APPENDIX B

217

other words, whether the kingdom contained any element to
which the nomenclature of the feudal system can properly be
applied. The question is one of fact. The nature of the
European feudal system is tolerably well known to students:
the position of the Mugqtis in the Delhi kingdom can be ascertained
 from the chronicles; and comparison will show whether
the use of these archaic terms brings light or confusion into
the agrarian history of Northern India.
The ordinary meaning of Iqta in Indo-Persian literature is an
Assignment of revenue conditional on future service. The word
appears in this sense frequently in the Mogul period as a synonym
‘along with tuyiil) of the more familiar jagir; and that it might
carry the same sense in the thirteenth century is established,
among several passages, by the story told by Barni (60, 61) of
the 2000 troopers who held Assignments, but evaded the services
on which the Assignments were conditional. The villages held
by these men are described as their iqtds, and the men themselves
as iqtadars. At this period, however, the word iqtd was used
commonly in a more restricted sense, as in the phrase ‘““the twenty
iqtds,” used by Barni (50) to denote the bulk of the kingdom.
[t is obvious that “the twenty iqtds” points to something of a
different order from the 2000 iqtds in the passage just quoted;
and all through the chronicles, we find particular iqtas referred
to as administrative charges, and not mere Assignments. The
distinction between the two senses is marked most clearly by
the use of the derivative nouns of possession; at this period,
iqtddar always means an assignee in the ordinary sense, but
Mugqti always means the holder of one of these charges. The
question then is, was the Mugqti’s position feudal or bureaucratic?
To begin with, we may consider the origin of the nobility
from whom the Muqtis were chosen. The earliest chronicler
gives us the biographies! of all the chief nobles of his time, and
we find from them that in the middle of the thirteenth century
practically every man who is recorded as having held the position
of Muqti began his career as a royal slave. Shamsuddin
[ltutmish, the second effective king of Delhi, who had himself
been the property of the first king, bought foreign slaves in great
numbers, employed them in his household, and promoted them,
according to his judgment of their capacities, to the highest

i T. Nasir, book xxii., p. 229 ff. I follow the Cambridge History in
ising the form Iltutmish for the name usually written Altamsh.