Composition and Role of the Army in the Delhi Sultanate

When the Turks established their rule over northern India in the early thirteenth century, their power rested on one foundation above all others: the army. The Delhi Sultanate, which stretched across large parts of the subcontinent for over three centuries, was fundamentally a military state. Its sultans were soldiers first and administrators second, and the survival of the throne depended on keeping a fighting force that was loyal, disciplined, and ready to march. The thinker Ziauddin Barani, who served at the Sultanate’s court and wrote extensively on statecraft, understood this clearly. For him, a well-managed army was not just a tool of conquest but the very condition of stable rule. This post explores how the Sultanate’s army was put together, how it was organised, and why political thinkers like Barani placed it at the heart of royal authority.

A military state built on conquest
The composition of the army
Cavalry: the backbone of the force
Infantry, elephants, and siege weapons
Categories of soldiers
How the army was organised
The decimal command structure
The Diwan-i-Arz and the Ariz-i-Mamalik
The iqta system and the problem of loyalty
Alauddin Khalji’s military reforms
Barani’s advice on the army
Why a strong army mattered to Barani
The army and the spread of Islam
Why the army was central to royal authority

A military state built on conquest

The Delhi Sultanate emerged from conquest, and conquest required a permanent capacity for war. The early sultans drew heavily on the Central Asian traditions of warfare brought by the Turks and influenced by the Mongols, which emphasised fast-moving cavalry and the mobility of troops. These were the tactics that had allowed the Turks to overcome their Rajput adversaries during the thirteenth century. Over time, however, the Turkish military framework absorbed Indian practices too, especially the large-scale use of elephants and the expansion of the infantry, which came to be staffed mostly by Indian soldiers.

The Sultan stood at the apex of this system as the supreme commander. He was the commander-in-chief who could either lead the army into war personally or appoint another to lead it. This concentration of military authority in the ruler was deliberate. An army that answered to the Sultan alone was far harder for ambitious nobles to turn against the throne.

The composition of the army

The Sultanate’s army was made up of several distinct arms, each with a specific role on the battlefield. Understanding this composition helps explain how the force functioned as a whole.

Cavalry: the backbone of the force

The cavalry was the most important and powerful unit in the army. Mounted soldiers were equipped with swords, daggers, and bows, and their horses gave the Sultans their decisive edge over Indian armies, which made it logical to focus resources on cavalry. The Turks introduced tactics learned in Central Asia and Afghanistan, including the use of mounted archers as light troops who would harass the enemy with arrows, throw their ranks into disorder, and then make way for a heavily armoured charge.

Infantry, elephants, and siege weapons

Below the cavalry came the infantry, a large body of foot soldiers drawn substantially from the Indian population. The elephant corps formed a third major arm. War elephants served as mobile platforms that could break enemy formations through sheer impact, while their sight and sound often panicked enemy horses and troops. Elephants were also valuable in siege operations, used to batter gates or as raised platforms for archers.

For attacking forts, the army relied on a form of mechanical artillery. Siege engines such as the manjaniq (catapult), charkh (crossbow), and maghribi (a mechanical stone-thrower) were used to hurl heavy projectiles over fortress walls. Movable towers known as garghaj allowed attackers to approach defended positions.

Categories of soldiers

The army was not a single uniform body. Broadly, it included soldiers directly recruited and paid by the Sultan, troops maintained permanently by nobles and provincial governors who were placed at the Sultan’s service when needed, soldiers recruited temporarily during war and paid only for that period, and volunteers who joined particular campaigns. The Sultan also kept his own personal troops and elite bodyguards for his security, ensuring that a reliable force was always close at hand.

How the army was organised

The administration and structure of the army gave it coherence. Two features stand out: the decimal system of command and the central department that managed military affairs.

The decimal command structure

The organisation of ranks rested largely on a decimal system inherited from Turko-Mongol practice. According to this arrangement, ten horsemen formed a unit under an officer called the sar-i-khail, a sipahsalar commanded ten such units, an amir commanded ten sipahsalars, a malik commanded ten amirs, and a khan commanded ten maliks. In principle, this produced a clean chain of command rising from a handful of soldiers up to commanders of tens of thousands.

In practice, the system was rarely followed strictly. Promotion, demotion, and dismissal of officers depended on the personal goodwill of the Sultan, and some offices became hereditary over time. Weak rulers often failed to keep merit as the basis for appointments, which gradually undermined the army’s discipline.

The Diwan-i-Arz and the Ariz-i-Mamalik

Military affairs were managed by a dedicated department called the Diwan-i-Arz, headed by the Ariz-i-Mamalik, who was responsible for recruiting, training, and maintaining the armed forces. It is important to note that the Ariz was not the commander-in-chief; that role belonged to the Sultan alone. The Ariz’s responsibility was administrative: to recruit, equip, and pay the troops. The department was first set up under Balban and later strengthened by Alauddin Khalji, who insisted on regular musters of the armed forces.

The iqta system and the problem of loyalty

A central challenge for the Sultanate was paying for such a large force. One solution was the iqta system. Territories were assigned to nobles and governors known as muqtis or walis, who collected taxes in their assigned lands, used part of the money to raise a local army that would support the Sultan when required, and remitted the rest to the treasury. This allowed the state to maintain armies across a vast empire without paying every soldier directly from the centre.

The iqta system carried a built-in risk. Soldiers maintained by nobles owed their immediate loyalty to those nobles, not to the Sultan. A powerful governor with his own army could become a threat to the throne. This tension between decentralised military maintenance and centralised royal control runs through the whole history of the Sultanate.

Alauddin Khalji’s military reforms

No ruler addressed this problem more decisively than Alauddin Khalji. Facing repeated Mongol invasions and rebellious chiefs, he set out to build a large standing army loyal to himself alone. His reforms are the clearest example of how military and economic policy were linked in the Sultanate.

Alauddin laid the foundation of a standing army that was directly recruited and paid by the state, addressing corruption such as false muster rolls and attendance by proxy. To stop nobles from drawing salaries for fictitious soldiers, he introduced two famous measures. The dagh system branded each army horse with a specific mark, while the chehra system recorded every soldier’s physical description, preventing fraud and letting the Sultan know the true strength and quality of his force.

Crucially, Alauddin paid his soldiers in cash rather than through land grants. This shift reduced dependence on feudal lords and tied the soldiers’ loyalty directly to the Sultan. Paying cash salaries, however, meant those salaries had to stretch far enough to support a soldier’s family. This was a major reason behind Alauddin’s market control policy, which fixed the prices of essential goods so that modest salaries remained workable. According to Barani, who is the main source for these reforms, the Sultan’s objective was to maintain an unprecedentedly large army, with low prices making low salaries acceptable for the soldiers.

Barani’s advice on the army

Ziauddin Barani was the most significant political thinker of the Sultanate, and his views on the army carry particular weight. His treatise the Fatawa-i-Jahandari, written as a set of counsels for Muslim rulers, has been compared to Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Machiavelli’s Prince as a classic work on statecraft. The work is organised as twenty-four pieces of advice, and one of them, Advice VII, is devoted entirely to the army.

Why a strong army mattered to Barani

For Barani, the army was inseparable from the survival of the state. He emphasised the importance of a strong and disciplined military to protect the state from external threats and maintain internal order. Beneath the apparent contradictions in his writing, scholars have identified a single consistent concern: the protection, consolidation, and expansion of the Sultanate. The army was the instrument through which all three goals were achieved.

Barani therefore advised the Sultan to ensure that the army remained efficient and loyal. He linked the quality of officers directly to the health of the kingdom, believing that severe punishments and the appointment of worthless officers would ruin the kingdom and weaken the Sultan’s authority. For him, careful selection of commanders and firm discipline were not optional refinements but essentials of governance.

The army and the spread of Islam

Barani’s thought also tied the army to religion. As a conservative thinker who advocated the implementation of the Sharia, he saw military strength as serving the larger aim of establishing and expanding Islamic rule. His work is often read as a prescriptive vision of an ideal Islamic state rather than a neutral description, presenting the political ideals a Muslim ruler should pursue to gain religious merit and the gratitude of subjects. In this framework, the army was both the shield of the state and an instrument of its religious mission.

It is worth noting that Barani wrote as an idealist looking back on the reigns of eight sultans he had witnessed. His advice often reads as a lament over the gap between how rulers actually behaved and how he believed they should behave. His emphasis on a loyal, disciplined, well-led army reflects exactly the qualities he feared were slipping away in his own time.

Why the army was central to royal authority

Pulling these threads together, the army was central to the Delhi Sultanate for several connected reasons. It was the means of conquest that had created the state, the instrument that defended it against Mongol invasions and internal rebellion, and the force that allowed sultans to project authority across a sprawling territory. The recurring problem of keeping that force loyal to the throne, rather than to powerful nobles, shaped some of the most important reforms of the period, especially those of Alauddin Khalji. And in the political thought of Barani, the army stood as the foundation on which just rule, royal authority, and the broader aims of the state all depended.

What do you think? Was Alauddin Khalji’s centralised, cash-paid standing army a more stable foundation for royal authority than the decentralised iqta system, or did each carry risks the other avoided? And how far do you think Barani’s idealised advice on the army reflected the real military practices of the Sultanate, rather than the world he wished existed?

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References

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Table of Contents

A military state built on conquest 🔗

The composition of the army 🔗

Cavalry: the backbone of the force 🔗

Infantry, elephants, and siege weapons 🔗

Categories of soldiers 🔗

How the army was organised 🔗

The decimal command structure 🔗

The Diwan-i-Arz and the Ariz-i-Mamalik 🔗

The iqta system and the problem of loyalty 🔗

Alauddin Khalji’s military reforms 🔗

Barani’s advice on the army 🔗

Why a strong army mattered to Barani 🔗

The army and the spread of Islam 🔗

Why the army was central to royal authority 🔗