THE 13tu AND 14tH CENTURIES 51 
it was repopulated, because the country on which it depended 
for supplies was unproductive; but the failure to produce 
arose, not merely from the want of rain, but from the 
dispersal of the peasants, and that dispersal must be at- 
tributed solely to a series of administrative blunders. 
The other point in the story is that we now meet for the 
first time with the idea that improvement in cropping 
should be one of the objects of administrative action. In 
the declarations of agricultural policy which have already 
been examined, stress is laid solely on maintenance and 
extension of cultivation: Muhammad Tughlaq may not 
have been the first to insist on the alternative line of action, 
but the earliest record of its official adoption comes in his 
reign. Its expression is, as I have said, magniloquent, 
and the picture of Meerut or Bulandshahr as a country of 
vines and date-palms is calculated to evoke a smile, or even 
a sneer: but the idea itself was sound, and from this time 
forward it is a recognised element in agrarian policy. 
The position in regard to Assignments in this reign is 
not recorded by the Indian chronicler, but some idea of it 
can be obtained from a book which was written in Damascus,® 
and which mentions Muhammad Tughlaq as the reigning 
sovereign in India. The military organisation in Delhi 
differed, we are told, from that of Egypt or Syria, in that a 
commandant was not required to maintain troops out of his 
own resources; the troops were paid from the treasury, 
while the commandants’ income was personal. Their 
personal income was given to them in the form of Assign- 
ments of revenue, which ordinarily yielded much more 
than the estimated value; and some of the higher officials 
at headquarters also had ‘towns and villages” for their 
salary, or for part of it. This account fits in with what has 
been said above regarding some previous ‘reigns. The 
Assignment of this period differed from that of the Mogul 
t In the Cambridge History (iii. 161) this passage is taken as ordering a 
change in rotation of crops; but I read it as meaning exactly what it says, 
that inferior crops were to be replaced by superior. 
2 The Masalig-ul Absar of Shahabuddin. I have not seen the text oft 
this work, and quote from the extracts given in Elliot, iii. 573 ff. I con: 
jecture that “towns” in the phrase '‘towns and villages,’’ may represent 
“gasbat,” in which case ‘‘parganas'’ would be the probable meaning.