Page:Historic Landmarks of the Deccan.djvu/15

 to Daulatabad, but before he could reduce the place he was recalled to Gujarat by the turn which affairs had taken in that province. The rebellious amirs had little difficulty in overpowering the force which he left to carry on the siege of Daulatabad, and the Deccan was independent of Delhi. Ismail the Afghan, an aged man, had little taste for the cares of government and voluntarily resigned the crown which had been placed on his head. In his place the amirs elected as their king Hasan Gangu, entitled Zafar Khan, an energetic soldier who had taken a prominent part in the rebellion. Hasan claimed descent from the hero Bahman, the son of Isfandiyar, and on ascending the throne of the Deccan on August 4th,* 1347, assumed the title of Ala-ud-din Bahman Shah, † and chose Gulbarga, where he had held a jagir from Muhammad bin Tughlaq, as the capital of the new kingdom.

The boundaries of Bahman Shah's dominions were the Tapti on the north and the Tungabhadra and the Krishna on the south. On the east and west the boundary varied with the power and warlike spirit of the petty Hindu chieftains of Urisa and Telingana on the one hand and of the Konkan and the Western Ghats on the other, but it was not until near the end of the fifteenth century, during the reign of Muhammad III, the thirteenth king of the dynasty, that the kingdom stretched from sea to sea.

The history of the Bahmani dynasty, so named from the title assumed by its founder, is largely the history of fierce warfare with the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar, which arose on the ruins of the kingdoms of Warangal and Dhorasamudra during the troubles of the later years of the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq. A detailed account of this warfare will be found in Chapter IV, which contains an account of the Raichur Duab, or the land lying between the Krishna and the Tungabhadra, always a fruitful source of strife.

The wars with Vijayanagar were varied by expeditions against the Hindu chiefs of Telingana and Urisa, and the petty rajas in the Western Ghats, and occasionally the Bahmanis found themselves at war with the Muhammadan Sultans of Gujarat, Khandesh and Malwa, or the Gond rulers of Kherla, but these hostilities were merely inter-