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, claim- 
ants would be disappointed, and the result would be a dis- 
satisfied 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 regu- 
lations 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 dis- 
appeared, and the increase in cash revenue would be less 
than proportionate to theincrease in produce due to ex- 
tended cultivation. On the whole, however, it may be