Muhammad bin Tughluq

Background and Accession

Born around 1290 as Jauna Khan, Muhammad bin Tughluq was the eldest son of Ghiyasuddin Tughluq, founder of the Tughluq dynasty, who had seized the Delhi throne in 1320 after the assassination of the last Khalji claimant, Khusrau Khan. As a prince, Jauna commanded military campaigns into the Deccan, capturing the Kakatiya capital of Warangal in 1323, and was educated to an unusual degree in Persian literature, mathematics, medicine, logic, and astronomy, developing a reputation for scholarship and rational inquiry that set him apart from most contemporary rulers. In 1325, Ghiyasuddin died when a wooden pavilion built to receive him on his return from a Bengal campaign collapsed at Afghanpur near Delhi. The traveler Ibn Battuta, writing decades later from testimony gathered at Muhammad's own court, suggested the collapse may have been deliberately engineered; modern historians generally treat this as unverifiable court rumor rather than established fact. Jauna succeeded smoothly as Muhammad bin Tughluq.

The Transfer of the Capital to Daulatabad

Around 1327, Muhammad ordered the transfer of the imperial capital from Delhi to Daulatabad, the renamed fortress-city of Devagiri in the Deccan, roughly 1,100 kilometers to the south. Historians point to several likely motives: Daulatabad's more central position relative to the sultanate's recently annexed southern territories, its formidable hill-fort defenses at a time when Mongol raids periodically threatened Delhi, and Muhammad's broader ambition to integrate the Deccan into direct imperial administration. According to the chronicler Ziauddin Barani, the relocation compelled much of Delhi's population — nobles, officials, and ordinary residents alike — to undertake the long march south, causing severe hardship and deaths along the way. Finding the southern capital administratively unworkable for governing the north, Muhammad reversed the policy within a few years and the court returned to Delhi, leaving the elaborate new construction at Daulatabad largely abandoned as an imperial seat.

The Token Currency Experiment

Around 1329–1330, facing financial strain from military campaigns and the Daulatabad project, Muhammad introduced a token currency of bronze or copper coins intended to circulate at the same value as the sultanate's silver tanka. The idea has sometimes been compared to the paper currency then circulating under the Mongol Yuan dynasty in China, though no direct evidence establishes that Chinese practice as his specific inspiration. Lacking effective state control over minting and unable to prevent forgery, the sultanate saw private individuals produce large quantities of counterfeit copper coin; the currency's value collapsed, trade was disrupted, and Muhammad was eventually forced to redeem the tokens for gold and silver at heavy cost to the treasury.

Taxation in the Doab and Agrarian Crisis

In the agriculturally vital Ganga–Yamuna Doab, Muhammad sharply increased land-tax demands, according to Barani during a period that coincided with famine conditions. The harshly enforced levies provoked widespread peasant flight and rebellion, deepening rather than relieving the treasury crisis the tax increase had been meant to solve, and further eroding the sultanate's authority in its agrarian heartland.

Military Campaigns: Khurasan and Qarachil

Muhammad reportedly assembled and funded a large army for an invasion of Khurasan on the Iranian plateau that was abandoned before crossing the frontier, at considerable financial waste. A separate and better-documented expedition, aimed at the Himalayan foothill kingdoms around Kangra and Kumaon in the mid-1330s and known as the Qarachil campaign, ended in disaster when the bulk of the Delhi army, unprepared for mountain terrain and monsoon conditions, was destroyed by hill resistance and the elements, with only a small remnant reportedly surviving to return.

Agricultural Reform and Religious Legitimacy

In the aftermath of the Doab tax crisis, Muhammad established a state department for agriculture, the Diwan-i-Kohi, intended to extend cultivation and issue loans (sondhar) to farmers for seed and equipment; the initiative, described by Barani, was poorly administered and largely failed to reverse the agrarian damage caused by the earlier taxation policy. Despite his reputation for unorthodox and often brutal governance, Muhammad was notably concerned with religious legitimacy in a wider Islamic context: after the Mongol destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad in 1258 had left the caliphal office in dispute, he sought formal recognition from a claimant to the office based in Cairo, had coins struck bearing the caliph's name, and had the khutba (Friday sermon) read in his honor — an unusual step among Delhi's sultans, most of whom ruled without seeking such external validation.

Governance, Repression, and Rebellion

Repeated administrative crises undermined Muhammad's authority across the empire. Bengal reasserted its independence under Fakhruddin Mubarak Shah around 1338; the Ma'bar region around Madurai broke away as an independent sultanate in 1335; and further south, the newly founded Vijayanagara kingdom, traditionally dated to 1336, emerged partly in the vacuum left by weakening Tughluq control of the peninsula. Muhammad's responses to dissent and rebellion were often severe, including executions and mutilation of suspected conspirators, a harshness recorded — with likely some exaggeration — by Barani, and reflected in later characterizations of the sultan as a paradoxical figure combining genuine scholarship with unpredictable cruelty.

Alongside these upheavals, Muhammad sponsored building projects in both his capitals: fortifications, mosques, and canal works in Delhi, and at Daulatabad an elaborately fortified citadel with an integrated water-supply system, parts of which survive in the fort complex today.

Death and Succession

In 1351, while pursuing a rebel named Taghi into Sindh, Muhammad fell ill and died near Thatta. He was succeeded by his cousin Firoz Shah Tughluq, whose more conservative and consolidative reign stabilized, though could not fully restore, an empire that Muhammad's ambitious but poorly executed policies had left fragmented and financially depleted.

Historiography

Two contemporary sources dominate the historical understanding of the reign. The Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta served for years as qazi (judge) under Muhammad and later as an envoy to China; his travelogue, the Rihla, offers a vivid, often personal, eyewitness account of the sultan's court. Ziauddin Barani, a Delhi courtier who wrote the Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi under Muhammad's successor, is more overtly critical, shaped by the politics of the following reign, and is used by historians as an essential but not neutral source.