Wealth, jizya and Timur

The sultans and their court lived in luxurious palaces, with fine clothes, jewelled ornaments and rich food. The chapter asks: where did that wealth come from?

Three sources:

• plunder from military campaigns;
• taxes on ordinary people and conquered regions;
• the slave trade: enslaved people worked for nothing, or were sent to faraway Central Asia to be sold.

The book notes the cost of plunder too: it damaged trade and farming. A raided region produces less the next year.

The period also saw many attacks on sacred images in Buddhist, Jain and Hindu temples. The motive was not only plunder but also iconoclasm: rejecting or destroying religious images that were thought of as idolatrous.

The book explains its own choice of word here. It says 'image', not 'idol' or 'icon', because those two words carry a negative judgement in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, whose strict branches condemn 'idolatry'.

India's classical texts used words like mūrti, vigraha, pratimā and rūpa. In English, 'image' is the neutral word, so that is the one used.

Some sultans also imposed the jizya, a tax on non-Muslim subjects in return for protection and freedom from military service. In practice, depending on the ruler, it became a financial burden and a public humiliation, and a pressure (money and social) to convert to Islam.

Then, at the end of the 14th century (1398), Timur, a brutal Turkic–Mongol conqueror, attacked Delhi, then a thriving city. His own memoirs give his two aims: to wage "war with the infidels and to gain something by plundering the wealth of the infidels". Huge numbers were killed or enslaved, the city was left in ruins, and he left with vast plunder and chaos behind him. The Lodis then came up as the last dynasty, by which time the Sultanate's land had shrunk a lot because kingdoms inside India resisted it.