indiA Gupta imperial rule over northern India ended around 550 as a result of the century-long drain on public resources to de-fend India’s northwestern frontier against repeated attempt
Trang 1Mongol fleets The expense of maintaining a strong defensive
force against potential Mongol invasions, however, eventually
undermined the Kamakura shogunate After defeating the
Kamakura clan in 1338, the Kyoto-based Ashikaga, or
Mu-romachi, shoguns ruled Japan from 1336 to 1467 There was a
further decentralization of authority, but the Ashikaga era is
especially noteworthy for cultural developments that
repre-sented a fusion of the imperial court traditions with samurai
culture The Ashikaga era ended with a century of civil wars
from 1467 to 1568 among rival samurai armies loyal to
re-gional warlords who were consolidating their power.
indiA
Gupta imperial rule over northern India ended around 550 as
a result of the century-long drain on public resources to
de-fend India’s northwestern frontier against repeated attempts
at invasion by eastern Hun seminomads There was a brief
renewal of centralized authority under Harsa (r 606–47), a
military leader of the early seventh century Harsa claimed
that he had restored the Gupta realm Harsa’s was a military
rather than a civilian administration, however After his
death India once again lapsed into a group of regional states
dominated by martial kings or chiefs
At the turn of the second millennium northern India
faced a new onslaught from the northwest by Muslim
invad-ers, most of whom were Turks from central Asia The new
invaders, like numbers of seminomads before them, entered
India via the northwestern passageways Between 1010 and
1525 India was ruled by a series of Muslim dynasties After
1206 the Muslim fortified city of Delhi and its suburbs
be-came the new capital, and the rulers were known collectively
as the Delhi sultans
The initial Muslim invasion was led by Mahmud of
Ghazni (r 997–1030), a warrior based near the present-day
city of Kabul in Afghanistan Mahmud, who was the first
Muslim ruler to take the title of sultan, raided India 17 times
between 1001 and 1025 His heirs continued to have a
pres-ence in the city of Lahore from 1010 to 1156 and in the
Pun-jab region until 1186 Between 1175 and 1205 the Ghurids of
northern Persia extended their authority into northwestern
India Finally, in 1206 the Ghurid warrior Qutb-ud-Din
Ay-bak (r 1206–10) took Delhi AyAy-bak’s successors, collectively
known as the Slave Dynasty, also known as the Mamluk
Dy-nasty, reigned from 1206 to 1290 The Khilji Turks ruled the
Delhi Sultanate from 1290 to 1320, followed by the Tughlaq
Turks (1320–1413), the Sayyid Turks (1414–51), and the Lodhi
Afghan rulers (1451–1526) In 1526 Zahir-ud-Dom
Muham-mad (known as Babur), an Afghan heir of the Mongols (r
1526–30), defeated the Lodhi armies and initiated the
Mu-ghal Dynasty (1556–1707)
The Delhi era of Muslim rule in India is characterized by some scholars as a succession of Turkish dynasties that ruled from their walled fortresses over their largely Hindu subject populations in northern India, from whom they exacted taxes
in return for offering them protection Despite this seeming separation between ruler and ruled, Muslims and Hindus be-gan a productive intercultural dialogue typical of the earlier eras of cultural integration, except that the Muslim rulers allowed Hindus greater opportunity to retain their cultural traditions as long as they submitted to Islamic sovereignty Alongside these developments in northern India, south-ern India was ruled by a series of Hindu dynasties from roughly 600, in part the result of the resettlement of refu-gees from the north The Pallava, Chola, and Pandyan king-doms were based in the multiple river system valleys and fertile plains of India’s southeastern Coromandel Coast The Chera monarchs ruled over the southwestern Malabar Coast Among these dynasties, the Cholas consolidated their control over their rivals in the 10th and 11th centuries They sent suc-cessful military missions to annex the neighboring region of present-day Sri Lanka as well as raiding parties against Ben-gal to the north and the Srivijaya Empire, which at that time controlled the straits of Melaka These straits were a vital maritime passageway between China and India
In the 14th century the Vijayanagara Hindu monarchy (ca 1323–1565), which constructed a lavish court and ritual complex on the southern Deccan plateau of Karnataka, an-nexed the entire southern region The Vijayanagara rulers
incorporated the existing regional warrior elite (nayaka) or
assigned members of the royal military as delegated provin-cial governors Similarly to the contemporary Delhi Sultan-ate system, the Vijayanagara commanders governed from regional military garrisons, in contrast to the previous age, when royal troops were clustered exclusively around the
royal court The nayaka partnered with local elite and
strate-gic temples to control the surrounding rural communities
Sri lAnKA
Anuradhapura was the early center of the Sri Lanka agricul-tural and Theravada Buddhist community It remained the capital city of the island from ancient times until 1000, when invading Tamil Chola armies from southern India plundered the city and established a new capital at Polonnaruwa to the southeast Sri Lanka forces retained Polonnaruwa as their capital when they retook the island in 1070 The state that was based in the new capital reached its height in the reign of Para-kramabahu I (r 1153–86), as Sri Lanka prospered as a center
of the trade network surrounding the Indian Ocean and as the international center of Theravada Buddhist scholarship But
by 1200 this realm had fragmented, in part because the
Tam-368 empires and dynasties: Asia and the Pacific