Sultanate of Ahmadnagar

The Nizam Shahi sultanate of Ahmadnagar was the middle of the five states that divided the Bahmani kingdom, and the one the Mughals took the longest to swallow. Malik Ahmad, a Bahmani governor whose father had been a Brahmin convert from Vijayanagara, defeated the last Bahmani army in 1490, founded a city he named after himself, and set up a dynasty that lasted a hundred and forty-six years. Its territory ran across the north-western Deccan from the Western Ghats towards Berar, with Bijapur to the south and Golconda to the east, which meant a century of wars with both over the Bahmani inheritance and, at intervals, alliances with either against Vijayanagara. The alliance that mattered was Hussain Nizam Shah's in 1564: his daughter's marriage to Bijapur sealed the coalition that destroyed Vijayanagara at Talikota the next year, and the Ahmadnagar artillery did much of the killing. The state was Shia from Burhan Nizam Shah's conversion in 1537, patronised Persian poets and Deccani painters, and built the Farah Bagh palace and the fort whose walls still stand. Its governing weakness was succession: after 1588 a run of sultans were murdered, deposed or crowned in infancy, and the factions fought over regents. That is when the Mughals came. Akbar's son Murad besieged the city in 1595 and Chand Bibi, regent for a child, held the breach; the treaty that followed cost Berar. The city fell in 1600 after she was killed by her own garrison, and the Mughals installed a puppet - but the state did not die, because the Abyssinian minister Malik Ambar rebuilt it from the countryside, with a Maratha cavalry, a new capital at Daulatabad and a land-revenue system the Marathas later copied, and fought the Mughals to a standstill for twenty-five years. Shahaji Bhonsle, Shivaji's father, was its last general. Shah Jahan annexed what remained in 1636 and split it with Bijapur. The city is in Maharashtra and is now spelt Ahilyanagar.

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