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No. 2.) RAJAHMUNDRY MUSEUM PLATES OF TELUGU CHODA ANNADEVA.
35
Nil.
Nil.
roughly the time when the expedition was undertaken. The facts mentioned by botb the historians are given in the following schedule, for the purposes of comparison : Sayyid 'Ali
Ferishla. (1) Firüz Shah's second war with Vijayanagara ; and his capture
Nil. of Bhānūr and Musalkal. (2) One year after this, he invaded Mabür and made peace with the The Sultan invaded Rāya.
Gondvana i.e. Má
hur in 815 A.H. (3) Hushyar and Bēdār rose to prominence . . . . .
Nil. (4) Death of Kbwāja-i-Jahān, the prime minister of the Sultan . (5) The invasion of Telingāna as far as Rajahmundry, and the con
quest of the country . . . . . . . (6) The siege of Pāngal . . . . . . . . The siege of Nalgonda
Pāngal in 820 A.H. It is obvious that Fīrīz Shāh's expedition to Rajahmundry took place between 815 A.H. and 820 A.H.
Another fact which seems to have some bearing on the subject must be taken into considera - tion here. Notwithstanding the uniform success which attended his arms, and the comparative ease with wbich he subjugated the country, Firūz Shāh is said to have returned to his capital without making an attempt to capture Rajahmundry, although he marched victoriously to the neighbourhood of the city. The reason for his failure to take advantage of the opportunity to capture the city is not quite apparent. Rajahmundry was an important stronghold in the lower valley of the Gõdāvari, and it was the seat of a flourishing Hindu kingdom. The temptation to plunder the city, if not actually to take possession of it, must have been too strong for an orthodox and ambitious Muhammadan king like Firüz Shāh to overcome. Therefore, the return of the Sultan without oven making an attempt to invest the city must be attributed to some obstacle which compelled him to turn back and hasten honiewards.
A few incidental remarks thrown out by the Muslim, historians, wbile describing the siege of Pāngal-Nalkonda by Firūz. Shāh in the middle of 820 A. H. (August, A.D. 1417), seem to suggest that the Sultan was con pelle:l to return by the arrival of a fresh Vijayanagara arn.y in the east. Firishta states that in the middle of the vear 820 A. H., the Sultan made an attack on Pangal commonly known as Nalkonda iu his day, a fort which stood at a distance of eighty farsangs or two hundred and forty wiles from Adõni on the banks of the Tungabhadrā. The authenticity
1 Briggs' Ferishta, Vol. II, pp. 389-90. There are two forte named Pångal in Telingāņa. One of them atands, at a distance of about seventy miles to the east of Adoni, in the Mahbubnagar District of Hyderabad State. This could not have been the Pāngal besieged by Firüz Shāh, as the distance between this fort and Adoni is seventy miles and not two hundred and forty as stated by Firishta.
There is another Pangal, adjoining the town of Nalkonda, the headquarters of the District of the same name in Hyderabad. In fact, Pāngal and Nalkonda are so near each other that they may be regarded as two different suburbs, as it were, of the same town. Moreover, the distance between this fort and Adoni roughly agrees with that given by Firishta.
The name Bilconda which is found both in Briggs' translation and the publishod Persian text (Naval Kishore Press) of Firishta is a corruption of Nalkonda, due to a scribal error commonly met with in Persian mss., lithographs, etc. Some scribe, either due to negligence or ignorance, shifted the dot indicating the phonetic value of the initial letter noon' (u) from the top to the bottom, and changed it into 'be'( ). Consequently, Valkonda ( 3jci) was transformed into Bilkonda ( sh). In one of the mss. in the library of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal the name of the fort in spelt as Malkonda:
در اواسطه سال مذکور قصد تغير پاگل که درین وقت به ملکونده شهرت دارد از قلعه اديني تانجا هشتاد فرسنگ است شده بانصوب لشکر کشید •
-Cat. of Arab. and Pereian mes, in the Library of R. A. S. B. No. D 57 fol. 332A.
