Reign of Firuz Shah Tughlaq: canals and new towns

Muhammad bin Tughluq died on the banks of the Indus in March 1351 during a campaign in Sind; after two days of chaos in the leaderless camp the nobles offered the throne to his cousin Firuz, who was proclaimed sultan on 23 March. Firuz led two expeditions to Bengal without annexing it; on the way back from the second he invaded Orissa, where, according to the official Sirat-i Firuz Shahi, the temple of Jagannatha at Puri was desecrated. He forced the chief of Nagarkot (Kangra) to submit and, after a disastrous first attempt, brought the Jams of Thatta in Sind back to obedience, but declined an invitation to intervene in the Bahmani kingdom.

Firuz Shah was remembered above all as a builder. The History and Culture of the Indian People credits him with five irrigation canals, the longest of which carried water from the Yamuna for 150 miles to Hisar, a town he founded; according to his chronicler Afif, the canals around Hisar made a spring crop possible there for the first time. He founded Fatehabad, Jaunpur and Firozabad, his new city on the Yamuna at Delhi, whose citadel survives as Feroz Shah Kotla; had two pillars of Ashoka brought from Topra and Meerut and set up at Delhi; repaired the Qutb Minar after lightning struck it; and endowed some thirty madrasas. In his own Futuhat-i Firuz Shahi he claimed to have abolished the cruel punishments and the cesses not sanctioned by the sharia that his predecessors had imposed.

Afif, who finished his history after Timur's sack of Delhi, painted the reign as a golden age of cheap grain and contented nobles. Modern historians are more critical: Firuz enforced the sharia, imposed the jizya on Brahmins, who had not paid it before, and acted against Muslims he regarded as heretics, while offices and assignments of revenue (iqta‘) became hereditary. Peter Jackson describes the reign as a time of stasis and decline, in which the military power of the sultanate dwindled. After Firuz's death on 20 September 1388 his sons and grandsons fought over the throne, and ten years later Timur found the sultanate divided and weak.