THE 13tH AND 1l4ta CENTURIES 57

of the Assignment, and, having found it, to allot it to the
claimant.
It will be obvious that successful administration must
have depended on a Valuation substantially in accordance
with the facts. Where the Income was over-valued, claimants
 would be disappointed, and the result would be a dissatisfied
 Service, a thing which no Moslem king in India
could afford to tolerate; if it were under-valued, claimants
would be contented, but the resources of the kingdom would
be dissipated. We have seen in the last section that, under
Muhammad Tughlaq, the Assignments were said to yield
much more than their estimated value, or, in other words,
in his time under-valuation was general. At the outset
of his reign, Firliz ordered a new Valuation to be prepared;
the work took six years (Afif, 94), and the total came to
53 krors of tankas. This is the first actual record of a
general Valuation which I have found in the chronicles; we
shall meet with others in the Mogul period, when they bulk
largely in the administrative literature. :
Firiiz retained this Valuation throughout his reign;
and, since cultivation extended largely in the period, we
must infer that his officers benefited progressively as the
actual Income mounted above the accepted figure. This
fact alone would go far to explain the glowing descriptions
of the general happiness given by Shams Afif, a bureaucrat
thinking primarily in terms of his own environment; while
the fiscal effect would not necessarily have been serious,
because the revenue from the Reserved sources would also
have increased as the result of extended cultivation. Some
allowance must also be made for the fact that the prices of
produce were now on a much lower level than had ruled in
the second quarter of the century, after Aliuddin’s regulations
 had been allowed to lapse. Shams Afif insists
(p. 293-4) on the facts that the prevailing cheapness was
not due to any action taken by Firiiz, and that, while prices
varied with the seasons, the general level remained low;
in other words the main effects of inflation had now disappeared,
 and the increase in cash revenue would be less
than proportionate to theincrease in produce due to extended
 cultivation. On the whole, however, it may be