166

The Sultans of Ma‘bar or Madura

734–79/1334–77

The southernmost Deccan

⊘ 734/1334

Sharīf Aḥsan, Jalāl al-Dīn, governor since 723/1323, then independent

⊘ 739/1338

‘Alā’ al-Dīn Udayji

⊘ 740/1339

Fīrūz Shāh, Quṭb al-Dīn, nephew and son-in-law of ‘Alā’ al-Dīn

⊘ 740/1339

Muḥammad Dāmghān Shāh, Ghiyāth al-Dīn, son-in-law of Sharīf Aḥsan

⊘ 745/1344

Maḥmūd Dāmghān Shāh, Nāṣir al-Dīn, nephew and son-in-law of Muḥammad Dāmghān Shāh

⊘ by 757/1356

‘Ādil Shāh, Abu ’l-Muẓaffar Shams al-Dīn

⊘ by 761/1360

Mubārak Shāh, Fakhr al-Dīn, possibly a Bahmanid

⊘ c. 774–9/c. 1372–7

Sikandar Shāh, ‘Alā’ al-Dīn

c. 779/c. 1377

Conquest hy Vi]ayanagara

The region known to the mediaeval Islamic geographers as Ma‘bar covered the lower south-eastern coastland of the Deccan, roughly corresponding to the later Coromandel. Madura, which became its capital, was conquered by an army sent by the Delhi Sultan Muḥammad b. Tughluq in 723/1323, and the governor installed there began some years later an independent line of Sultans of Ma‘bar. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa stayed there in 743/1342 after being at the Tughluqid court in Delhi, en route for China, and married a princess of the Ma‘bar ruling family. By the mid-fourteenth century, the Sultans seem also to have controlled the southern tip of the Deccan round westwards as far as Cochin. The Sultanate was always under threat from powerful Hindu neighbours, in particular, from the early 1350s onwards, from the kingdom of Vijayanagara situated to its north, and this last seems to have overwhelmed the Sultanate by 779/1377 or shortly afterwards.

EI2 ‘Hind. IV. History’ (J. Burton-Page), ‘Ma‘bar’ (A. D. W. Forbes).

R. C. Majumdar et al. (eds), The History and Culture of the Indian People. VI. The Delhi Sultanate, ch. 10 H.II.

M. Habib and K. A. Nizami (eds), A Comprehensive History of India. V. The Delhi Sultanat (A.D. 1206–1526), ch. 15.

Haroon Khan Sherwani and P. M. Joshi (eds), History of Medieval Deccan (1295–1724), Hyderabad 1973, 1, 57–75.

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