediate end to the adolescent Ghurid empire. Within months, the whole huge expanse had fallen apart again under Ghuri’s rivaling successors. His nephew claimed the western territories as an independent king, and three of his Turkish slaves turned governors did the same over their own lands: one in Ghazni, a second in the Sind, and a third, Qutb-ud-din, in Lahore.

Qutb-ud-din outshone them all. He declared himself sultan of the north Indian lands, and although he ruled for only four years before dying in a fall from his polo pony in 1210, his sultanate lasted for over three centuries. The four years of Qutb-ud-din’s rule, after all, had built on the previous twenty years of his service to the Ghurids in northern India; and during those decades, he had worked hard to help the two Ghuri brothers transform their realm into a Muslim land. In his hands, it became a particularly
Indian
Muslim land: free from domination that came from beyond the mountains, but also a land where the old religious traditions were firmly stamped down into the mud. “He purged by his sword the land of Hind from the filth of infidelity and vice,” writes his contemporary, the Persian historian Hasan Nizami, “and freed the whole of that country from the thorn of God-plurality, and the impurity of idol-worship, and by his royal vigour and intrepidity, left not one temple standing.”
⁵

At his death, Qutb-ud-din’s son Aram Shah set himself up as the next ruler of the north Indian kingdom. At once, he lost the southern cities of Gwalior and Ranthambore to revolt, and the eastern Bengalese province to the governor his father had appointed there, one Ali Mardan. Exasperated by this incompetence, a party of dissidents at Delhi invited one of Qutb-ud-din’s own Turkish slave officers (or
ghulams
), Iltumish, to come into that city and establish himself as a rival for the sultanate.
⁶

Iltumish had not only been a trusted lieutenant of the dead sultan but was also his son-in-law; given that there was no neat tradition of father-to-son succession in the Muslim sultanates of India, he had as good a claim to the throne as Aram Shah. He accepted the invitation, and when Aram Shah marched south towards Delhi to drive him out, Iltumish met his brother-in-law outside the walls of Delhi and killed him in battle.

For the next twenty-five years, Iltumish would rule from Delhi, which became the capital of his sultanate. All twenty-five of those years were spent fighting. It took him another six years to drive out the other Turkish pretenders to power in Ghazni and the Sind, finally bringing both under his control by 1217. The city of Lahore (troubled, says Nizami, by “calamities, and changes of governors, and the sedition of rebels, [and] the flames of turbulence and opposition”) by itself held out until 1228, and Bengal was not completely under his control until 1231.
⁷

32.2 Delhi under Iltumish

At the same time, Iltumish did his best to invade the still-Hindu lands that had not fallen to Ghurid rule. The kingdom of Orissa, on the eastern coast, suffered from fighting on its northern borders but managed to hold off the newcomers. A few Rajput kingdoms survived in central India, battered but still unconquered. Mewar, some 280 miles inland from the Indian Ocean, was chief among them; Iltumish mounted a major assault against the Hindu ruler of Mewar, Jaitra Singh, but although he was able to sack the city of Aghata, Jaitra Singh held out against him.

The repulse of the Muslim forces from Mewar was hailed, by the Hindus of India, as a religious victory. Iltumish, after all, was a Muslim ruler, remembered in his inscriptions as “protector of God’s territories,” builder of mosques and minarets. Halfway through his sultanate, the caliph in Baghdad—still holding on to the bare remnants of Abbasid power—recognized his rule by awarding him both a robe of honor and the ceremonial title
Sultan-i-azam
, “Great Sultan,” legitimate and God-ordained ruler over his conquered lands; this gave Iltumish and his successors the right to use the title “Auxiliary of the Commander of the Faithful” on their coins. The Hindu deities, as an inscription celebrating Jaitra Singh’s resistance exclaims, were “intoxicated with a drink of the blood” of the Muslim soldiers who had attacked them. Jaitra Singh’s successful defense of his crown was also a defense of the Hindu world against the Muslim invaders.
⁸

Yet at the same time, Iltumish was pragmatically aware that the Hindus in his realm had to be treated gently. He promised them the status of
dhimmi
: non-Muslim subjects of a Muslim king, allowed to hold property and to claim legal rights but exempt from Islamic requirements, like resident aliens in a modern nation-state. Like the Crusaders, Iltumish was savvy enough to separate political realities from religious aspirations.
⁹

In 1236, the Sultan of Delhi—now in his twenty-sixth year of rule—was campaigning against rebels hiding in the Salt Range mountains, north of his capital, when he became too ill to sit on his horse. He was carried back to Delhi and died there in April.
¹⁰

He had fathered at least four children, three sons and a daughter; his oldest son, who had been governing Bengal as his vice-regent, had died prematurely seven years earlier, and his two younger sons were (in his eyes) weak and incompetent. So, shocking his people to their core, he left the title of Sultan of Delhi to his daughter Raziyya, twenty-one years old; in the words of the historian Peter Jackson, with “all the attributes of a successful ruler except one . . . she was not a man.”
¹¹

Raziyya had her supporters, but although they managed to engineer her enthronement, another equally strong cabal threw its weight behind her trifling (but male) brother Firoz (“a weak and licentious prince”). Raziyya claimed and held on to the title
Sultan
, but she found herself continually thwarted not just by her Hindu enemies, but by the subjects in her own sultanate who did not acknowledge her sovereignty. She was, according to all accounts, a competent, clear-thinking, strategic ruler, but even her attempts to prove her worth by wearing male clothing and armor threw the Sultanate of Delhi into a long and violent chaos. Raziyya, would-be defender of Islam, threatened Delhi’s very existence as an Islamic state; and it was, almost, unable to survive the contradiction.
¹²

*
After the death of Muhammad himself in 632, the leadership of the new Muslim community was claimed by the Prophet’s old friend Abu Bakr, who had the support of many of Muhammad’s followers. Others, though, believed that Muhammad’s closest male relative, his son-in-law Ali, should be the Prophet’s successor. Although Ali himself agreed to accept Abu Bakr’s headship, a subset of Muslims continued to insist that only Ali and his successors were divinely appointed, and that Abu Bakr and his immediate successors were illegitimate usupers. They became known as “Shi’ite” Muslims (the “party of Ali”), while the supporters of Abu Bakr became known as “Sunni” Muslims. As Farhad Daftary points out in his study of the Isma’ili sect, the early history of the Shi’ite movement is “shrouded in obscurity,” but within a century the Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims had already developed significantly different theological doctrines, traditions, and laws. The events surrounding Abu Bakr’s succession are described in Bauer,
The History of the Medieval World
. pp. 295ff; Daftary’s useful capsule explanation is found in chapter 2 of
The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Isma’ilis
(I. B. Tauris, 1995).

Chapter Thirty-Three

Heresy

Between 1209 and 1210,
the knights of the Albigensian Crusade
attack the Christians of southern France

W
HILE
J
OHN
L
ACKLAND
was refilling the English treasury, Philip II of France was carefully firming up his hold on the newly conquered lands in Western Francia. The defeat of John had almost doubled the size of his kingdom. Now he had to make marriages between his relatives and the noble families of Western Francia, give gifts of land and privilege, and mount the occasional short, sharp siege to remind his new vassals where their loyalties lay.
¹

In 1209, he found himself facing a new crisis—and this one had not been generated by his counterpart across the English Channel. In the south of France, in the lands between the Rhone river and the rough Pyrenees range, a heresy had grown into a way of life.

Heresy: a departure from orthodoxy that was not merely dangerous, but placed the thinker outside the gates of the kingdom of God. Heresy was more than error. Error was wrong belief; error became heresy when the believer, confronted by the Church’s condemnation, refused to give it up.

Disagreements about Christian doctrines went all the way back to the days of the apostles, when (according to the Book of Acts), the leaders of the Christian church met in Jerusalem to discuss which Jewish laws Gentile converts should follow. Afterwards, the apostle Paul himself used the decisions of this first church council to point out—rather sharply—errors in the way his fellow apostle Peter was handling himself around Gentiles.
*

But he did not label Peter a heretic. For
heresy
to exist—not just individual error, but belief that stepped all the way outside the framework of the Christian faith—there had to
be
a framework.

This had been provided by the emperor Constantine all the way back in 325, when he had called all Christian bishops together at Nicaea to hammer out a creed, a statement of orthodoxy. The Nicene Creed was the first official fence built around the Christian faith to define who was in and who was out.
*
And the Nicene Creed, approved by Constantine, also created the ability to punish heresy with the sword. Before Nicaea, Christians could accuse each other of error all they wanted, but argument and excommunication were the sharpest swords they could wield. After Nicaea, bishops had much more power: they could ask the emperor to enforce the creed he had sponsored with political might.

Not everyone thought this was a good idea—particularly those who happened to be on the outside of the creed. Writing nearly a century later, Augustine notes that the fourth-century heretics known as Donatists complained that “the apostles never sought such measures from the kings of the earth.” But, Augustine continues, that was only because in the apostles’ day, the kings of the earth didn’t believe in Christ. Now, a Christian king could serve God “by enforcing with suitable rigor such laws as ordain what is righteous, and punish what is the reverse.” This included not just wrong actions, but wrong beliefs.

“Why,” Augustine asks, “should adulteries be punished by the laws, and sacrilege allowed? Is it a lighter matter that a soul should not keep faith with God, than that a woman should be faithless to her husband?”