A.D. 1001 TO A.D. 1200
Part II
The Great Raider Mahmûd being now put past, the Campaigns of the Crescent continued in feebler fashion. In truth, for a few years Mahomed and Masûd, the dead king's twin sons, were occupied in settling the succession. Mahomed, the elder by some hours, mild, tractable, was his father's nominee and on the spot; Masûd, on the other hand, was a great warrior, bold, independent, and promptly claimed as his right those provinces which he had won by his sword. So they came to blows.
At the outset Mahomed's piety failed him; for having decorously halted his host during the whole of the Month of Fasting--Ramzân--Masûd thereinafter fell upon him, armed at all points, defeated him, and put out his eyes after he had reigned a short five months.
Masûd, the new king, appears to have been a man of considerable character and grim humour, for one of the first acts of his reign was in cold blood to hang an unfortunate gentleman who once, long years before, when the question of succession was the subject of conversation, had been heard to say crudely that if Masûd ever came to the throne he would suffer himself to be hanged.
So he suffered.
But in truth, as we read the story of this Ghuznevide dynasty, and of the Ghori dynasty which followed it, we rub our eyes and wonder how many centuries we have gone back. For these big, bold, burly men are fairly savages in comparison with the cultured Hindu whom they harried. And Masûd, though by repute an affable gentleman, generous even to prodigality, and of uncommon personal strength and courage, was as turbulent as a king as he had been as a prince.
His favourite maxim was, "Dominion follows the longest sword." His was not only long, but heavy. No other man of his court could wield it, and an arrow from his bow would pierce the hide of a mailed elephant. During the ten years of his reign he entered India with an army three times. But the first of these raids was followed, A.D. 1033, by a terrible famine, a still more terrible outbreak of plague, from which in one month, more than forty thousand people died in Isphahân alone.
This was in its turn followed by a severe defeat of the Ghuznevide arms by the Turkomâns on the north-east frontier; for it must not be forgotten that though these dynasties of which we are treating are counted as of India, they have in reality but little to do with it. They were but titular suzerains, and very often not that, of the more northerly provinces of Hindustan.
Apparently as a salve to resentment and shame at this defeat, Masûd began to build a fine palace at Ghuzni, over which he must have spent some of his father's treasures, for a golden chain and a golden crown of incredible weight appears as a canopy in the Hall of Audience.