The History of the Renaissance World (89 page)

S
OUTH OF
D
ELHI
, the breakaway kingdoms of Vijayanagara and Bahmani were more worried about each other than about the sultanate that had once ruled them.

By the time of his death in 1356, the first Vijayanagara ruler, Harihara Raya I, had conquered himself a territory that reached from Kaveri to Krishna. His brother Bukka Raya succeeded him as sultan.

Meanwhile, Bahman Shah (the former Delhi officer Zafar Khan) was also at war. He had moved his capital city to the safer town of Gulbarga (Karnataka), a well-watered area surrounded by hills, and built himself a massive citadel there; it still survives today. By the time of his death, in 1358, he had expanded the Bahmani kingdom until it stretched from from Bhongir in the east to Daulatabad in the west; and from the Wainganga river in the north to Krishna in the south.

77.1 Citadel of Gulbarga.
Credit: © R Sudhir Kumar

Krishna marked the northern border of Vijayanagara, and Bahman Shah’s son and successor, Muhammad Shah I, began a war with his neighbor over possession of the fertile land between Krishna and Tungabhadra. It was the first of ten vicious and indecisive wars that would occupy the two kingdoms for more than a century.
⁷

Muhammad Shah himself was a no-holds-barred warrior, the first to use gunpowder in his wars in the Deccan. His gunpowder projectiles were inaccurate and unpredictable, valuable for noise and confusion more than for actual defense; they came from China, and the Indians called them
hawai
, “rockets.” Yet their use began to change the landscape. For the first time, the new forts being built across the contested land were given slit holes through which projectiles could be fired.
⁸

Muhammad Shah’s wars against the Hindu kingdom to the south were, in his eyes, religious contests. Contemporary chronicles say that in the fifteen years Muhammad Shah fought against Vijayanagara, half a million people died. (Finally, the two shahs came to an agreement: civilians would be spared, as would prisoners of war.) Temporary treaties were made, and then broken; land was given over, and then reclaimed; as in France and England to the west, the will to war kept both kingdoms on the edge.
⁹

77.1. Bahmani Expansion

Faced with solid opposition on his northern border, Bukka Raya’s son and successor Harihara made a tentative prod to the south, crossing a few soldiers over the Palk Strait and landing them on the shores of Sri Lanka.

Since the decay of Pandyan power in the previous century, the north of Sri Lanka had been independent under a king who ruled from Jaffna; the first Jaffna king may well have been a Pandyan general who remained in the island when his native country fell to Delhi. The kingdom of Jaffna had flourished, for a time; Ibn Battuta had visited the court of Jaffna sometime in the 1340s and had been given a tour of the kingdom’s pearl fisheries and ruby mines.

The south of the island had never fallen under Pandyan control, but over several obscure decades, the center of power had migrated from Dambadeniya to the capital city of Gampola, a little farther to the south, and from there to the fortress city of Kotte. From the southern shores, Sri Lankan traders had struck out to ports all over the south, reaching as far as Cairo.
¹⁰

The island was rich, but not vulnerable. The Vijayanagara troops made a few incursions, but the troops committed to the north made it impossible for Harihara to follow up; the kings at Jaffna and Kotte were able to buy him off with an insignificant tribute. The conquest of the island would have to wait.

I
N
1388, Firoz Shah died.

Once Delhi was firmly behind him, he had begun to make the traditional expeditions outwards, against neighboring kingdoms. These had, almost universally, failed; but his success at home continued: “Through the attention which the Sultan devoted to administration,” says Shams-i Siraj, “the country grew year by year more prosperous.”

Firoz Shah himself believed that justice and compassion were the greatest qualities of his reign. “In the reigns of former kings,” he wrote,

. . . many varieties of torture [were] employed. Amputation of hands and feet, ears and noses; tearing out the eyes, pouring molten lead into the throat, crushing the bones of the hands and feet with mallets, burning the body with fire, driving iron nails into the hands, feet, and bosom, cutting the sinews, sawing men asunder; these and many similar tortures were practised. . . . All these things were practised that fear and dread might fall upon the hearts of men, and that the regulations of government might be duly maintained. . . . [But] through the mercy which God has shown to me, these severities and terrors have been exchanged for tenderness, kindness, and mercy. Fear and respect have thus taken firmer hold of the hearts of men.
¹¹

He was right. Despite his unwarlike rule, Delhi had mostly held together; he had lost only one part of the empire, Khandesh, which rebelled under its governor six years before his death. But apart from Khandesh, general contentment prevailed. Firoz Shah was no general, but he had proved to be an excellent administrator, an enthusiastic mosque builder and garden planner, a competent manager of the empire’s finances. Grain remained cheap in the capital; soldiers and officials were well paid; taxes were reasonable.
¹²

He died in 1388, aged eighty-one, and at once the remaining cohesion of the sultanate spun apart. The governors of Jaunpur, Malwa, and Gujarat joined Bengal and Khandesh in independence, while in Delhi, a handful of claimants battled over the weakened throne. Tenderness and kindness had not restored the empire’s greatness, but they had slowed the decay; now rot accelerated once more. “During the forty years that Firoz Shah reigned, all his people were happy and contented,” Shams-i Siraj concludes, “but when he departed, and the territory of Delhi came into the hands of others, by the will of fate, the people were dispersed.”
¹³

Chapter Seventy-Eight

The Union of Krewo

Between 1364 and 1399,
Hungary and Poland join briefly under one crown,
and then Poland and Lithuania join under another

I
N
1364, Casimir the Great of Poland called a council, and the world came.

Charles V of France, newly crowned, was there. So was the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, elected as king of Germany to replace the unpopular Louis in 1346 and then crowned emperor in 1355; he had just married the king of Poland’s own granddaughter Elizabeth. The king of Hungary was present; dukes and barons from German principalities, Polish duchies, and Mediterranean islands filled out the guest list.

The council itself, the Congress of Krakow, was a bust. Casimir the Great had hoped to whip the assembled kings and aristocrats up into an enthusiasm for a new crusade, this one against the eastern threat of the Ottoman Turks. But calling for crusade had become a little bit like throwing a charity dinner and passing the hat; people paid lip service to the need, but looked the other direction when the actual demand was made. The assembled rulers were much more interested in jousting: “The king of Poland / Who holds Cracow in his domain . . . promised that he would help. . . . To put the holy crusade into execution,” wrote the French poet Guillaume de Machaut, who was among the attendees.

And of all the princes who were there,

Some avowed, and others swore on oath

That they would willingly assist,

And do everything in their power.

But the heralds proclaimed the lists

For they all wished to tarry

To joust and to hold a great tournament.

In short, they jousted together.
¹

The tournament was as close to fighting as any of them would get; they went home, and that was the last of it.

But the Congress of Krakow had fulfilled its more foundational purpose, which was to demonstrate to the world that Poland had joined the first rank of nations.

Unity had not come easy to the land of the Polans. The first “King of Poland,” the eleventh-century Duke of Piast Boleslaw I, had controlled only a handful of Polish dukedoms, and none of his successors had done much better. Casimir’s father, the short but ambitious Wladyslaw the Elbow-High (also a Duke of Piast) had made a good try at rounding up all of the dukes, but the Polans in the north and east had remained outside of his control.

Since his coronation in 1333, Casimir had worked at finishing the job. The Teutonic Order, between his domain and the Baltic Sea, had taken all of Prussia; he made a treaty with the order that settled an ongoing quarrel over his northern border. He paid off the king of Hungary and in return was given control over the duchy of Mazovia. He fought other duchies into submission, and built at least fifty new castles across Poland to help hold the newly expanded country together. He founded schools and convinced the pope to approve the charter of a new university in Krakow. He sponsored the massive revision and republication of a law code for all Polans. He threw himself into the renovation of his capital city: “He found Poland dressed in timber,” says an old Polish proverb, “and left her dressed in brick.”
²

The Congress of Krakow revealed to the world a new Poland: a third larger, prosperous and well educated, at peace. But Casimir had left one task undone: he hadn’t managed to produce a male heir. He had married three times, had two mistresses, and indulged in an illegal bigamous marriage with one girl from Prague, but his only legitimate children were girls.