Page:The Nizam.djvu/30

4 THE KHILJEES PREVAIL AT DELHI.

CHAP. I This Alptegin afterwards assumed the independent govern- ment of the country about the mountains of Sooleeman to General. the Indus, making Ghuznee his citadel. This he held for fourteen years, up to the time of his death, and thence founded the house of Ghuznee. His death occurred in the year 976. Alptegin had "a slave named Sebektegin, whom he purchased from a merchant who brought him from Toorkistan, and whom by degrees he had raised to so much power and trust that, at his death, he was the effective head of his government, and in the end became his successor." He also married a daughter of his benefactor. In the action that Sebektegin had with Jeipal, Raja of Lahore, at Laghman, at the mouth of the valley which extends from Peshawur to Cabool, he conquered, and made great slaughter among the enemy, as well as took possession of the country up to the Indus, leaving an officer, with 10,000 horse, as his governor of Peshawur. On this occasion the Affghans and Khiljees of Laghman - not only tendered their allegiance but furnished useful recruits to the country. These Khiljees, who are said to be of Tartar origin and to have come from a larger settlement about the source of the Jaxartes, had settled even then, during the tenth cen- tury, in that portion of the Affghan country between Sistan and India for some time, and had been closely connected with the Affghans. I enter into this detail merely to show that in 1288, when Kaikobad, the last of the Mahommedan slave-kings of Delhi, was assassinated, in the competition for the throne between the Tartar chiefs and those of the old kingdom of Ghuznee, "the Khiljees seem, from the ability of their chief or some advantage of their own, to have been at the head of the latter class; they prevailed over the Tartars, and Jelal-ood-Deen Khiljee