Death of Prince Muhammad fighting the Mongols

01The Martyr Prince

Prince Muhammad held Multan as the guardian of the north-west frontier and kept a cultured court, with Amir Khusrau and Amir Hasan among his poets. In 1285 a Mongol army raided the Punjab. The prince marched out, the Mongols were pushed back, but in the pursuit he was cut off with a small party and killed. He was remembered afterwards as Khan-i-Shahid, the Martyr Prince. Khusrau was captured, escaped, and wrote an elegy for him.

02The frontier

Barani writes that Balban never recovered from the grief, and he died within two years. The succession passed to his grandson Kaiqubad, an incompetent youth, and within three years the Khaljis had seized power. The Mongol frontier on the Beas and Ravi remained the chief military problem of the Delhi Sultanate for the next twenty years, until the great battles of Alauddin Khalji’s reign. Balban had already refused to leave Delhi on distant campaigns for fear of this frontier.

Place · Ancient; tradition names Lava, son of Shri Rama, as founderLahore (Lavapura)The old capital of Punjab on the Ravi, part of the Hindu Shahi realm until Mahmud’s conquest, and from 1799 to 1849 the capital of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Sikh empire. At Partition in 1947 nearly all its Hindus and Sikhs had to leave.Read →