Kābul

Kabul lies in a high basin on the river of the same name, ringed by the Hindu Kush and set where the passes from Central Asia open toward India. Its citadel, the Bala Hissar, crowns a rocky spur above the town, and orchards and vineyards fed by mountain streams soften the stony landscape. Caravans between Khorasan, Turkestan and Hindustan met in its bazaars, which made the city worth fighting over for centuries.

In the late fourteenth century Kabul passed to Timur and his descendants. Babur, driven out of Samarkand and Ferghana, took it in 1504 and made it his base. He praised its climate and fruit, laid out gardens on the slopes, and from here began the march to Hindustan in 1526. At his own wish he was buried in Kabul in one of them, and Shah Jahan later added a marble mosque beside the tomb. Akbar's half-brother Mirza Hakim governed the city until 1585. Jahangir favoured the garden of Shahrara, Shah Jahan remade the garden of Jahanara, and the governor Ali Mardan Khan built the covered Char Chatta bazaar.

The Mughals lost Kabul to Nader Shah in 1738, and after his death in 1747 it passed to Ahmad Shah Durrani, though by then only about ten thousand people lived there. Timur Shah, his son, moved the Durrani capital from Kandahar to Kabul in the mid-1770s. Under him and Zaman Shah the city grew again around the Bala Hissar, its mosques and its markets. In 1826 Dost Mohammad Khan took power here.