Page:History of India Vol 3.djvu/241

 WEAKNESS OF THE MOSLEM POWER 195 of thrones, but wanting the power to hold a sceptre. The respect which belonged to a caste of foreigners, who kept themselves apart and observed strict rules of religious and social law, had been degraded when those laws were lightly esteemed, when the harems of the Moslems were filled with native women, when Hindus who nominally professed Islam were promoted to high office, when the Mohammedan domination, in short, had become the rule of the half-caste. The empire of Delhi had disappeared. The greater provinces had their sep- arate kings, the smaller districts and even single cities and forts belonged to chiefs, or to clans who owned no higher lord. The king's writ was no more supreme; it was the day of the little princes, the Muluk-at-tawaif , or Faction Kings. Something, it is true, had been done to restore the vanished power of Delhi during the century that fol- lowed the collapse of the Taghlak dynasty after the invasion of Timur. The Sayyids utterly failed, but their successors, the Lodi Afghans, showed at first both energy and wisdom. Buhlol, who supplanted the last of the feeble Sayyids in 1451, was a good soldier and a simple man, who was content to let the world know that he was king, without parading the pomp of mon- archy. He took the minor principalities round Delhi in hand, and after a stubborn war of over a quarter of a century succeeded (as we have seen) in recovering Jaunpur and its territories, and in restoring the old frontier of his kingdom as far as Bihar. His son Si- kandar, succeeding him in 1488, completed his task by