Dynastic History | Buland Darwaza, Fatehpur Sikri — A Capital of Fourteen Years

Akbar moved his court onto this sandstone ridge in 1571. The reason the court gave was religious: a son, Salim, had been born at the village of Sikri in 1569 near the khanqah of Shaikh Salim Chishti, and Abu'l-Fazl's Akbarnama has the emperor honouring the shaikh who had foretold the birth. The stone was quarried from the ridge the city stands on, which is why the whole place is one colour.

The congregational mosque was finished in 1571–72 by the date on its own inscription. The gate you climb to reach it, the Buland Darwaza, commemorates a victory in Gujarat: UNESCO dates the gate to 1575, other accounts to 1601–02, and the question is not settled.

The court left in 1585, when Akbar went north-west to the Punjab and made Lahore the seat. It never came back to Sikri. The explanation usually offered — that the water supply failed — is a later commonplace rather than something the court's own record states; what the record does show is that an imperial capital was wherever the emperor's camp was, and the camp followed the frontier.

A city on this scale was built and kept running by people who did not live in the palaces: quarrymen and masons, water-carriers, the traders in the town below the walls, and the villages assessed to feed all of them while the court was here.

The ASI runs the site today, ticketed. The Jama Masjid and the Chishti dargah within it are still in use for prayer and pilgrimage, and are entered on those terms rather than as an exhibit.

📸 Cover: The Buland Darwaza, the gate into the Jama Masjid courtyard, Rupeshsarkar, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons