Ahmednagar

Ahmednagar lies in the rain shadow of the Western Ghats, on a dry upland of black soil, scattered hills and irrigated fields beside the Sina River. Ahmad Nizam Shah I founded the city in 1494 on the site of the older settlement of Bhingar, after a victory over a larger Bahmani force. Chroniclers describe a surveyed capital with palaces, squares, shops and gardens, and one boasted that within two years it rivalled Baghdad and Cairo.

Ahmednagar was the seat of the Nizam Shahi dynasty, one of the five Deccan sultanates that split from the Bahmanis. In 1565 its sultan joined the others against Vijayanagara at Talikota. The city's great defence came in 1595, when the regent Chand Bibi, queen of the dynasty, led the garrison of the stone fort against a Mughal army; Akbar's men took the fort only in 1600. The regent Malik Ambar then kept the sultanate alive until the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan conquered the city in 1636. Aurangzeb spent the last years of his reign campaigning in the Deccan and died at Ahmednagar in 1707. Maratha rulers later held the city in turn, until a British force under Arthur Wellesley besieged and captured it in 1803, and it passed to the British for good in 1817.