Collection · 1 essay · 34 entries
Bengal Sultanate
Everything the archive holds on Bengal Sultanate, gathered from across the map. The Atlas files a topic once, in one branch; a collection brings back together what that filing separates.
Essays
Entries
- DynastyBengal — the Delhi Governors and Independent Sultans — 1198 – 1576
- PersonFakhruddin Mubarak Shah — r. c. 1338 – 1340
- PersonAla-ud-din Ali Shah — r. 1338 – c. 1340
- PersonShams-ud-din Ilyas Shah — r. c. 1342 – 1358
- PersonGhiyas-ud-din (Bengal) — r. 1367 – 1374
- PersonSultan-us-Salatin (Bengal) — r. 1374 – 1383
- PersonShams-ud-din II (Bengal) — r. 1383 – 1386
- PersonRaja Kans — r. 1386 – 1392
- PersonJalaluddin Muhammad Shah — r. 1392 – c. 1409
- PersonAhmad Shah (Bengal) — r. c. 1400/1409 – c. 1420
- PersonNasir-ud-din Gholam — r. 1420 (days)
- PersonNasir Shah (Bengal) — r. 1420 – 1428
- PersonBarbak Shah (Bengal) — r. 1428 – 1435
- PersonYusuf Shah (Bengal) — r. 1435 – 1457
- PersonSikandar Shah II — r. 1457 (one day)
- PersonJalaluddin Fath Shah — r. 1457 – 1481
- PersonBarbak Shah (Habshi) — r. 1481 (two months)
- PersonSaifuddin Firuz Shah — r. c. 1480 – 1493
- PersonNasiruddin Mahmud Shah II — r. 1493 – c. 1494
- PersonShamsuddin Muzaffar Shah — r. c. 1492 – 1496
- PersonAlauddin Husain Shah — r. 1496 – 1523
- PersonNasiruddin Nusrat Shah — r. 1523 – 1538
- PersonGhiyasuddin Mahmud Shah — r. 1538
- PersonBahadur Shah Sur — r. c. 1544 – 1549
- PersonSulaiman Karrani — r. 1553 – 1573
- PersonBayazid Karrani — r. 1573 (one month)
- PersonDaud Khan Karrani — r. 1573 – 1584
- PersonSaifuddin Hamza Shah — r. c. 1374 – 1384 (contested chronology)
- PersonShihabuddin Bayazid Shah — r. c. 1384 – 1387 (contested)
- PersonAlauddin Firuz Shah — r. 1533 (about one year)
- PersonMuhammad Khan Sur — r. 1553 – 1555 (governor of Bengal from 1545)
- PersonGhiyasuddin (Jallalu-d-din) Jalal Shah — r. 1561 – 1564
- PersonGhiyasuddin (personal name not given by the source), son of Jalal Shah — r. 1564 (about seven months)
- PersonTaj Khan Karrani — r. 1564 – 1565 (as governor for his brother Sulaiman)
The edge of what is written
Mapped on the Atlas, nothing written yet:
Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah — founder 1352 · Gaur & Pandua — the capitals · Ghiyasuddin Azam Shah — Hafiz's correspondent · Raja Ganesha & Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah · Alauddin Husain Shah 1494–1519 · Sher Shah's conquest 1538 · The Karrani Dynasty · Fall to Akbar 1576
What the archive does not know
Every unresolved question the sources left open across this collection, gathered in one place rather than buried at the foot of each page.
**The forced-conversion claim needs proper handling and this essay does not settle it.** The account of Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah quotes James Wise, writing in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in **1894**, that "the only condition he offered was either the Koran or death". That is a single colonial-era article, and it sits in the same source as a description of a peaceful sixteen-year reign with embassies to three empires. The archive reports its existence and provenance and asserts nothing: a nineteenth-century British claim of mass forced conversion is exactly the kind of statement its method requires be traced to its earliest attestation before use. It is also directly contradicted, as a general explanation, by the agrarian account of Bengal's Islamisation that the archive's Shah Jalal essay sets out.
No Bengali or Persian source was read for this essay, and none of the sultanate's own chronicles, inscriptions or coins. For a state defined by its mint towns, an essay that never examines a taka is thin.
The Adina Mosque's temple spolia is stated as fact by the source and not evidenced there — no excavation report, no inscription, no inventory of reused pieces is cited. The claim is architecturally commonplace and probably right, but the archive should establish which survey records it before treating the detail as settled.
The five dynasties are named and only two are described here. The Ilyas Shahi (150 years) and the Hussain Shahi (the cultural peak, and the dynasty of the 1505 Sylhet inscription) both deserve their own treatment; the Hussain Shahis in particular are credited with the sultanate's height and appear in this essay only as the family that succeeded the Habshis.
Ulugh Khan Jahan built a UNESCO World Heritage city and is one clause in this essay. Who he was, what his relationship to the sultans was, and why a general founded an urban complex of that scale at Bagerhat are unexamined.
Bengal's relationship with Arakan — brought under Bengali suzerainty by Jalaluddin, and later the destination of Bengali Muslim migration — is named twice and never described. It is the sultanate's most consequential external relationship for the modern history of the region.
This is the archive's third Bengal essay and Bengal still has no collection: the region node holds two directly-tagged essays against a threshold of three. That is the progress instrument working as designed, and the next cross-branch Bengal essay will light it up.