Daulatabad Fort, the Yadava Capital Cut Into a 600-Foot Rock, Had Three Lines of Defence, a Deep Moat and a Tunnel Sealed by an Iron Trap-Door

The fortress of Deogiri, now called Daulatabad, stands on a conical rock that the 1908 Imperial Gazetteer of India says is scarped (cut back to a sheer face) for 150 feet from the base. Per the same entry, the hill climbs almost straight up to about 600 feet above the plain. An outer wall of two and three-quarter miles once enclosed the old city, and three lines of fortification lie between that wall and the foot of the upper fort. Eight gates pierce the defences, the Gazetteer says.

Daulatabad lies in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar district (formerly Aurangabad) in Maharashtra, 16 kilometres from the city by Maharashtra Tourism’s count. Visitors on the road to the Ellora caves pass it.

A broad moat and one narrow bridge

Laurence Oliphant, who passed through in 1852, described a pyramid of rock climbing abruptly to 700 feet above the village at its foot, scarped all round down to a broad moat, with a sheer drop of 100 or 150 feet. His 700 feet and the Gazetteer’s 600 feet probably differ because he measured from the village and the Gazetteer from the plain. Sahapedia, the heritage portal, says the Bahmani sultans (who held the fort from 1347) later deepened the defences with a ditch about 15 metres deep and nine metres wide.

Ibn Battuta, who saw it in the fourteenth century, wrote that the rock had been excavated and a castle built on its summit. Oliphant’s account of the way in shows what that meant. He crossed the moat by a narrow bridge and plunged into a dark opening opposite. Guides lit the way by torch through small caves with very low doorways, and the path then climbed an inclined plane inside the rock until it turned into steps.

It ended at a large iron trap-door “pierced with innumerable small holes.” Oliphant wrote that the holes, and a groove in the rock that joined the passage, let the garrison fill the tunnel with smoke and flame to suffocate and blind attackers who got that far. He thought the situation unlikely ever to arise.

The Yadava capital

The Gazetteer calls the Yadavas, who are also known as the Seunas, feudatories of the Chalukyas who rose to be independent princes. It says Bhillama threw off allegiance about 1187 and is said by the court scholar Hemadri to have founded Deogiri. Maharashtra Tourism and Sahapedia number him Bhillama V, while the Gazetteer calls him Bhillama I. His grandson Singhana acquired practically the whole of the Western Chalukyan kingdom, the Gazetteer adds.

Sahapedia reads the name as “hill of the gods” and describes Deogiri under the Yadavas as a giri-durga, a mountain fort in the terms of the Arthashastra. Maharashtra Tourism says its position on trade routes made it a prize.

The Yadava court was also a place where Marathi literature was written. LiveHistoryIndia dates the Dnyaneshwari, the Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, to 1290, in the reign of the last Yadava king Ramachandra, whose kingdom it says covered large parts of present Maharashtra. Ramachandra’s rule runs from 1271 to 1309 on Sahapedia and 1271 to 1311 on LiveHistoryIndia.

Raids from Delhi, 1296 to 1318

The Gazetteer dates the first Delhi raid to 1294, and Sahapedia to 1296. Barani, the Delhi chronicler writing in the 1350s, reports news of it under the Hijri year 695, which corresponds to 1296. In the Elliot and Dowson translation, Ala-ud-din Khalji, then governor of Kara, set out with three or four thousand horse and two thousand foot, and gave Chanderi as his target. Ramachandra’s army, under his son, was far away, and Barani says the people there had never heard of Muslim armies. A force Ramachandra sent was beaten, Ala-ud-din entered Deogiri, and on the first day he took thirty elephants and some thousand horses.

The chroniclers tell what happened inside the fort differently, and Sahapedia sets out the versions. In its account Ala-ud-din cornered Ramachandra in the fort, and the king negotiated for time while the city below was plundered. In Isami’s version (written about 1350), the invader called Ramachandra down for a private audience and threatened to behead him if his son interfered. Amir Khusrau and Barani mention no battle with Ramachandra’s son Singhana. Firishta, writing about 1606, describes a second fight and a Yadava rout, and Sahapedia advises treating that double victory with caution because neither Barani nor Khusrau records it.

Next came Malik Kafur, who arrived in 1306 to 1307 with a cavalry force of 30,000, Sahapedia says. Yadava forces left the fort for a hill position and were overrun. Ramachandra was captured, taken to Delhi, given the title Rai-yi Rayan and sent home after six months. He then served as an ally of the Sultanate. After his death in 1309, Singhana stopped paying tribute, and Malik Kafur returned towards the end of Ala-ud-din’s reign and occupied the citadel with little resistance. For Kafur’s occupations the Gazetteer gives 1307 and 1310, and for the death of the last raja, Harpal, 1318. Sahapedia puts the last Yadava resistance, under Harpaldeva, in 1317, when Qutb al-Din Mubarak Shah reoccupied the fort and renamed it Qutbabad.

The capital that moved south

Muhammad bin Tughlaq made Deogiri his capital under the name Daulatabad, “city of fortune.” Barani gave a reason for the choice in plain geography. In his account Daulatabad lay about equal distances from Delhi, Gujarat, Lakhnauti, Sonargaon, Telangana and Ma’bar, though he judged the move ruinous to Delhi. He wrote that many people died on the road and that “few only survived” to return home.

Ibn Battuta, who served at the sultan’s court, gave a different cause: letters of abuse thrown into the audience hall at night. He put the march at forty days. The transfer is dated 1326 or 1327 by Sahapedia, 1327 by Maharashtra Tourism and 1339 by the Gazetteer, the outlier of the three.

Ibn Battuta visited Daulatabad itself and described a city that rivalled Delhi in size, divided into three sections: Daulatabad proper for the sultan and his troops, a district called Kataka, and the citadel, which he called unequalled in strength. A leather ladder, taken up at night, led to the upper fort, and its dungeons held rats larger than cats. Sahapedia, drawing on the military historian Jos Gommans, says Tughlaq’s builders added round bastions, a deeper moat, a counterscarp and a glacis (a sloping bank in front of the wall).

That arrangement did not last. According to Sahapedia, officers in Daulatabad revolted and chose Ismail Afghan as sultan, Zafar Khan was one of his lieutenants, and Zafar Khan was later enthroned as the first Bahmani sultan, in 1347.

From Chand Minar to the keys of 1633

The Gazetteer credits the Chand Minar, 210 feet high, to Ala-ud-din Bahmani to commemorate his capture of the fort. Maharashtra Tourism gives its height as 64 metres, which matches, and says it was built in the 15th century. A small mosque beside it carries a Persian inscription dated 849 Hijri (1445), the Gazetteer says. If the Ala-ud-din meant is Ala-ud-din Bahman Shah, whose rule began in 1347 according to Sahapedia, the attribution and the 15th-century date do not sit together, and the sources do not settle it. The Chini Mahal, the Gazetteer records, is where Aurangzeb imprisoned Abul Hasan, the last Qutb Shahi king of Golconda, in 1687. Aurangzeb is the subject of a separate profile on this site.

The next holders are traced by Sahapedia. The garrison under Malik Ashraf, who held the fort in the Bahmani decline, delivered the keys to Ahmad Nizam Shah in 1499 (the Gazetteer gives 1526 for the Nizam Shahi capture). In 1610 the regent Malik Ambar moved the Nizam Shahi court to Daulatabad. When Mughal forces under Mahabat Khan besieged it in March 1633, they placed heavy guns on a nearby hill and sprang two mines under the walls. Fateh Khan, the defender, delivered the keys in early June 1633. The fort then became the base for Aurangzeb’s campaigns against Bijapur and Golconda, Sahapedia says.

After Aurangzeb, the Gazetteer says, the fort passed to Asaf Jah, the first Nizam of Hyderabad. Sahapedia dates this to 1724, after a brief spell under the Marathas.

What the Archaeological Survey is documenting

The fort is in the care of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). In November 2025, Lokmat Times reported that the ASI’s Aurangabad Circle had begun a conservation management plan for the fort and for Bibi ka Maqbara, drawn up with a Pune conservation architect. The report says the fort covers nearly 300 acres. The survey will draw plans of the Chand Minar, the Bharat Mata temple, the Baradari, the Shahi Hamam, the Saraswati well, the Hatti tank, the Kalakot gate and the moat. Along the 600-foot climb to the summit are 15 to 20 landmarks to be put on record.

The same ASI circle holds drawings of the region’s monuments by James Burgess and Henry Cousens, early surveyors of Western India, Lokmat Times says.