Ahmadnagar Sultanate

The Ahmadnagar Sultanate was one of the five Deccan sultanates of India, ruling the northwestern Deccan from 1490 to 1636. Its founder, Ahmad Nizam Shah, was the son of a Bahmani minister who broke with his masters, defeated their army, and built a new capital first at Junnar and then at Ahmednagar with its great land fort. The Nizam Shahi dynasty reached its height when its alliance of Muslim sultanates smashed the Hindu empire of Vijayanagara at Talikota in 1565, the sultan himself beheading the enemy regent on the field. Later kings pushed the realm to its largest extent and threw back a Mughal invasion in 1586, but succession murders rotted the house from within. The sultanate lived on borrowed time through heroic regencies: Chand Bibi holding the fort against Akbar's armies, and the Abyssinian general Malik Ambar defying the Mughals for decades. In 1636 Aurangzeb, then viceroy of the Deccan, finally annexed the exhausted state into the Mughal Empire.