Firuz Shah Bahmani

Taj al-Din Firuz Shah, son of Dawud Shah and grandson of Ala al-Din Bahman Shah, the founder of the Bahmani Sultanate, was the brother of Ahmad Shah I. He and Ahmad were raised by Muhammad Shah II, who married his daughters to the two brothers and made Firuz heir presumptive — then preferred his own son Ghiyas al-Din. When Ghiyas al-Din was blinded and imprisoned and Shams al-Din installed as a puppet, Firuz and Ahmad marched on Gulbarga and Firuz declared himself sultan in 1397; the nobleman Taghalchin was killed and Shams al-Din blinded.¹

Firuz expanded the kingdom in repeated wars with Vijayanagara: he threw back Harihara II's advance into the Raichur Doab, won in 1406 and married Deva Raya's daughter, took Kherla from Narsingh Rai, and built the new city of Firozabad on the Bhima south of Gulbarga. He set out to make the Deccan the cultural centre of India, sending ships every year from Goa and Dabhol to the Persian Gulf to recruit men of letters, administrators, soldiers and artisans. His fortune turned at Pangal in 1419–1420, a disastrous defeat after which he surrendered the southern and eastern districts.¹

Broken by the defeat, he spent his final two years in asceticism and piety and left the administration to two manumitted slaves. In 1422, seeking to secure the succession for his son Hasan Khan, he ordered his brother Ahmad blinded; Ahmad escaped, besieged Gulbarga, and Firuz — carried ill to the battlefield as his army defected — abdicated in Ahmad's favour on 22 September 1422. He died at Gulbarga on 1 October 1422 and was buried in the great Haft Gumbaz tomb built in his lifetime. The English biography calls him an intellectual king, versed in the Quran and Islamic jurisprudence, with philosophical leanings in Sufism; no source names a school or an order for him, and the record says so plainly.¹