to purchase them by the surrender of all their property, the value of which was estimated by commissaries appointed for the purpose.  The price was always more than they could pay; and after torturing a certain number to death in the attempt to screw the sum out of them, the troops were let in to murder the rest; so that no city, town, or village escaped; and the very grain collected for the army, over and above what they could consume at any stage, was burned, lest it might relieve some hungry infidel of the country who had escaped from the general carnage.

All the soldiers, high and low, were murdered when taken prisoners, as a matter of course; but the officers and soldiers of Timur’s army, after taking all the valuable movables, thought they might be able to find a market for the artificers by whom they were made, and for their families; and they collected together an immense number of men, women, and children.  All who asked for mercy pretended to be able to make something that these Tartars had taken a liking to.  On coming before Delhi, Timur’s army encamped on the opposite or left bank of the river Jumna; and here he learned that his soldiers had collected together above one hundred thousand of these artificers, besides their women and children.  There were no soldiers among them; but Timur thought it might be troublesome either to keep them or to turn them away without their women and children; and still more so to make his soldiers send away these women and children immediately.  He asked whether the prisoners were not for the most part unbelievers in his prophet Muhammad; and being told that the majority were Hindoos, he gave orders that every man should be put to death; and that any officer or soldier who refused to kill or have killed all such men, should suffer death.  ‘As soon as this order was made known,’ says Timur’s historian and great eulogist, ’the officers and soldiers began to put it in execution; and, in less than one hour, one hundred thousand prisoners, according to the smallest computation, were put to death and their bodies thrown into the river Jumna.  Among the rest, Mulana Nasir-ud-din Amr, one of the most venerable doctors of the court, who would never consent so much as to kill a single sheep, was constrained to order fifteen slaves, whom he had in his tents, to be slain.  Timur then gave orders that one-tenth of his soldiers should keep watch over the Indian women, children, and camels taken in the pillage.’[46]

The city was soon after taken, and the people commanded, as usual, to purchase their lives by the surrender of their property—­troops were sent in to take it—­numbers were tortured to death—­and then the usual pillage and massacre of the whole people followed without regard to religion, age, or sex; and about a hundred thousand more of innocent and unoffending people were murdered.  The troops next massacred the inhabitants of the old city, which had become crowded with fugitives from the new;[47] the