The History of the Renaissance World (55 page)

Nasiruddin, aged twenty when he was elevated to the sultanate of Delhi in 1246, survived on the throne for two decades by not trying to rule. He was, says the
Tabakat-i-Nasiri
, devoted to fasting and prayer and the study of the Holy Word; he was a model of all gentle virtues: compassion, clemency, humility, and harmlessness. Causing no harm, he received none. He gave himself over to study and charity, and turned the running of the sultanate over to his Turkish officials. “The Sultan expressed no opinion without their permission,” explains the fourteenth-century poet and historian Isami; “he did not move his hands or feet except at their order. He would neither drink water nor go to sleep except with their knowledge.”
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Chief among his officials was the Turkish Grand Chamberlain Balban. Taken captive in a Mongol raid on his tribe as a young man, sold at the Baghdad slave market, and finally bought by Iltumish himself when he was in his early thirties, Balban had spent his entire adult life as a slave; but in Delhi, this was no bar to advancement. He had worked his way into Iltumish’s good graces, had served Raziyya herself in the court position of Chief Huntsman, and by 1246 was one of the most experienced soldiers and administrators of the Forty. Nasiruddin chose him to be vizier, making him the de facto sultan of Delhi: “The king lived in the palace,” says Isami, “and Balban governed the empire.”
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The years of disruption at Delhi had threatened the sultanate’s defenses. To the southeast, the Hindu king of Orissa—long resistant to Muslim encroachment—had gone on the offensive. His name was Naramasimha Deva; he had begun his push outward in 1238 and had taken away parts of Bengal that had once fallen under Islamic rule; the Delhi-controlled city of Laknaur had fallen to Naramasimha in 1243, and the year after, a massive battle on the shores of the Ganges had ended with the Orissa armies triumphing. “The Ganga herself was blackened,” reads an Orissa inscription celebrating the victory, “by the flood of tears from the eyes of the Muslim women of the north and west, whose husbands fell to Naramasimha’s army.”
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And to the north, the Mongols threatened. Lahore had been sacked, in 1241, by a Mongol raiding party that descended, looted the city, slaughtered anyone who resisted, and then withdrew. More sustained invasions seemed likely.

Balban met the threat by organizing annual military campaigns against both Hindu opponents and Mongol outposts. The first of these took place right after Nasiruddin’s enthronement, in 1246. With Nasiruddin in attendance and Balban in command, the armies of Delhi crossed into the region of the northern river known as the Sind and launched an attack on the scattering of Mongol forts there. “By the favour and aid of the Creator,” Balban’s chronicler tells us, “he ravaged the hills. . . . The army of the infidel Mongols who were in those parts took to flight, and . . . fear fell upon their hearts.” The following year, Balban led a similar campaign against Hindu rebels who had fortified themselves at Talsandah, east of Kannauj, and seized it for Delhi.
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47.1 Balban’s Wars

The
Tabakat-i-Nasiri
lists a score of these excursions: yearly military expeditions, buttressing the boundaries of Delhi and beating back the enemies at the sultanate’s edges. The success of these campaigns lay at the heart of Balban’s clout. By 1249, he had grown so indispensable that he was able to arrange a marriage between the Sultan Nasiruddin and his own daughter. “As Balban was the asylum of the Sultan’s dynasty, the prop of the army, and the strength of the kingdom,” Juzjani remarks, “it was his daughter’s good fortune to become the royal consort.”

He probably intended to be the grandfather of the next sultan, but the single son his daughter bore to her new husband died in infancy, and no more heirs appeared.
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In 1260, Balban led a massive and bloody reprisal against the hill country of Mewar, a Rajput kingdom south of Delhi that had caused the sultanate unending headaches by raiding, burning, and pillaging: in the eyes of the mamluks, a land of thieves, cattle rustlers, and bandits. Iltumish had attacked Mewar, but had been unable to overrun it. Now, in a series of vicious and bloody battles, Balban reduced the Mewar resistance to nothing. Thousands of Mewar soldiers were killed by the sword, or trampled under the feet of Balban’s elephants; civilians were slaughtered, captives were skinned alive, then hung over the gates of cities that resisted. When guerrilla warfare continued from the forests, Balban supplied his army with axes and ordered them to clear a hundred miles of trees away, laying the ground bare: “Hindus beyond computation fell beneath the unsparing swords of the holy warriors,” the
Tabakat-i-Nasiri
says.
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It was Balban’s most spectacular victory yet. The account of the triumph, dated to the fifteenth year of Sultan Nasiruddin’s reign, brings the
Tabakat
to an end; Nasiruddin remained on the throne of Delhi for another six years, but the histories are silent about his accomplishments. Apparently Balban—despairing of a grandson, and now at the height of his power—had eclipsed the sultan entirely.

By 1266, Nasiruddin was dead. None of the thirteenth-century chroniclers describe his death; half a century later, Isami would insist that Balban had poisoned his son-in-law. However it came about, Nasiruddin died with no heir, and Balban—father of his widow—claimed the sultanate of Delhi as his own.
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Twenty years of fighting to strengthen an empire ruled by a figurehead had left Balban with a strong need to assert his own authority. As vizier, he had kept the sultanate of Delhi safe with his own right hand; as sultan, he began to work out a theory that made the strength of that right hand identical to the will of God. He was
Zil-i-llahi
, “shadow of God”: God’s vice-regent on earth. He, no less than the distant Frederick II, held his crown from God alone; he, no less than the faraway Innocent IV, stood above all written laws. He was answerable to no man, bound by no legal code, and vulnerable to no challenge.
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No previous sultan had made such a bold claim, but Balban was prepared to give daily demonstrations of his status as divinely appointed representative of God to his people. He gave up drinking in public, remaining always distant, aloof, and solemn. He created an imposing armed guard that surrounded him everywhere he went. He dressed magnificently and sat on a diamond-studded throne, and in his audience chamber he instituted a new ceremony: his courtiers were to prostrate themselves before the throne on their bellies and kiss his feet. They were not to laugh in his presence.
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He made a few practical innovations as well. Those of the Forty who still survived were sent far away from Delhi, on missions to distant corners of the sultanate, preferably the most wild and dangerous ones; those who survived were selectively pruned through poisoning. Balban had a network of spies throughout the empire, sending constant reports back to Delhi about the behavior of far-flung officials. One of those spies, failing to provide an update on the doings of a provincial governor, was publicly executed and hung up on the city gate of his target.
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In the disorderly years since Iltumish, explains Balban’s biographer Ziauddin Barani, the people of Delhi had become “vacillating, disobedient, self-willed.” Balban’s unyielding hand on Delhi’s reins restored peace: “The dignity and authority of government were restored,” Barani writes. “Fear of the governing power, which is the basis of all good government . . . had departed from the hearts of all men, and the country had fallen into a wretched condition. But from the very commencement of the reign of Balban the people became tractable, obedient, and submissive.” The Turkish slave, risen to the sultanate, had reduced his people to the state he had once endured: obedient and submissive, slaves.
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Chapter Forty-Eight

The Seventh Crusade

Between 1244 and 1250,
Egypt changes hands,
and another crusade fails

D
ECEMBER IN
P
ARIS
, 1244: nearly Christmas. Louis IX of France lay ill, so close to death that he could neither speak nor move. Even the movement of his breath had ceased. “He was in such evil case,” his friend and biographer Jean de Joinville writes, “that, as they tell, one of the ladies who tended him wished to draw the sheet over his face, and said that he was dead.”
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Thirty years old, Louis IX—crowned king at twelve, governed by his mother until he turned twenty—had just finished beating back Henry III’s unsuccessful invasion of the western French lands. He was at the height of his strength, but he had no male heirs; his death would throw France into crisis. The entire palace wept. The doctors left; the doors to his room were flung open for mourners; priests arrived to “commend his soul.” And then, suddenly, the king took a deep breath and sighed.
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He had emerged from his coma; and when he had recovered enough to sit up and speak, he announced that in thanksgiving, he would go on crusade.

This announcement was greeted with joy by everyone except his mother Blanche, who tried to talk him out of it and even offered to pay for mercenaries who could go in his place. But Louis was unmoved. He had made a sacred vow, and he was not Frederick II; he would not renege.
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Even before his illness, Louis IX had probably been contemplating crusade. In the fall of 1244, disastrous news had come from the east: Jerusalem had fallen once more into Muslim hands.

The disaster had been brought about by a complicated five-year series of events. Frederick’s treaty with the sultan al-Kamil had expired in 1239; Islamic law dictated that a treaty made by Muslims with infidels could not last more than ten years. In most cases, treaties were simply renewed once per decade. But al-Kamil had died in 1238, and his two sons had battled over his empire.

The older brother, as-Salih Ayyub, triumphed (and imprisoned his rival for the rest of his life). However, the short sharp civil war had given Ayyub’s uncle as-Salih Ismail, brother of al-Kamil and governor of Damascus under al-Kamil’s sultancy, the opportunity to rebel. He declared himself ruler of the Syrian half of the Ayyubid empire, splitting Saladin’s kingdom in half. Ismail was now the overlord of Jerusalem.

So Ayyub hired mercenaries to attack his uncle’s Syrian domains, hoping to recover them for himself.

These mercenaries were wandering survivors of the Turkish kingdom of Khwarezm, destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1219. When the last Shah of Khwarezm, Jalal ad-Din, had fled into India pursued by Genghis’s men, his army and family had been wiped out, but Jalal ad-Din himself had survived. He had spent the next ten years of his life waging guerrilla warfare against the Mongol conquerors, finally meeting his end at Mongol hands in a desperate mountain battle in 1231. His followers, instead of dispersing, became known as the
Khwarezmiyya
, nomadic mercenaries, claiming to preserve the last remnants of Khwarezm culture, hiring themselves out to whoever could pay.
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