Page:Historic Landmarks of the Deccan.djvu/14

 to the sea on the east, and on the west at least as far as Raichur. Its southern boundary was probably formed by the Tungabhadra and Krishna rivers to within about a hundred miles of the sea, when it took a south-easterly direction and met the coast at a point to the south of Motupalli. To the south of Warangal lay the kingdom of Dvaravatipura or Dhorasamudra, the ruins of which city still exist at Halebid in the Mysore State. This kingdom was governed by the Hoysala dynasty, a branch of which, the Yadavas of Deogir, governed the northernmost kingdom. Warangal was under the sway of a dynasty known as the Kakatiyas.

Ala-ud-din, on his return from his raid into the Deccan, murdered his uncle, Jalal-ud-din Firuz Shah Khalji, and ascended the throne of Delhi on October 26th, 1296. The sequence of expeditions from Delhi against Deogir and Warangal is given in the accounts of those places. In 1 31 8 the kingdom of Deogir was finally annexed to Delhi, and in 1325 Telingana was annexed, and the whole of the Deccan was thus brought under the sway of the Muhammadans.

The empire had now reached dimensions which rendered efficient administration by one central controlling authority difficult, if not impossible ; and disintegrating influences were at work. The ferocious tyranny of Muhammad bin Tughlaq, the second emperor of the house of Tughlaq, drove his subjects to rebellion in all quarters of the empire. In 1346 the amirs of the Deccan, who had for some time been disaffected, were summoned by the emperor to aid him in suppressing a rebellion in Gujarat. They set out on their journey in obedience to the summons, but had hardly left Daulatabad * when they began to suspect that the summons was a mere pretext, and that Muhammad's real object in sending for them was to mete out to them, for their past delinquencies, the cruel punishment which he was wont to inflict on the disaffected and the disobedient. They slew the officers who had been sent to summon them and returned to Daulatabad, where they imprisoned the imperial governor and elected one of their own members, Ismail Fath † the Afghan, king of the Deccan under the title of Nasir-ud-din Shah. The emperor immediately marched into the Deccan and laid siege