Place · hill fort city · India

Daulatabad

Date

1187 · 1327

Function

Military & resistance

Patron dynasty

Delhi Sultanate

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

19.943, 75.220

Worth knowing

The tunnel has a stone furnace at a turn in it and an iron plate that could be heated to fill the passage with heat and smoke, and no attacking force is recorded to have got through it. The Chand Minar in the lower town was raised in 1435 to mark Bahmani possession, and the Muslim population the transfer left behind is the origin of the Deccan sultanates and of Dakhni.

Connections (12)

• Contemporary capital withGulbarga / Kalaburagi

  Muhammad bin Tughlaq moved Delhi's population to Daulatabad in 1327 and moved it back a few years later, and the Deccan governorate he created broke away in 1347 to become the Bahmani sultanate with its capital at Gulbarga. The fort's spiral entrance tunnel, designed so attackers could be trapped and burned in it, is the most complete piece of medieval Indian military engineering to survive.

• Site adjacencyBibi ka Maqbara

  Bibi ka Maqbara at Aurangabad was built by Aurangzeb's son Azam Shah for his mother Dilras Banu Begum in deliberate imitation of the Taj, at a fraction of the cost and with marble only on the lower parts — the rest is plastered. It stands on the same plain as Daulatabad, the fort Muhammad bin Tughlaq made his capital three and a half centuries earlier, so two Delhi-based dynasties left their Deccan mark within sight of each other.

• Traveller routeRed Fort, Delhi

  Ibn Battuta served as qadi of Delhi under Muhammad bin Tughlaq and was in the city during the removal of its population to Daulatabad, which he describes — the Sultan ordering everyone out, the search of the empty streets, the man found who could not walk. The stops recorded here are representative of the Rihla's Indian sections, and the chronology varies slightly between reconstructions of his route.

• Traveller routeKhambhat / Cambay

  Ibn Battuta travelled from the Deccan to the Gujarat coast on his way to the Maldives and China, and Khambhat was the port through which most western Indian textile and maritime trade passed in his century. His Rihla describes it as a city of foreign merchants with fine houses and mosques. These are representative stops rather than a complete itinerary, and the dating differs between reconstructions.

• Shared site withGirijatmaj, Junnar

  Leṇyādri is a Buddhist cave group of about thirty excavations from the first centuries CE, cut in the same Junnar hills and the same decades as Bhājā, Bedsā and Kārlā. One of its cells was later given to Gaṇeśa, which is how an Aṣṭavināyaka shrine came to be a chaityagriha with a pillarless hall.

• CampaignWarangal Fort

  Warangal was annexed in 1323 by the prince who became Muhammad bin Tughlaq, and four years later he moved the capital to Devagiri to hold the Deccan he had conquered. Warangal's Kakatiya governors reasserted themselves within a decade as the Musunuri Nayakas, which is part of why the Daulatabad experiment was abandoned.

• Imperial administration ofTughlaqabad

  Muhammad bin Tughlaq's token currency and his transfer of the capital to Daulatabad are the same reign and the same problem: a treasury drained by Deccan campaigns and an empire too large to administer from one end. Both were reversed. The brass tokens were redeemed at face value in silver, which is why the failure is documented in the chronicles at all.

• Architectural modelGolconda

  Daulatabad's scarped granite cone with its rock-cut moat and single trapping tunnel and Golconda's concentric granite walls with eighty-seven bastions are the two great Deccan hill forts, and both were Hindu foundations — Yadava and Kakatiya — rebuilt by sultanates for artillery. The plateau's fortification is a continuous technical tradition that changed hands repeatedly without changing method.

• Ruled fromMuhammad bin Tughlaq

  Muhammad bin Tughlaq moved the capital from Delhi to Daulatabad (Devagiri) in 1327 to be closer to the Deccan, forcing the entire population of Delhi to march 1,100 kilometres south — the move was reversed within three years when the city proved indefensible from Delhi's bureaucracy. The failed experiment left Daulatabad fortified at Mughal scale and Delhi half-emptied for a decade.

• SackedAlauddin Khilji

  Alauddin Khilji sacked Devagiri (later renamed Daulatabad) in 1296 as a Khilji prince under his uncle Jalal-ud-Din, taking Yadava treasure that financed his coup against Jalal-ud-Din the following year. He returned to Devagiri in 1307 under his own reign, defeating Ramachandra Yadava who submitted and became a tributary. The 1296 and 1307 Devagiri campaigns opened the Deccan to Delhi Sultanate expansion that would culminate in Muhammad bin Tughlaq's 1327 transfer of the capital here.

• Site withinAurangabad / Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar

  Daulatabad — the Yadava-and-Khilji hill-fort that Muhammad bin Tughlaq moved Delhi's population to in 1327 and then abandoned three years later — sits 16 kilometres northwest of Aurangabad in Aurangabad district. The Nizam Shahi-era Chand Minar and the Mughal-era fortifications are all within the city's wider administrative orbit, and the fort has been administered as part of Aurangabad district since the eighteenth century.

• Historical linkQutb complex, Delhi

  Muhammad bin Tughluq shifted capital and mint from Delhi to Daulatabad in 1327, where he issued the copper-brass token currency in 1329.

On these journeys

• Shared & layered sites
• Sultanate capitals
• Ghurid conquest & the Delhi Sultanate
• Ibn Baṭṭūṭa — qāḍī, exile, envoy (1333–1347)
• Forts of the south & Deccan
• Coinage & mint networks — karshāpaṇa to the rupee

Sources

Wikipedia, “Daulatabad Fort”. Ibn Battuta, Riḥla, on the transfer of the capital; Archaeological Survey of India, Aurangabad circle records.

• Wikipedia — Daulatabad Fort