Ahmadnagar Sultanate

A falconer's son takes the canopy

formationDrafted from Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829)

Ahmad Nizam Shah's own father began life as Timapa, a Brahmin boy from Vijayanagara taken captive as a child by a Bahmani army and raised among the sultanate's royal slaves under the name Hasan. His talent won him a place at court, first as a companion to a Bahmani prince and later, under the nickname Bheiry — a mispronunciation of his own father's name that stuck as a title — as a provincial governor and eventually chief minister to the sultanate itself, styled Nizam-ul-Mulk. His son Ahmad inherited both his father's ambition and his enemies.

A father's murder answered with a night attack

While Ahmad was campaigning to expand his own family's estates around Junnar, word reached him that his father had been assassinated at the Bahmani court at Bidar. He broke off his campaign, returned home, and took up his father's own titles rather than submit quietly to whatever faction now controlled the capital. When the Bahmani government sent an army against him under Jahangir Khan, Ahmad struck first: a night attack at dawn on 28 May 1490 routed the royal camp entirely, killing several of its senior officers and scattering the rest.

A capital built on a battlefield

On the ground where he won that battle, Ahmad built a palace and garden his successors would later fortify and expand — the beginning of the city of Ahmadnagar itself. He soon stopped having the Bahmani sultan's name read in the Friday public prayers and substituted his own, though when some of his own officers objected to so open a claim to sovereignty, he backed off just far enough to save appearances, insisting his royal canopy merely shielded him from the sun. His own officers pressed him to reverse course again shortly after, and this time he let his name stand. From Junnar, and then from the new city bearing his name, Ahmad Nizam Shah spent the rest of his reign extending his territory into Daulatabad and the Konkan coast, building an independent kingdom out of the province his own father had once governed for someone else.

Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829) · William Miller · Public domain

A kingdom of regents

expansionDrafted from Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829)

Ahmad Nizam Shah completed the conquest of Daulatabad before his death, persuading its garrison to abandon a Bahmani-appointed governor still loyal, in name, to Gujarat's king, and folded the fortress permanently into his own territory. He reduced hill forts across the southern Khandesh borderlands and compelled the rajas of Galna and Baglana to pay him tribute, leaving his son Burhan a kingdom considerably larger than the one he had carved out of his own rebellion.

Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829) · Vinayaraj · CC BY-SA 4.0

A boy-king and the pattern that followed

Burhan Nizam Shah I came to the throne still a child, in his seventh year, and government passed to a regent minister — a pattern that would recur throughout the dynasty's history far more often than direct rule by an adult king in full command of his own court. Ahmadnagar fought recurring wars with its neighbors Berar and Khandesh over these decades, winning some engagements decisively and losing territory in others, but the kingdom's own internal weakness — a young or absent king, a regent managing rival factions of nobles — proved as persistent a feature of Nizam Shahy rule as any external threat.

A princess who became a queen twice over

Into this pattern married Chand Bibi, a Nizam Shahy princess given in marriage to Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur to seal an alliance between the two houses. Widowed and without her own children to anchor her at Bijapur's court, she eventually returned to Ahmadnagar, her own homeland, at a moment when the kingdom's need for a steady hand at the center had rarely been greater. What she found waiting for her there was not a peaceful regency but a kingdom already contested by rival claimants, a hostile Mughal empire pressing from the north, and, in time, a test of her own authority that no earlier Nizam Shahy regent had faced.

Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829) · Unknown · Public domain

The beheading of Ramraj

expansionDrafted from Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (Vol. III) (1910)

Husain Nizam Shah succeeded his father Burhan I in 1553, still only thirteen, and inherited a kingdom locked in the same running contest with Bijapur that had occupied his father's own forty-seven-year reign - sieges and counter-sieges over the frontier forts of Sholapur and Kulliani, alliances made and broken with the Vijayanagara regent Ramraj as the balance of power required. Husain lost six hundred pieces of cannon in one reverse and was besieged in his own capital in turn, before a chance flood on the Sena river drowned twenty-five thousand of the besieging army in a single night and forced a peace.

Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal, Pune · Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (Vol. III) (1910) · Unknown · Public domain

A confederacy against a common enemy

By 1565 the pattern of shifting alliances had exhausted itself, and the Deccan's Muslim kings - Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, Bidar and Golconda - united instead against the power all of them had by turns allied with and fought: Ramraj himself, whose own dominance over the Deccan's politics had become intolerable to every one of his former partners at once. Ramraj met the combined armies with a force Firishta puts at seventy thousand cavalry and ninety thousand infantry, so confident of victory that he ordered his officers to bring him Bijapur's and Golconda's kings alive, to be kept in iron cages, and Husain Nizam Shah's head specifically.

An elephant's trunk, and an empire undone

The battle turned on artillery: Husain Nizam Shah's own front line, six hundred guns deep and screened by foreign archers, broke the first Hindu charge with such slaughter that the field before the cannon was left "dead close to the muzzles of the guns." When the allied cavalry exploited the confusion and drove into the center of Ramraj's own line, the aged Hindu commander was overtaken on foot by one of Husain Nizam Shah's own war elephants, which seized him in its trunk and carried him to the Nizam Shahy king - who ordered him beheaded on the spot. Ramraj's army broke and fled toward Vijayanagara itself, and the kingdom that had dominated the southern Deccan for two centuries fell to the four allied armies in the campaign that followed. Husain Nizam Shah did not long outlive his own victory: he returned to Ahmadnagar and died there not long after, "of a disorder brought on by excess" - a court poet marking his death with a single line: "the sun of the Deccan has become obscured."

Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal, Pune · Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (Vol. III) (1910) · Unknown · Public domain

A regent's own garrison

endDrafted from Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829)

Chand Bibi's regency for the boy-king Bahadur Nizam Shah unfolded against a Mughal empire steadily tightening its pressure on the Deccan. She secured help from her own nephew, Ibrahim Adil Shah of Bijapur, weathered an attempted coup by her own appointed minister, Muhammad Khan, whose garrison ultimately turned him over to her for punishment once his secret dealings with the Mughal commander came to light, and organized a coalition army of sixty thousand men drawn from Ahmadnagar, Bijapur and Golconda to contest Mughal advances into Berar. That coalition was defeated at Sonpat, and Mughal forces continued to press closer to the capital itself.

An emperor arrives in person

In the beginning of 1599, the Mughal emperor Akbar himself marched south, unwilling to leave the Deccan campaign to his officers alone. He laid siege to the fortress of Asirgarh while detaching his son, Prince Daniel, and his commander Khan Khanan to move directly against Ahmadnagar. The Nizam Shahy general sent to intercept them was outmaneuvered on the march and forced to retreat, and Mughal troops reached the walls of Ahmadnagar itself without further opposition, beginning a siege with mining operations against the fortifications.

Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829) · SafarNama · CC BY-SA 4.0

A council divided, and a queen without allies

Trusting few of the officers left around her after years of betrayals by her own ministers, Chand Bibi consulted the eunuch officer Humayun Khan, who urged her to fight on. She judged otherwise: better, she said, to negotiate the fort's surrender on terms guaranteeing the garrison's lives and property, and retire with the young king to Junnar, than to trust men who had already failed her repeatedly. Humayun Khan ran into the streets proclaiming that the queen meant to betray the garrison to the Mughals. The soldiers who heard him, believing it, broke into her private apartments and killed her.

A fortress taken, a kingdom's independent rule ended

Within days of Chand Bibi's death, Mughal mines breached the walls in several places, and Akbar's troops stormed the fortress, giving little quarter to those inside. Bahadur Nizam Shah and the royal family were taken prisoner; the regalia and treasury were sent to Akbar at Burhanpur, and the deposed king was confined at the fortress of Gwalior, where the source notes he still remained as it was written. Nizam Shahy officers who escaped the fall proclaimed a new king and held out for a time from Paranda, and in the years that followed an Abyssinian former slave named Malik Ambar built a fresh resistance around a series of puppet Nizam Shahy princes — but the sultanate that Ahmad Nizam Shah had founded at the site of his own battlefield victory had, in its own original form, ceased to rule itself the moment its capital fell.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston · Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829) · Unknown · Public domain