[24] The following more detailed, but also more confused, story is told in the Wákiăt-i-Mushtáki (Elliot, IV. 552–54): A man named Mehmúd, son of Mughís Khilji, came to Hoshang and entered his service. He was a treacherous man, who secretly aspired to the throne. He became minister, and gave his daughter in marriage to the king. [Farishtah, Pers. Text, II. 474, says: “Malik Mughís gave his daughter (Mehmúd’s sister) in marriage, not to Hoshang, but to Hoshang’s son Muhammad Shah.”] His father Malik Mughís, coming to know of his son’s ambitious designs, informed the king of them. Hereupon Mehmúd feigned illness, and to deceive the king’s physicians shut himself in a dark room and drank the blood of a newly killed goat. When the physicians came Mehmúd rose hastily, threw up the blood into a basin, and tossing back his head rolled on the floor as if in pain. The physicians called for a light. When they saw that what Mehmúd had spat up was blood they were satisfied of his sickness, and told the king that Mehmúd had not long to live. The king refrained from killing a dying man. This strange story seems to be an embellishment of a passage in Farishtah (Pers. Text, II. 477). When Khán Jehán, that is Malik Mughís the father of Mehmúd, was ordered by Sultán Muhammad to take the field against the Rájput rebels of Nádoti (Hároti?) many of the old nobles of Málwa went with him. In their absence the party hostile to the Khiljis represented to Sultán Muhammad that Mehmúd Khilji was plotting his death. On hearing that the Sultán was enraged against him Mehmúd secluded himself from the Court on pretence of illness. At the same time he worked secretly and bribed Sultán Muhammad’s cup-bearer to poison his master. On the death of Sultán Muhammad the party of nobles opposed to Mehmúd, concealing the fact of Muhammad’s death, sent word that Muhammad had ordered him immediately to the palace, as he wanted to send him on an embassy to Gujarát. Mehmúd, who knew that the Sultán was dead, returned word to the nobles that he had vowed a life-long seclusion as the sweeper of the shrine of his patron Sultán Hoshang, but that if the nobles came to him and convinced him that the good of his country depended on his going to Gujarát he was ready to go and see Sultán Muhammad. The nobles were caught in their own trap. They went to Mehmúd and were secured and imprisoned by him. [↑]
[25] Farishtah, Pers. Text, II. 480. [↑]
[26] Briggs’ Farishtah, IV. 196. These titles mean: The Chief of Nobles, the Great, the August. [↑]
[27] It is related that one of the pious men in the camp of Sultán Ahmed of Gujarát had a warning dream, in which the Prophet (on whom be peace) appeared to him and said: “The calamity of (spirit of) pestilence is coming down from the skies. Tell Sultán Ahmed to leave this country.” This warning was told to Sultán Ahmed, but he disregarded it, and within three days pestilence raged in his camp. Farishtah Pers. Text, II. 484. [↑]
[28] Briggs’ Farishtah, IV. 205, gives 230 minarets and 360 arches. This must have been an addition in the Text used by Briggs. These details do not apply to the building. The Persian text of Farishtah, II. 485, mentions 208 columns or pillars (duyast o hasht ustuwánah). No reference is made either to minarets or to arches. [↑]
[29] Farishtah, Pers. Text II. 487. [↑]
[30] Briggs’ Farishtah, IV. 207. Malcolm’s Central India, I. 32. In a.d. 1817 Sir John Malcolm (Central India, I. 32 Note) fitted up one of Mehmúd’s palaces as a hot-weather residence. [↑]
[31] Of the siege of Kumbhalmer a curious incident is recorded by Farishtah (Pers. Text, II. 485). He says that a temple outside the town destroyed by Mehmúd had a marble idol in the form of a goat. The Sultán ordered the idol to be ground into lime and sold to the Rájputs as betel-leaf lime, so that the Hindus might eat their god. The idol was perhaps a ram, not a goat. The temple would then have been a Sun-temple and the ram, the carrier or váhana of the Sun, would have occupied in the porch a position similar to that held by the bull in a Mahádeva temple. [↑]
[33] In the end of a.h. 846 (a.d. 1442) Mehmúd built a seven-storeyed tower and a college opposite the Jámá Mosque of Hoshang Sháh. Briggs’ Farishtah, IV. 210; Persian Text, II. 488. [↑]