INDIA 3i9 wards murdered. The Crown was seized by his nephew Ala ed- din, who took the name Mohammed Shah. He was the first who extended the Mohammedan empire of Delhi 1296. over a substantial portion of the Deccan and ultimately over the whole peninsula. It must be remembered that the Mohammedan Turks and Afghans were a military ruling race, who held sway over the Hindus as- subjects without inter- mixture, in virtue of their military organisation. To the Hindu they were out-caste, once-born like any Sudra ; while to them the Hindus were heathen idolaters. Direct persecution, however, was not habitual, and a gradual fusion of manners and customs was in progress. Once more a new dynasty arose after Mohammed's death, beginning with another Turk slave. The Tughlak emperors ruled for nearly a century. The second of the line The L a t e r was Mohammed Tughlak, half genius and half Kingdoms, madman. One of his crazy schemes was an 13211525 - invasion of China across the Himalayas by a great army which perished in the mountain passes as utterly as the Grand Army of Napoleon's Moscow expedition. But the empire fell to pieces after the reign of his wise successor, Feroz Shah, who could not stop the disintegration, which was completed by the invasion of Tamerlane. On this occasion Delhi was sacked, and the inhabitants massacred. The Lodi dynasty, which succeeded the Tughlak, scarcely held dominion outside the Delhi district; though in the second half of the fifteenth century Bahlul Lodi and his son again more or less subjugated Northern Hindustan. Meantime in the Deccan the governors, who for a time con- tinued to profess allegiance to the Lodi emperors, declared their independence; about 1480 the Bahmani dynasty, The Deccan resting on the support of the Turk and Afghan Kingdoms. soldiery, ruled over nearly all the Deccan. Then this great empire in its turn broke up into the several kingdoms of Bijanagar, Bijapur, Ahmednagar, and Golconda. Of these the first is dis- tinguished as being Hindu, not Mohammedan, and also as proving itself at once the strongest and intellectually the foremost. All of these survived until the latter end of the seventeenth century.
