Siege of Satara

01The emperor besieges

After Sambhaji’s execution in 1689, his brother Rajaram carried on the war from Jinji in the south, while Santaji Ghorpade and Dhanaji Jadhav ranged across the Deccan. Rajaram came back to Maharashtra in 1698 and made Satara his seat. Aurangzeb, over eighty, decided to take the Maratha forts one by one. He arrived before Satara in December 1699 with his whole court. The fort, Ajinkyatara, sits on a steep hill above the town.

02The mine and the surrender

The Mughals dug mines under the walls. When the largest was fired in April 1700, part of the blast was thrown outwards and the falling rock crushed the Mughal storming party waiting below; the chroniclers say hundreds died. Meanwhile Chhatrapati Rajaram had died at Sinhagad in March, and the garrison’s supplies were low. On 21 April 1700 Prayagji Prabhu surrendered on terms. Aurangzeb renamed the fort Azamtara after his son. The Marathas recovered it in 1705.

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 →