Golconda Sultanate

The Golconda Sultanate was the Qutb Shahi sultanate of the southeastern Deccan, lasting from 1518 to 1687. Its founder Quli Qutb Shah, a Turkoman Shia horseman in Bahmani service, seized the great hill fort of Golconda and made it a throne; his city Hyderabad, founded a century later, would outlive them all. One of the five Deccan sultanates, Golconda warred eternally with Bijapur and Ahmadnagar, joined the Talikota alliance that broke Vijayanagara, and grew fat on diamonds: the Kollur mines produced the Koh-i-Noor and the Hope among stones the whole world coveted. Persian was the court's tongue for ninety years before Telugu rose beside it, and the sultans' tombs outside Hyderabad still draw the eye. The Mughals came twice: Shah Jahan forced tribute in 1636, and Aurangzeb, tired of Shia defiance, besieged Golconda for eight months in 1687, jailed the last sultan in Daulatabad for life, and folded the diamond kingdom into his empire.