A medieval sultan's copper coins turned ordinary homes into counterfeit mints
Short of silver after costly wars, Muhammad bin Tughluq of the Delhi Sultanate issued brass and copper tokens carrying the face value of silver coins. Households simply cast their own. The sultan finally bought back real and fake alike, and heaps of worthless metal piled up inside the walls of Tughlakabad.
The dynasty he belonged to ruled the Delhi Sultanate from 1320 to 1413, the third to do so. Its founder, Ghazi Malik, was governor of Punjab when Delhi's nobles invited him to overthrow Khusro Khan, who had seized power after the Khalji line collapsed. Victorious in 1320, he took the title Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq and built a fortified new city, Tughlakabad, about six kilometres east of Delhi, to resist Mongol raids.
Even the family name is a misunderstanding. Coins, inscriptions and texts show Tughlaq was the founder's personal name, not an ancestral surname; historians apply it to the whole line for convenience. His origins are debated, with most scholars leaning towards Turkic or Turko-Mongol roots, while a court poet's claim of descent from Persian royalty is usually written off as flattery.
The founder's death in 1325 remains murky. Returning from a campaign in Bengal, he died when a wooden pavilion collapsed on him and a favourite son. Court accounts blamed lightning or stampeding elephants, but Ibn Battuta and several later historians concluded that his eldest son, Jauna Khan, had it built to fall. Jauna Khan then reigned for 26 years as Muhammad bin Tughluq, a learned man versed in poetry and law but deeply suspicious and harsh towards opponents.
Under him the sultanate briefly reached its widest extent, across most of the subcontinent, largely through campaigns between 1330 and 1335. He ordered Delhi's Muslim elite to relocate to a second capital at Deogiri, renamed Daulatabad, earning the nobility's lasting resentment. Crushing taxes drove farmers off their land, and famine followed the coinage fiasco. Revolts began in 1327, and new powers such as the Vijayanagara Empire rose in the south. Timur's devastating invasion of 1398 to 1399 finished the dynasty's strength, and Khizr Khan eventually deposed its last sultan.
Source: Tughlaq dynasty
