The saint and the son
In the 1560s Akbar had no surviving son. He visited Shaikh Salim, a Sufi of the Chishti order who lived at the village of Sikri, and the shaikh is said to have foretold the birth of three sons. In 1569 one of Akbar's wives gave birth there to a boy, who was named Salim after the saint and later reigned as Jahangir. Two further sons followed. Akbar decided to build a city at the site, and work began in 1571.
Building the city
The city was laid out along a long sandstone ridge, with a lake on one side and a wall round the other three. It was built quickly, almost entirely in the local red sandstone, by large numbers of masons. After Akbar's conquest of Gujarat in 1573 the city took the name Fatehpur, the city of victory.
The religious centre is the Jama Masjid, one of the largest mosques of its day, with a vast courtyard. In the courtyard stands the tomb of Salim Chishti, who died in 1572: a small building in white marble with screens of pierced stone. The mosque's southern gate, the Buland Darwaza, is a towering portal added in the mid-1570s to mark the Gujarat victory, and it carries an inscription with a saying attributed to Jesus that the world is a bridge to pass over, not to build upon.
The palace area lies to the north-east. It is a sequence of courts and pavilions rather than a single building: the Diwan-i Am for public audience; the Diwan-i Khas, whose single carved central pillar carries a platform joined to the walls by bridges; the five-storey open pavilion called the Panch Mahal; and residences traditionally, though not reliably, named after particular queens. The buildings combine trabeated forms, brackets and carved columns from Gujarati and Rajput building with Persian and Central Asian planning.
Akbar's court
Fatehpur Sikri was the setting for the most famous years of Akbar's reign. In 1575 he built the Ibadat Khana, a house of worship where scholars of Islam, and later Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians and Jesuit priests from Goa, debated before him. The building has not been securely identified. The discussions led to the declaration of 1579 that made Akbar the final arbiter of disputed points of religious law, and to the court ideas of universal peace that his historian Abul Fazl later set out. The Jesuit Antonio Monserrate, who came in 1580, left a description of the city and court.
Why it was left
In 1585 Akbar moved his court to Lahore to deal with the north-west frontier, the death of his half-brother Mirza Hakim at Kabul, and threats from Central Asia. He stayed there thirteen years and did not return to Fatehpur Sikri as a capital. The traditional explanation is that the city ran short of water; the lake did fail on at least one occasion. Many historians think the move was mainly strategic, and that the Mughal court, which moved constantly with the emperor, never depended on any one city. The city was not wholly deserted, and the mosque and the shrine remained in use.
The site
The palace and mosque survive in remarkably complete condition, largely because they were not rebuilt. The shrine of Salim Chishti still draws pilgrims, many of them hoping, as Akbar did, for children.
Further reading
- Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000
See also
- Akbar — Akbar, born Jalal-ud-din Muhammad, was the third Mughal emperor, who ruled from 1556 to 1605, expanded the empire across most of the Indian subcontinent, and restructured its administration and religious policy.
- Mughal Empire — The Mughal Empire was a Persianate Muslim dynasty of Timurid and Chagatai descent that ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from Babur's victory at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 until the deposition of Bahadur Shah II following the 1857 rebellion, reaching its territorial and cultural peak under Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb.
- Delhi — Delhi is the capital of India and one of the longest continuously inhabited urban regions in the subcontinent, having served as the seat of power for successive dynasties across more than a millennium.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.