The Middle Ages was a time of great cruelty and kings ruled without regard to individual rights. This was especially true of the Sultan Muhammad Tughluq of the Sultanate of Delhi in India. Even Ibn Battuta feared for his life! He tells us of a friend of his, a religious leader. The shaikh Shinab al-Din had called the Sultan Muhammad Tughluq an oppressor and refused to follow his orders. He was imprisoned and tortured:
"On the fourteen day, the Sultan sent him food ... but he refused to eat it. ... When the Sultan heard this he ordered that the shaikh should be fed human excrement [dissolved in water]... [They] spread out the shaikh on his back, opened his mouth with forceps, ... and made him drink it. On the following day.... he was beheaded." [Gibb, p. 699 - 700]
Others were tortured to get confessions: "They were laid flat on their backs and on the chests ... was placed a red-hot iron plate, which was pulled off after a moment and took with it the flesh of their chests. After that, urine and cinders were brought and put on their wounds, whereupon they confessed..." [Gibb, p. 701]
Ibn Battuta also tells of the execution of some men and a boy: "On the Sultan's orders they were strung up by their hands to a wooden stake and [the soldiers] shot arrows at them until they died." [Gibb, p. 707]
When the Sultan was trying to relocate his capital further south, he became angry at the whole city of Delhi for their reluctance to move and he took out his anger against them all. "...one of the gravest charges against the Sultan is his forcing of the population of Delhi to evacuate the city... [because] of insults and abuse... So he decided to lay Delhi in ruins, and having bought from all the inhabitants their houses and dwellings and paid their price to them, he commanded them to move out of the city and go to Dawlat Abad. They refused, so his herald was sent to proclaim that no person should remain in it after three nights. The majority of the citizens left, but some of them hid in the house. The Sultan ordered a search to be made ... and his slaves found two men in the streets, one of them a cripple and the other blind... He ordered the cripple should be flung from a [catapult] and the blind man dragged from Delhi to Dawlat Abad, a distance of forty days' journey. He fell to pieces on the road, and all of him that reached Dawlat Abad was his leg." [Gibb, p. 707 - 708]
Other kings were equally cruel. Ibn Battuta tells us of King Kabak of Transoxiana or Chagatay and how he settled a dispute about a drink of milk!
"...a woman laid a complaint before [the king] against one of the amirs (military leaders). She stated that she was a poor woman with children to support, that she had some milk [for sale] with the price of which she would procure food for them, and that the amir had taken it from her by force, and drunk it. [The king] said to her, 'I shall cut him in two; if the milk comes out of his belly, he has gone to his fate, but if not I shall cut you in two after him'. The woman said, '[No,] I release him from the obligation... But [the king] gave the order, the man was cut in two, and the milk came out of his stomach." [Gibb, p. 557]