The move to Daulatabad

Devagiri, the hill fortress of the Yadava kings, had been annexed in 1318. From it the Sultan could govern the new Deccan provinces, which by the late 1320s stretched east to Warangal and south to Madurai. He ordered the officials, scholars and Sufis of Delhi to move there, about a thousand kilometres away. Barani, writing a generation later, says not a cat or a dog was left in Delhi; most historians take that as rhetoric and think the order fell on the Muslim elite rather than the whole city.

The transfer did not hold. By about 1335 the Sultan was back in Delhi, but many of the migrants stayed, and their families supplied much of the governing class of the Deccan's next state. Ma'bar broke away around 1335, Bengal in 1338, and the Deccan itself in 1347.