Page:A Brief History of the Indian Peoples.djvu/120

116 meaning a golden one, for each verse on its completion. After thirty years of labour, the poet claimed his reward. But the Sultan, finding that the poem had run to 60,000 verses, offered him 60,000 silver dirhams, instead of dirhams of gold. Ferdousi retired in disgust from the court, and wrote a bitter satire, which to this day tells the story of the alleged base birth of the monarch. Mahmúd forgave the satire, but remembered the great epic, and, repenting of his meanness, sent 100,000 golden dirhams to the poet. The bounty came too late; for, according to the legend, as the royal messengers bearing the bags of gold entered one gate of Ferdousi's city, the poet's corpse was being borne out by another.

House of Ghor, 1152-1186.—During a century and a half the Punjab remained under Mahmúd's successors as an Afghán Musalmán Province in India. There had long been a feud between the Afghán towns of Ghor and Ghazní. Mahmúd subdued Ghor in 1010; but about 1051 the Ghor chief captured Ghazní and dragged its principal men to his own capital, where he cut their throats, and used their blood in making mortar for the fortifications. After various reprisals, Ghor finally triumphed over Ghazní in 1152; and Khusrú, the last of Mahmúd's line, fled to Lahore, the capital of his outlying Indian territory. In 1186 this also was wrested from him; and the Ghor prince Shaháb-ud-dín, better known as Muhammad of Ghor, began the conquest of India on his own account. But each of the Hindu principalities fought hard, and some of them still survive, seven centuries after the torrent of Afghán invasion swept over their heads.

Hindu Resistance to Muhammad of Ghor, 1191.—On his first expedition towards Delhi in 1191, Muhammad of Ghor was utterly defeated by the Hindus at Thaneswar in the Punjab, badly wounded, and barely escaped with his life. His scattered hosts were chased for forty miles. But he gathered together the wreck of his army at Lahore, and, aided by new hordes from Afghanistan, again marched into Hindustan in 1193. Family quarrels among the Rajputs prevented a united effort against him. The cities of Delhi and Kanauj stand forth as the centres of rival Hindu monarchies, each of which claimed the first place