Page:History of India Vol 3.djvu/215

 BENGAL AND JAUNPUR 175 Barbak, held the throne ; the latest kings were Afghans. Provincial as these sovereigns were, they maintained great state and luxury, and the remains of their archi- tecture bear witness to the standard of taste which they upheld. For the splendour of their architecture, however, the " Kings of the East," or Sharki Maliks of Jaunpur, stand supreme in the period before the Mogul empire. Upon the decline of the Delhi kingdom, the eunuch Sarwar, who became Khwaja-i-Jahan and vizir under the last Sultans of the house of Taghlak, was sent in 1394 into " Hindustan ' : -the land of the Hindus, a term used specifically to denote the country about Benares and Oudh, where the Hindus were still prac- tically independent and took up his residence at Jaun- pur, the new city founded on the Gumti opposite Zafara- bad by his late master Firoz. He soon " got the fiefs of Kanauj, Karra, Oudh, Sandila, Dalamau, Bahraich, Bihar, and Tirhut into his own possession, and put down many of the infidels, and restored the forts which they had destroyed. The Almighty blessed the arms of Islam with power and victory. The raja of Jajna- gar and the King of Lakhnauti now began to send to Khwaja-i-Jahan the [tributary] elephants which they had formerly sent to Delhi." Thus began the dynasty of the " Kings of the East," which subsisted in con- spicuous power for nearly a century. Their dominions stretched along the plain from Kanauj to Bihar, and from the Ganges to the Himalaya Tarai, and occupied most of the country corresponding roughly with the