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147 piness to a land which had been sorely tormented. Like his namesake, Firoz the Khalji, the new Sultan had a horror of bloodshed and torture. He had seen too much of both under his cousin's rule, and he resolved that they should cease. " The great and merciful God," he wrote in his own touching memoirs, " taught me, His servant, to hope and seek for His mercy by devot- ing myself to preventing the unlawful slaying of Mos- lems and the infliction of any kind of torture upon them or upon any men." So gentle a king was not made for the glories of conquest; he abhorred war and clearly was no general; if not content to leave the revolted provinces alone, he made little effort to recover them. The Deccan was allowed to become independent under Hasan Gangu, the founder of the Bahmanid dynasty, whose Sultans ruled all the provinces south of the Vindhyas for 180 years. Bengal also remained independent, though Firoz twice attempted to bring it back under subjection. On the first campaign (1353) he was absent from his cap- ital eleven months, and after winning a great battle, in which 180,000 Bengalis are said to have been slain, he refused to storm the fort of Ikdala in which the King of Bengal had taken refuge, for fear of shedding more of the blood of the faithful, and sadly returned to Delhi. In the second expedition, six or seven years later (1359-60), though he had seventy thousand cav- alry, infantry " past numbering," 470 elephants, and all the paraphernalia of war, he concluded a treaty of peace with the Bengal king, and then proceeded to lose him-