Muhammad bin Tughluq, Sultan of Delhi from 1325 to 1351, was by every account — friendly and hostile — one of the most learned rulers of his age: a calligrapher, logician, and student of Greek philosophy and medicine who conversed with scholars as an equal. He was also, by the same accounts, incapable of distinguishing between an idea that was elegant and one that was possible, and savage toward anyone who obstructed the difference.
The empire he inherited was the largest any Delhi sultan ever held, stretching deep into the Deccan plateau. Delhi sat far in the north — exposed to Mongol raids and remote from the new southern provinces. The logic of moving the centre was real. The execution became a byword.
The march
In 1327 the sultan ordered the capital transferred to Deogiri, renamed Daulatabad — “Abode of Wealth” — a spectacular rock fortress some 1,100 kilometres south. What began as a transfer of the court and administrative elite hardened, in the telling of chroniclers and of the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta (who served the sultan as a judge and knew his court intimately), into a forced evacuation: Delhi’s people driven onto the road, the halt and the blind not excepted — Ibn Battuta relates that a cripple was catapulted and a blind man dragged the whole way, arriving as a single leg. The road was strung with amenity stations, and paved with dead all the same; thousands perished of heat, hunger, and exhaustion. Visitors described great Delhi standing empty enough that the sultan, surveying it from his roof, pronounced himself satisfied: “Now my mind is tranquil.”
Daulatabad was magnificently fortified and chronically short of water, and the north, ungoverned, began slipping toward rebellion. Within about a decade the experiment was conceded; the court — and the survivors — marched the 1,100 kilometres back. The Deccan, seeded with northern elites, shortly produced the breakaway Bahmani Sultanate: the transfer’s most durable achievement was strengthening the region that then left.
The token currency
The companion fiasco: around 1330 the sultan introduced token currency — brass and copper coins decreed equal to silver, an idea with sound Chinese precedents but issued without any safeguard against counterfeiting. Ibn Battuta’s contemporaries put it plainly: every Hindu household became a mint. The treasury drowned in forgeries; commerce seized; and the sultan, to his credit and ruin, redeemed the tokens in genuine gold and silver, mountains of worthless brass reportedly mouldering outside the fort for decades.
He spent his last twenty years chasing rebellions from one end of the empire to the other and died on campaign in 1351. The historian Barani preserved the epitaph of the exhausted realm: the sultan was freed of his people, and the people of their sultan.