Don't know where this goes. From
Dhu's book link to Will Durant's Story of Civilization. This is not Vol II though, its link is just called The Story of Civilization and contains the chapters on India that preceed those in Vol II.
http://www.archive.org/details/storyofci...t035369mbp PDF
From p.563-565 of the pdf (p.459-461 of book/printed text) onwards:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In one day all this power and luxury were destroyed. Slowly the
conquering Moslems had made their way south; now the sultans of
Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golkonda and Bidar united their forces to reduce
this last stronghold of the native Hindu kings. Their combined armies
met Rama Raja's half-million men at Talikota; the superior numbers of
the attackers prevailed; <b>Rama Raja was captured and beheaded in the
sight of his followers, and these, losing courage, fled. Nearly a hundred
thousand of them were slain in the retreat, until all the streams were colored
with their blood.</b> The conquering troops plundered the wealthy capital,
and found the booty so abundant "that every private man in the allied
army became rich in gold, jewels, effects, tents, arms, horses and slaves."71
<b>For five months the plunder continued: the victors slaughtered the helpless
inhabitants in indiscriminate butchery, emptied the stores and shops,
smashed the temples and palaces, and labored at great pains to destroy
all the statuary and painting in the city; then they went through the
streets with flaming torches, and set fire to all that would burn.</b> When at
last they retired, Vijayanagar was as completely ruined <b>as if an earthquake
had visited it and had left not a stone upon a stone. It was a destruction
ferocious and absolute, typifying that terrible Moslem conquest
of India which had begun a thousand years before, and was now
complete.</b>
<b>VI. THE MOSLEM CONQUEST</b>
<i>The 'weakening of India Mahmud of Ghazni - The Sultanate of
Delhi - Its cultural asides - Its brutal policy - The lessson of
Indian history</i>
The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story
in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization
is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty,
culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading
from without or multiplying within. The Hindus had allowed their
strength to be wasted in internal division and war; they had adopted religions
like Buddhism and Jainism, which unnerved them for the tasks
of life; they had failed to organize their forces for the protection of their
frontiers and their capitals, their wealth and their freedom, from the
hordes of Scythians, Huns, Afghans and Turks hovering about India's
boundaries and waiting for national weakness to let them in. For four
hundred years (600-1000 A.D.) India invited conquest; and at last it came.
The first Moslem attack was a passing raid upon Multan, in the western
Punjab (664 A.D.) Similar raids occurred at the convenience of the invaders
during the next three centuries, with the result that the Moslems
established themselves in the Indus valley about the same time that
their Arab co-religionists in the West were fighting the battle of Tours
(732 A.D.) for the mastery of Europe. But the real Moslem conquest of
India did not come till the turn of the first millennium after Christ.
In the year 997 a Turkish chieftain by the name of Mahmud became
sultan of the little state of Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan. Mahmud knew
that his throne was young and poor, and saw that India, across the border,
was old and rich; the conclusion was obvious. Pretending a holy zeal for
destroying Hindu idolatry, he swept across the frontier with a force inspired
by a pious aspiration for booty. <b>He met the unprepared Hindus
at Bhimnagar, slaughtered them, pillaged their cities, destroyed their temples,
and carried away the accumulated treasures of centuries.</b> Returning
to Ghazni he astonished the ambassadors of foreign powers by displaying
"jewels and unbored pearls and rubies shining like sparks, or like wine
congealed with ice, and emeralds like fresh sprigs of myrtle, and diamonds
in size and weight like pomegranates."73 <b>Each winter Mahmud descended
into India, filled his treasure chest with spoils, and amused his men with
full freedom to pillage and kill;</b> each spring he returned to his capital
richer than before. At <b>Mathura (on the Jumna)</b> he took from the temple
its statues of gold encrusted with precious stones, and emptied its coffers
of a vast quantity of gold, silver and jewelry; <b>he expressed his admiration
for the architecture of the great shrine, judged that its duplication would
cost one hundred million dinars and the labor of two hundred years, and
then ordered it to be soaked with naphtha and burnt to the ground.</b>73
Six years later he sacked another opulent city of northern India, <b>Somnath,
killed all its fifty thousand inhabitants,</b> and dragged its wealth to Ghazni.
In the end he became, perhaps, the richest king that history has ever
known. <b>Sometimes he spared the population of the ravaged cities, and
took them home to be sold as slaves; but so great was the number of such
captives that after some years no one could be found to offer more than
a few shillings for a slave.</b> Before every important engagement Mahmud
knelt in prayer, and asked the blessing of God upon his arms. He reigned
for a third of a century; and when he died, full of years and honors,
Moslem historians ranked him as the greatest monarch of his time, and
one of the greatest sovereigns of any age.74
Seeing the canonization that success had brought to this magnificent
thief, other Moslem rulers profited by his example, though none succeeded
in bettering his instruction. In 1186 the Ghuri, a Turkish tribe of Afghan-
istan, invaded India, captured the city of Delhi, destroyed its temples,
confiscated its wealth, and settled down in its palaces to establish the
Sultanate of Delhi--an alien despotism fastened upon northern India for
three centuries, and checked only by assassination and revolt. <b>The first
of these bloody sultans, Kutb-d Din Aibak, was a normal specimen of
his kind--fanatical, ferocious and merciless. His gifts, as the Mohammedan
historian tells us, "were bestowed by hundreds of thousands, and his
slaughters likewise were by hundreds of thousands." In one victory of
this warrior (who had been purchased as a slave), "fifty thousand men
came under the collar of slavery, and the plain became black as pitch with
Hindus."</b>75 Another sultan, Balban, punished rebels and brigands by casting
them under the feet of elephants, or removing their skins, stuffing
these with straw, and hanging them from the gates of Delhi. When some
Mongol inhabitants who had settled in Delhi, and had been converted to
Islam, attempted a rising, Sultan Alau-d-din (the conqucrer of Chitor)
had all the males from fifteen to thirty thousand of them slaughtered
in one day. Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlak acquired the throne by
murdering his father, became a great scholar and an elegant writer,
dabbled in mathematics, physics and Greek philosophy, surpassed his
predecessors in bloodshed and brutality, fed the flesh of a rebel nephew
to the rebel's wife and children, ruined the country with reckless inflation,
<b>and laid it waste with pillage and murder till the inhabitants fled to
the jungle. He killed so many Hindus that, in the words of a Moslem
historian, "there was constantly in front of his royal pavilion and his Civil
Court a mound of dead bodies and a heap of corpses, while the sweepers
and executioners were wearied out by their work of dragging" the victims
"and putting them to death in crowds."</b>70 In order to found a new
capital at Daulatabad he drove every inhabitant from Delhi and left it a
desert; and hearing that a blind man had stayed behind in Delhi, he ordered
him to be dragged from the old to the new capital, so that only a leg
remained of the wretch when his last journey was finished.77 The Sultan
complained that the people did not love him, or recognize his undeviating
justice. He ruled India for a quarter of a century, and died in bed. His
successor, <b>Firoz Shah, invaded Bengal, offered a reward for every Hindu
head, paid for 180,000 of them, raided Hindu villages for slaves, and
died at the ripe age of eighty. Sultan Ahmad Shah feasted for three days
whenever the number of defenseless Hindus slain in his territories in one
day reached twenty thousand.</b>78<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Short clips of some of islamic record in India. Religion of peace. Same as today, same as ever.
