Agra

Agra lies on the Yamuna, on the road from Delhi down into the Gangetic plain, a place of little note until Sultan Sikandar Lodi rebuilt it as his seat of government around 1504. Babur took it after his victory at Panipat in 1526, laid out the Aram Bagh across the river, the first formal Mughal garden in India, and died here in 1530.

Akbar made Agra his capital in 1558 and from 1565 to 1573 rebuilt its fort in red sandstone, with some four thousand men at work each day. The court moved to Fatehpur Sikri in 1571, left for the Punjab in 1585 and returned to Agra in 1598. Nur Jahan raised a marble tomb for her father, Itimad-ud-Daulah, between 1622 and 1628, and in 1632 Shah Jahan began the Taj Mahal for his wife Mumtaz Mahal; the whole complex was finished around 1653. By then he had moved his capital to Shahjahanabad at Delhi, in 1648, and from 1658 his son Aurangzeb kept him a prisoner in the fort until his death in 1666.

Agra declined with the empire. Jats under Rajaram plundered Akbar's tomb at Sikandra in 1688, and Suraj Mal's Jats took the city on 12 June 1761 after a month's siege and melted down the silver doors of the Taj. The Marathas of Mahadji Shinde captured the fort in 1785, and General Lake took it for the East India Company in October 1803. Agra became the seat of the short-lived Presidency of Agra in 1834 and, from 1836, of the North-Western Provinces.