Agra
Sikandar Lodi's new capital, Akbar's red sandstone fortress, Shah Jahan's marble elegy — Agra keeps the whole Mughal arc inside a few kilometers of the Yamuna.
1504
Lodi capital
Sikandar Lodi moves his court to Agra.
1573
Akbar's fort
Red sandstone walls rise on the Yamuna.
1653
The Taj
Shah Jahan completes the marble tomb.
1803
Company rule
The British take the Mughal seat.
est. 1504 — the long account
Agra had been a stronghold of the Delhi Sultans for centuries, but its great age begins in 1504, when Sikandar Lodi moved his capital here from Delhi to control the eastern plain. Babur took the city after Panipat in 1526, and under Akbar it became the working heart of the Mughal empire: the red sandstone fort rose between 1565 and 1573, and when Akbar wanted a ceremonial capital he simply built another city forty kilometers west at Fatehpur Sikri — then abandoned it within fifteen years and came back.
Under Jahangir and Shah Jahan the city filled with gardens and tombs along both banks of the Yamuna, arranged, unusually for a Mughal city, as a riverfront. Nur Jahan built the jewel-box tomb of her father Itimad-ud-Daulah in 1628 — the first Mughal tomb faced entirely in marble — and in 1632 Shah Jahan began the tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal that would eclipse everything else: the Taj Mahal, finished in 1653 by some twenty thousand workers. Five years later Aurangzeb deposed his father and imprisoned him in Agra Fort, where the old emperor spent his last eight years gazing across the river at his own masterpiece.
The empire's collapse scattered Agra between Jats, Marathas and freebooters until the British took it in 1803; they made it the capital of the North-Western Provinces and fought for it again in 1857. The Raj built its cantonment and its hotels for the growing stream of Taj visitors, and modern Agra grew around that traffic — which means the monuments survive in a city that has been a pilgrimage site of a different kind for a century and a half.
Agra · Yamuna