Bidar

Bidar crowns the Deccan plateau behind a great fort of red laterite, a city of palaces, mosques and tombs set above a triple moat. Its most famous craft is bidri, silver and brass inlaid into a blackened metal ground. The fort's bastions and gates guard a royal complex of palaces and mosques, among them the Solah Khamba mosque and the Rangin Mahal with its coloured tilework.

The Bahmani sultan Ahmad Shah Wali moved his court from Gulbarga to Bidar around 1427, attracted by its cooler air and fertile land, and rebuilt the old fort. Soldiers, merchants and scholars from across the Deccan and Persia came to the new capital. The best-known figure of the new capital was the Persian-born minister Mahmud Gawan, who founded a great madrasa here in 1472, with lecture rooms, a library and a mosque arranged around a courtyard, and taught mathematics, philosophy and theology. Court factions had him executed in 1481. As the Bahmani state fragmented, a local dynasty set up a small sultanate at Bidar, until Bijapur conquered it in 1619. In 1656 Aurangzeb, then viceroy of the Deccan, took the city, and later a store of gunpowder blew up part of the Mahmud Gawan madrasa, which his troops were using as a barracks.