Muhammad bin Tughluq moves the capital to Daulatabad

Devagiri, the capital of the Yadava kings, first raided by Alauddin Khalji in 1296, was annexed by the Delhi Sultanate in the 1310s and became its main base in the Deccan. Muhammad bin Tughluq, who had campaigned in the south as crown prince, renamed it Daulatabad and made it a second seat of government. The historian Barani, a courtier of the sultan who later judged him harshly, says that he chose it because Delhi, Gujarat, Bengal, Telingana, Ma‘bar and the other provinces lay at almost equal distances from it; in the first version of his chronicle Barani dates the decision to 727 AH — November 1326 to November 1327. A road lined with shade trees, with relays of couriers and rest-houses at the stages, linked the two cities.

The move came in stages: first the sultan's mother and the households of the grandees, then, after the revolt of Kishlu Khan in 1327–1328, the people of Delhi and of the towns around it. Barani claims that not a cat or a dog was left in Delhi and that many emigrants died on the road or pined away in exile, and Ibn Battuta, who reached Delhi in 1334, tells cruel stories of the expulsion and found the city still empty and thinly peopled. Modern historians regard the picture of a wholly deserted capital as exaggerated: Sanskrit inscriptions of 1327–1328 show Hindus living around Delhi, coins were still struck there, and in the same years the sultan was building new fortifications in the city. In Peter Jackson's view, it was the principal Muslim families of the old city, not its whole population and not the army, who were sent south. According to Barani, the shaykhs, ulama and notables received money and villages in the Deogir country, and the state bought the houses of the ordinary citizens of Delhi.

About 1335–1336, returning from his failed campaign against the rebel sultan of Ma‘bar, Muhammad allowed those who wished to go back to Delhi. Daulatabad nevertheless kept a large Muslim population from the north, and historians link the rise of the independent Bahmani Sultanate in 1347 with the colony created by the transfer.