Sambhaji’s sack of Burhanpur

01The gate of the Deccan

Burhanpur on the Tapti was the capital of Mughal Khandesh and the great trading city on the road from Agra to the Deccan and Surat. Sambhaji, crowned in 1681 after a struggle at court, needed money and wished to show Aurangzeb that the Marathas were as strong as under Shivaji. Early in 1681 a Maratha army under his commander-in-chief Hambirrao Mohite rode swiftly north. The governor Khan Jahan was away, and his deputy Kakar Khan had only a small force.

02Three days of plunder

The Marathas did not attack the walled city but fell on its rich suburbs, chief among them Bahadurpura, where bankers and merchants lived. For three days they took gold, jewels and cloth, and burned what they could not carry. The garrison stayed behind the walls. By the time Khan Jahan came up, the Marathas were gone with their spoil. The merchants of Burhanpur petitioned Aurangzeb, and the raid was one reason he decided to come to the Deccan himself later that year.

Dynasty · 1674–1848 CE (Swarajya from the 1640s)Maratha Chhatrapatis (Bhonsle)Shivaji Bhonsle built a Hindu kingdom out of hill forts in the Sahyadri and was crowned Chhatrapati at Raigad in 1674. His sons and his daughter-in-law Tarabai held it through twenty-seven years of war with Aurangzeb, and the state they saved became the Maratha power that ruled much of India in the eighteenth century.Read →