XI History - Lesson - - Advent of Arabs and Turks rule Indian provinces with Delhi as capital for about four centuries. Though it is customary to describe this period as the Muslim period, the rulers of medieval India came from different regions and ethnicities: Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Central Asians were involved militarily and administratively. Iltutmish was an Ilbari Turk and many of his military slaves were of different Turkish and Mongol ancestries brought to Delhi by merchants from Bukhara, Samarkhand and Baghdad. There were some slaves of other ethnicities as well (notably Hindu Khan, captured from Mihir in Central India) but Iltutmish gave them all Turkish titles.
The Sultanate ( – ) itself was not homogenous. Its rulers belonged to five distinct categories: (a) Slave Dynasty ( - ) (b) Khalji Dynasty ( - ) (c) Tughlaq Dynasty ( - ) (d) Sayyid Dynasty ( - ) and (e) Lodi Dynasty ( - ). Sources for the Study of Delhi Sultanate Al-Beruni: Tarikh-Al-Hind (Indian Philosophy and Religion written in Arabic) Minhaj us Siraj: Tabaqat-i-Nasiri ( ) (World Islamic History written in Arabic) Ziauddin Barani: Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi ( ) History of Delhi Sultanate up to Firuz Tughlaq Amir Khusrau: Mifta Ul Futuh (Victories of Jalal-ud-din Khalji); Khazain Ul Futuh (Victories of Allauddin Khalji - Texts in Persian) Tughlaq Nama (History of Tughlaq dynasty in Persian) Shams-i-Siraj Afif: Tarikh i Firuz Shahi (after Barani’s account of Delhi Sultanate in Persian) Ghulam Yahya Bin Ahmad: Tarikh-i- Mubarak Shahi ( Written in Persian during the reign of Sayyid ruler Mubarak Shah) Ferishta: History of the Muslim Rule in India (Persian) Persian chronicles speak about the Delhi Sultanate in hyperbolic terms. Their views dealing with the happenings during the period of a certain Sultan were uncritically appropriated into modern scholarship.— Sunil Kumar, Emergence of Delhi Sultanate