Page:History of India Vol 3.djvu/235

 VIJAYANAGAE, THE CAPITAL 189 the number of twenty thousand, it was his habit to indulge in a feast. Mohammad continued his march to Adorn, and even to the capital Vijayanagar itself, which he vainly be- sieged for a month. This campaign, in which he re- peatedly vanquished the enemy, and laid the Carnatic waste, is said to have cost the lives of half a million Hindus, and it was only after ambassadors had urgently pleaded with him, that the Sultan consented to forego his custom of indiscriminate slaughter and pledged his successors, somewhat ineffectually, to the like clemency. Another campaign, waged by his son, Mujahid, in 1378, was undertaken for the possession of the strong fortress of Bankipur, south of Dharwar, and after several vic- tories and hunting the raja from place to place, and after restoring the mosque on the seacoast which Kafur had founded nearly seventy years before, Mujahid led his army back to the Krishna with over sixty thousand prisoners, chiefly women. He was murdered on his way home by his uncle Davud, but the change of rulers made no difference in the superiority of the Moslem kingdom. Vijayanagar paid an annual tribute, or if it withheld it there was war and humiliation. The most signal discomfitures of the Hindus oc- curred in the reign of Firoz, the son of Davud. On the first occasion, in 1398, Vijayanagar was the aggres- sor, the object being, as usual, the regaining of Mudkal and Raichur. Firishta tells a quaint story of how a grave kadi and his friends insinuated themselves into the not very fastidious favour of the nautch girls of