Founding of the Bahmani Sultanate

In 1345 members of the military class of the Deccan known as the ‘amirs of a hundred’ (amiran-i sada) rose against Muhammad bin Tughluq's agents and proclaimed one of their number, Ismail Mukh, a brother of the Afghan Malik Mall, sultan at Daulatabad. The sultan marched south, defeated them and besieged their leaders in the fortress, but a new revolt in Gujarat called him away. One of Ismail's lieutenants, Hasan Gangu, styled Zafar Khan, then defeated and killed the royal commander Imad al-Mulk, who had been sent to reduce Gulbarga, and made a triumphal entry into Daulatabad. Ismail Mukh renounced the royal title in his favour, and on 24 Rabi‘ II 748 — 3 August 1347 — Hasan was enthroned as Ala-ud-Din Bahman Shah. Busy with the rebels of Gujarat and Sind until his death in 1351, Muhammad never recovered the Deccan.

Hasan's origins are obscure. The contemporary poet-historian Isami says that he was born in Ghazni. The historian Firishta, writing in the early 17th century, dismissed the claim of descent from the ancient Persian king Bahman as the invention of flatterers and told a story that Hasan, a native of Delhi, had served a Brahmin named Gangu, whose name he honoured in his own; the title Bahman Shah appears in an inscription at Gulbarga and on the dynasty's coins. Soon after the ceremony at Daulatabad the sultan made Gulbarga his capital; the Bahmanis moved to Bidar in the 1420s, and between 1490 and 1527 the sultanate broke up into five successor states.

Historians link the new state with the colony of northern Muslims settled at Daulatabad by the transfer of the capital two decades earlier. From the reign of Bahman Shah's son Muhammad Shah I (1358–1375) the Bahmanis fought almost continuous wars with Vijayanagara over the lands between the Krishna and the Tungabhadra.