Bahman Shah spent most of his reign consolidating a kingdom in the Deccan and strengthening his hold over those Muslim nobles who chose to remain there rather than to join Muḥammad ibn Tughluq in northern India. He adopted the four territorial divisions (ṭarafs) established by Muḥammad ibn Tughluq for his own administration and established departments and appointed functionaries similar to those of the Delhi sultanate. Working outward from his capital, he was able to establish his authority over the western half of the Deccan plateau and to impose an annual tribute upon the Hindu state of Warangal, which had also emerged from the breakup of the Deccan portion of the Tughluq empire. Often, however, the tribute was not paid, and a number of wars were fought over the question of whether the Bahmanīs could maintain a superior position in relation to their eastern neighbours, including also the Reddi kingdoms of Rajahmundry and Kondavidu, in the following years.

Muḥammad Shah I (reigned 1358–75), son and successor of Bahman Shah, began the struggle with Vijayanagar that was to outlast the Bahmanī sultanate and continue, as a many-sided conflict, into the 17th century. There were at least 10 wars during the period 1350–1500, most of which were concerned with control over the Tungabhadra-Krishna Doab. The doab had been an area of contention long before the foundation of either the Bahmanī kingdom or Vijayanagar. Claims and counterclaims of victory show that neither side gained effective and lasting control over the doab, and the struggle extended eventually into the Konkan and Andhra regions. In his wars against Vijayanagar and Telingana (Warangal), Muḥammad Shah made use of newly organized artillery to defeat an army much larger than his own. His two wars with Vijayanagar gained him little, but his attack on Telingana in 1363 brought him a large indemnity, including the turquoise throne and the town of Golconda with its dependencies; in 1365 his rapid response to a rebellion by the governor of Daulatabad and some Maratha and other chieftains of Berar and Baglana led to a quick victory. The sultan devoted the last decade of his reign to consolidating his hold over the territories in his possession. Institutional and geographic consolidation under Muḥammad Shah laid a solid foundation for the kingdom. His legacy was soon disturbed, however, when his son and successor, ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Mujāhid (reigned 1375–78), was assassinated by his cousin Dāʾūd while returning from a campaign in Vijayanagar. Dāʾūd was in turn murdered by ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn’s partisans, who then set Dāʾūd’s brother Muḥammad II (reigned 1378–97) on the throne and blinded Dāʾūd’s son. These political difficulties enabled Vijayanagar to take away Goa and other territory along the western coast, but the rest of Muḥammad II’s reign was peaceful, and the sultan spent much of his time building his court as a center of culture and learning.

Several political and cultural tendencies that emerged at this time had significant effects on the development of the Bahmanī state and its successors. Although the state had been organized by a group of dissident nobles from the Delhi sultanate, differences in both the culture and the political affiliation of the nobilities developed, largely because of differences in recruiting patterns. Soon after the foundation of the Bahmanī state, large numbers of Arabs, Turks, and particularly Persians began to immigrate to the Deccan, many of them at the invitation of Sultan Muḥammad I, and there they had a strong influence on the development of Muslim culture during subsequent generations. The new settlers (āfāqīs) also had a political effect, as they soon began competing successfully for important positions within the political hierarchy. The original rebels from the Delhi sultanate and their descendants, who came to be called dakhnīs (i.e., Deccanis—from the Deccan), thought of themselves as the old nobility and thus resented the success of the newcomers. The situation was comparable to that of the Delhi sultanate, in which a party of entrenched nobles had tried to protect their privileged position against newcomers who were developing claims to power. Thus, the distribution of high offices among Persian newcomers by Sultan Ghiyāth al-Dīn (Muḥammad II’s oldest son, who ruled for about two months) in 1397 was seen as a threat by the old nobles and Turks and was probably a major reason for his assassination. Later the addition of Hindu converts and Hindus to the nobility complicated the situation further, as it had in the north, but the division between Deccanis and āfāqīs (hereinafter called newcomers) was most significant and contributed to the disintegration of the Bahmanī state.

Muḥammad II’s peaceful reign was followed by a year of succession disputes caused both by party conflicts and by dynastic rivalries. When Muḥammad’s cousins Aḥmad and Fīrūz finally gained control, Fīrūz succeeded as Fīrūz Shah Bahmanī. His reign (1397–1422) was a period of notable cultural activity in the Bahmanī sultanate, as well as one of continued development of the trend toward wider political participation. Noted for his intelligence and learning, Fīrūz established on the Bhima River his new capital, Firuzabad, as the greatest center of Muslim culture in India at a time when the Delhi sultanate was rapidly dissolving. Perhaps in an effort to balance the continuing influx of Persians, as well as to strengthen his own position as a ruler who was above all the nobles and who recognized the realities of political power, Fīrūz gave a number of high offices to Hindus (Brahmans) and married several Hindu women, including the daughter of the king of Vijayanagar. Thus, the parallel with the earlier development of the Delhi sultanate nobility continued. The fact that Hindus were becoming politically more significant at a time when the military rivalry with Vijayanagar was renewed suggests a political rather than a religious motivation for that rivalry.

Fīrūz stopped an invasion in the north by the Gond raja of Kherla in Madhya Pradesh and conducted two moderately successful campaigns against Vijayanagar. The first brought him a tribute payment and temporary military control over the Raichur Doab, while the second ended with his marriage to the Vijayanagar king’s daughter and the establishment of an apparently amicable relationship between the two rulers. The peace lasted for only 10 years, however, and a third war (1417–20) ended in a disastrous defeat for Fīrūz by the united forces of Vijayanagar and Fīrūz’s former allies, the Velama faction of the Reddi ruling group in Andhra. The Vemas of Kondavidu, once hostile, now joined the sultan. Fīrūz’s position was so weakened by the defeat that he was forced to abdicate in favor of his brother Aḥmad, who had the support of most of the army.

One of the first acts of the new sultan, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad I (reigned 1422–36), was to move the capital from Gulbarga to Bidar, which was surrounded by more fertile ground and had become more centrally located now that some territory had been gained to the southeast, in Telingana. Perhaps, also, the move signified Aḥmad’s expansionist ambitions, for in 1425 he defeated and killed the Velama ruler of Warangal and finally annexed most of Telingana, bringing his eastern border to the edge of Orissa. During the next decade, however, rebellions forced Aḥmad to allow local chieftains to rule as tributaries throughout much of the area.

External and internal rivalries

Although the Bahmanī state had been threatened from the north earlier, it was during Aḥmad’s reign that conflicts first broke out with the northern neighbours Malwa and Gujarat. The breakdown of centralized authority within the Delhi sultanate and the consequent rise of provincial kingdoms meant that new rivalries could develop on a regional basis, and the Bahmanī sultans found themselves contending with two of the successor states of the Delhi sultanate in an arena where their expansionist ambitions had some chance of success. A border dispute with Malwa led to a Bahmanī victory and a short-lived recognition of the chieftainship of Kherla as a Bahmanī protectorate. Aḥmad I then forged an alliance with another northern neighbour, Khandesh, which acted as a buffer between Bahmanī and the kingdoms of Malwa and Gujarat. On the pretext of giving aid to a Hindu chieftain who had revolted against Gujarat, he sent unsuccessful expeditions into Gujarat in 1429 and 1430. The latter defeat was especially significant, as it partly stemmed from rivalries between the Deccani officers and the newcomers from the Middle East, a friction that appears to have become gradually more intense from this point until the decline of the Bahmanī sultanate.

Toward the close of his reign, Aḥmad I named his eldest son as his successor and gave him full charge of the administration; he parceled out the provinces (ṭarafs) among his other sons, exacting from them promises that they would be loyal to the new sultan, ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Aḥmad II (reigned 1436–58). Even though Aḥmad II had to face a rebellion by one of his brothers, a precedent was set for a rule of primogeniture, which seemed to alleviate the problem of succession disputes for the rest of the century. Unfortunately for later Bahmanī rulers, rivalries among the nobility were to prove just as detrimental to the fortunes of the dynasty as family disputes were in many other dynasties of the period.

Aḥmad II proved to be a weaker ruler than his father had been, and during his reign the conflicts among the nobles intensified. Two short wars with Vijayanagar in 1436 and 1443–44 were confined to Tungabhadra-Krishna Doab and signified little except the arrival of a new power, the Hindu Gajapati king of Orissa, who allied himself with the Bahmanī ruler in the second campaign. Perhaps more significant in its ultimate effect was the Bahmanī victory over Khandesh in 1438. The force in that campaign was composed exclusively of newcomers, who had convinced the sultan that Deccani treachery had been responsible for the defeat in Gujarat in 1430. The newcomers thereby gained considerable influence with the sultan but at the same time intensified the resentment of the Deccanis, who retaliated in 1446 by massacring a large number of them, with the malleable sultan’s tacit permission. Later, when the sultan was convinced that the newcomers had been unjustly killed, he punished many of the responsible Deccanis and promoted the surviving newcomers. During the last years of his reign, Aḥmad had to face a rebellion in Telingana led by his son-in-law and supported by the sultan of Malwa. It was at this time that Maḥmūd Gāwān, a newly arrived noble from Persia, displayed his military and diplomatic skills by persuading the rebels to desist and the sultan to pardon them.

Under the successors of Aḥmad II, Bahmanī faced continuous disturbances, such as further rebellion in Telingana and three serious onslaughts by Maḥmūd Khaljī of Malwa; the Gajapati king of Orissa joined the fray by making inroads into the heart of the Bahmanī kingdom. Humāyūn (reigned 1458–61) and Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad III (reigned 1461–63) sought the help of Muḥammad Begarā of Gujarat against Malwa and warded off the invasions.