BAHMANID CONQUESTS 191 Firoz took Bankipur, which his predecessor had vainly coveted, and did not retire till the enemy had again suffered the loss of sixty thousand prisoners. Not only did the raja surrender the fortress; he even yielded a princess to the Sultan's harem a humiliating degra- dation for a Hindu sovereign together with immense treasure, and was actually obliged to admit his foe as a guest within the walls of the capital. An interesting feature of the Bahmanid wars was the adoption of the " Rumi r (Ottoman) custom of forming a laager of linked wagons to protect the camp. As we shall see, Babar employed this mode of defence with the addition of chained gun-carriages. Other campaigns followed in 1419, 1423, 1435, and 1443, accompanied by the usual Bahmanid victories and massacres, the destruction of temples and Brahman colleges and general devastation, and ending in the invariable submission and tribute of the Hindu state. The unsuccessful siege of Devarakanda in the Telugu country in 1459 by the Bahmanid Humayun, an Oriental Nero, shows that the power of the dynasty was limited by Hindu chiefs to the east; but the conquests of Mo- hammad II between 1476 and 1481, when Rajamandari, Kandapali, and Kandavid were wrested from the raja of Orissa, while the Sultan's arms triumphed over Masu- lipatan, and Belgaon was added on the west, raised the kingdom of Kulgarga to its greatest glory and extent. The pride was very shortly followed by the fall, but the blow did not come from rival empires. The kingdom broke up from internal causes. The succession of two
