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The Bahmani Kingdom or the Bahmani Sultanate was a late medieval Persianate kingdom that ruled the Deccan plateau in India. The first independent Muslim sultanate of the Deccan, the Bahmani Kingdom came to power in 1347 during the rebellion of Ismail Mukh against Muhammad bin Tughlaq, the Sultan of Delhi. Ismail Mukh then abdicated in favour of Zafar Khan, who established the Bahmani Sultanate.
The Bahmani Kingdom was perpetually at war with its neighbours, including its rival to the south, the Vijayanagara Empire, which outlasted the sultanate. The Mahmud Gawan Madrasa was created by Mahmud Gawan, the vizier regent who was prime minister of the sultanate from 1466 until his execution in 1481 during a conflict between the foreign (Afaqis) and local (Deccanis) nobility. Bidar Fort was built by Ahmad Shah I (), who relocated the capital to the city of Bidar. Ahmad Shah led campaigns against Vijayanagara and the sultanates of Malwa Sultanate and Gujarat. His campaign against Vijayanagara in 1423 included a siege of the capital, ending in the expansion of the Sultanate. Mahmud Gawan would later lead campaigns against Malwa, Vijayanagara, and the Gajapati Empire, and extended the sultanate to its maximum extent.
The sultanate began to decline under Mahmood Shah. Through a combination of factional strife and the revolt of five provincial governors (Bahmani taraf), the Bahmani Sultanate split up into five states, known as the Deccan sultanates. The initial revolts of Yusuf Adil Shah, Malik Ahmad Nizam Shah I, and Fathullah Imad-ul-Mulk in 1490 and Qasim Barid I in 1492 saw the end of any real Bahmani power, and the last independent sultanate, Golkonda, in 1518, ended the Bahmanis' 180-year rule over the Deccan. The last four Bahmani rulers were puppet monarchs under Amir Barid I of the Bidar Sultanate, and the kingdom formally dissolved in 1527.
With the support of the influential Indian Chishti Sufism Shaikhs, he was crowned "Alauddin Bahman Shah Sultan – Founder of the Bahmani Dynasty". They bestowed upon him a robe allegedly worn by the prophet Muhammad. The extension of the Sufi's notion of spiritual sovereignty lent legitimacy to the planting of the sultanate's political authority, where the land, people, and produce of the Deccan were merited state protection, no longer available for plunder with impunity. These Sufis legitimized the transplantation of Indo-Muslim rulership from one region in South Asia to another, converting the land of the Bahmanids into being recognized as Dar ul-Islam, while it was previously considered Dar ul-Harb.
Turkic peoples or Indo-Turkish troops, explorers, saints, and scholars moved from Delhi and North India to the Deccan with the establishment of the Bahmanid sultanate. How many of these were Shi'ites is unclear. Nonetheless, there is enough evidence to demonstrate that a number of nobility at the Bahmani court identified as Shi'ites or had significant Shi'ite inclinations.
The Vijayanagara empire and the Bahmanids fought over the control of the Godavari-basin, Tungabadhra Doab, and the Marathwada country, although they seldom required a pretext for declaring war, as military conflicts were almost a regular feature and lasted as long as these kingdoms continued. Military slavery involved captured slaves from Vijayanagara whom were then converted to Islam and integrated into the host society, so they could begin military careers within the Bahmanid empire. Mohammad Shah II's reign was noted for its peace and lack of foreign wars. Strong measures of civil and military organizations were set up by Mohammad Shah I, but they developed only during Mohammad Shah II's rule.
Ghiyasuddin succeeded his father Muhammad II at the age of seventeen in April 1397, but was blinded and imprisoned by a Turkic slave called Taghalchin, who had held a grudge on the Sultan for the latter's refusal to appoint him as a governor. He had lured the Sultan into putting himself in the former's power, using the beauty of his daughter, who was accomplished in music and arts, and had introduced her to the Sultan at a feast. He was succeeded by Shamsuddin, who was a puppet king under Taghalchin. Firuz and Ahmed, the sons of the fourth sultan Daud, marched to Gulbarga to avenge Ghiyasuddin. Firuz declared himself the sultan, and defeated Taghalchin's forces. Taghalchin was killed and Shamsuddin was blinded.
Taj ud-Din Firuz Shah became the sultan in November 1397. Firuz Shah fought against the Vijayanagara Empire on many occasions and the rivalry between the two dynasties continued unabated throughout his reign, with victories in 1398 and in 1406, but a defeat in 1417. One of his victories resulted in his marriage to the daughter of Deva Raya, the Vijayanagara Emperor.
Firuz Shah expanded the nobility by enabling Hindus and granting them high office. In his reign, Sufis such as Bande Nawaz, a Chishti saint who had immigrated from Dehli to Daulatabad, were prominent in court and daily life. He was the first author to write in the Deccani language dialect of Urdu. The Dakhni language became widespread, practised by various milieus from the court to the Sufis. It was established as a lingua franca of the Muslims of the Deccan, as not only the aspect of a dominant urban elite, but an expression of the regional religious identity.
The Sultan, drunk, condoned a large-scale massacre of Persian Shi'a by the Sunni Dakhani nobles and their Sunni Ethiopian slaves. A few survivors escaped the massacre dressed in women's clothing and convinced the Sultan of their innocence. Ashamed of his own folly, the Sultan punished the Dakhani leaders who were responsible for the massacre, putting them to death or throwing them in prison, and reduced their families to beggary. The accounts of the violent events likely included exaggerations as it came from the pen of the chroniclers who were themselves mainly foreigners and products of Safavid Persia.
The eldest sons of Humayun Shah, Nizam-Ud-Din Ahmad III and Muhammad Shah III Lashkari ascended the throne successively, while they were young boys. The vizier Mahmud Gawan ruled as regent during this period, until Muhammad Shah reached age. Mahmud Gawan is known for setting up the Mahmud Gawan Madrasa, a center of religious as well as secular education, as well as achieving the sultanate's greatest extent during his rule. He also increased the administrative divisions of the sultanate from four to eight to ease the administrative burden from previous expansion of the state. Gawan was considered a great statesman, and a poet of repute.
Mahmud Gawan was caught in a struggle between a rivalry between two groups of nobles, the Dakhanis and the Afaqis. The Deccanis made up the indigenous Muslim elite of the Bahmanid dynasty, being descendants of Sunni immigrants from Northern India, while the Afaqis were foreign newcomers from the west such as Gawan, who were mostly Shi'is. The Dakhanis believed that the privileges, patronage and positions of power in the sultanate should have been reserved solely for them.
The divisions included sectarian religious divisions where the Afaqis were looked upon as heretics by the Sunnis as the former were Shi'as. Eaton cites a linguistic divide where the Dakhanis spoke Dakhni while the Afaqis favored the Persian language. Mahmud Gawan had tried to reconcile with the two factions over his fifteen-year prime ministership, but had found it difficult to win their confidence; the party strife could not be stopped. His Afaqis opponents, led by Nizam-ul-Mulk Bahri and motivated by anger over Mahmud's reforms which had curtailed the nobility's power, fabricated a treasonous letter to Purushottama Deva of Orissa which they purported to be from him. Mahmud Gawan was ordered executed by Muhammad Shah III, an act that the latter regretted until his death in 1482. Upon his death, Nizam-ul-Mulk Bahri, the father of the founder of the Nizam Shahi dynasty became the regent of the Sultan as prime minister.
The last Bahmani Sultans were puppet monarchs under their Barid Shahi prime ministers, who were the de facto rulers. After 1518 the sultanate formally broke up into the five states of Ahmednagar, Berar, Bidar, Bijapur, and Golconda. They are collectively known as the Deccan sultanates.
The Bahmani Sultans were patrons of the Persian language, culture and literature, and some members of the dynasty became well-versed in the language and composed its literature in the language.
The first sultan, Alauddin Bahman Shah, is noted to have captured 1,000 singing and dancing girls from Hindu temples after he battled the northern Carnatic region chieftains. The later Bahmanis also enslaved civilian women and children in wars; many of them were converted to Islam in captivity.Sewell, Robert. A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar) pp.57–58.
The later Sultans were buried in a necropolis known as the Bahmani Tombs. The exterior of one of the tombs is decorated with coloured tiles. Arabic, Persian and Urdu inscriptions are inscribed inside the tombs.
The Bahmani Sultans built many mosques, tombs, and in Bidar and Gulbarga, the two capitals. They also built many forts in Daulatabad Fort, Golconda and Raichur. The architecture was highly influenced by Persian architecture, as they invited architects from Persia, Turkey and Arabia. The Persianate Indo-Islamic style of architecture developed during this period was later adopted by the Deccan sultanates as well.
The scholar Iqtidar Alam Khan claims, however, that based on a differing translation of a passage of medieval historian Firishta's text Tarikh-i Firishta, in which he describes early use of gunpowder weapons in the Indian Subcontinent, it can be inferred that both the Delhi Sultanate and non-Muslim Indian states had the gunpowder weapons that the Bahmani Sultanate began to use in 1368, and that the Bahmanis had acquired the weapons from the Delhi Sultanate. Contemporary evidence shows the presence of gunpowder for pyrotechnics uses in the Delhi Sultanate, and Alam Khan states that their usage in the Battle of Adoni in 1368 was rather the first military usage of gunpowder-derived objects in the Subcontinent. According to Klaus Rötzer, these early pyrotechnic weapons were used primarily to frighten enemy cavalry and elephants.
The Bahmani Sultanate used cannons while besieging the Fort of Machal in 1470 or January 1471. This was the first known use of gunpowder in siege weaponry on the Deccan Plateau.
List of Bahmani rulers
Independence from Sultan of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughlaq Shah Ala-ud-Din Bahman Shah Ala-ud-Din Bahman Shah I 3 August 1347 – 11 February 1358 Shah Mohammad Shah I 11 February 1358 – 21 April 1375 Shah Ala-ud-Din Mujahid Shah Mujahid Shah 21 April 1375 – 16 April 1378 Shah Daud Shah Bahmani 16 April 1378 – 21 May 1378 Shah Mohammad Shah II 21 May 1378 – 20 April 1397 Shah Ghiyath-ad-din Shah 20 April 1397 – 14 June 1397 Shah Shams-ud-Din Shah
Puppet King Under Lachin Khan Turk14 June 1397 – 15 November 1397 Shah Taj-ud-Din Feroze Shah Feroze Shah 24 November 1397 – 1 October 1422 Shah Ahmed Shah Wali Bahmani 1 October 1422 – 17 April 1436 Shah Ala-ud-Din Ahmed Shah Ala-ud-Din II Ahmed Shah Bahmani 17 April 1436 – 6 May 1458 Shah Ala-ud-Din Humayun Shah Humayun Shah 7 May 1458 – 4 September 1461 Shah Nizam Shah Bahmani 4 September 1461 – 30 July 1463 Shah Muhammad Shah Lashkari Muhammad Shah Bahmani III 30 July 1463 – 26 March 1482 Vira Shah Mahmood Shah Bahmani II
Puppet under Malik Naib, Qasim Barid I, and Amir Barid I26 March 1482 – 27 December 1518 Shah Ahmed Shah Bahmani III
Puppet King Under Amir Barid I27 December 1518 – 15 December 1520 Shah Ala-ud-Din Shah Bahmani II
Puppet King Under Amir Barid I28 December 1520 – 5 March 1522 Shah Waliullah Shah Bahmani
Puppet King Under Amir Barid I5 March 1522 – 1526 Shah Kaleemullah Shah Bahmani
Puppet King Under Amir Barid I1525–1527 Dissolution of the sultanate into five kingdoms — Bidar Sultanate, Ahmednagar, Bijapur, Golconda, and Berar Sultanate
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