Page:Historic Landmarks of the Deccan.djvu/51

39 all the Bijapur territory which he had conquered in the early days of the war.

For some time after this the history of Daulatabad is uneventful. Murtaza Nizam Shah used the fortress as a prison for his son. Miran Husain, of whom he was jealous. The young prince had been for some time in prison when he was sent for by his father, who pretended that he could no longer endure separation from his son. Murtaza, having, as he thought, got his son into his power, made an attempt to murder him by setting fire to his bedclothes, but the prince escaped with a few bad burns and shortly afterwards retaliated by suffocating his father in the baths.

Towards the end of the sixteenth century the Nizam Shahi kingdom was hard pressed by the Emperor Akbar. Berar was ceded to Delhi in 1595 and peace was concluded, but the imperial troops found a pretext for renewing the conflict in the following year. At length, in July 1599, Bahadur Nizam Shah being then the nominal king and Chand Bibi the actual ruler of Ahmadnagar, prince Daniyal, Akbar's youngest sen, and the Khan-i-Khanan laid siege to Ahmadnagar, which fell about the middle of 1603 after an intermittent siege of four years. The " noble queen " Chand Bibi was put to death by the amirs of Ah- madnagar, and after the fall of the capital Bahadur Nizam Shah was carried off to Gwalior, where, after a long captivity, he ended his days-

The dynasty, however, still remained. After the fall of Ahmad- nagar those nobles who remained faithful to the Nizam Shahi house raised to the throne Murtaza, the son of Shah Ali, one of the sons of Burhan Nizam Shah I, the second king of the dynasty. Shah Ali, whose mother was Mariyam Bibi, a Bijapur princess, had retired to Bijapur, and his son was brought thence and enthroned at Purenda, which became for a short time the capital of the Nizam Shahi kingdom. The new king was accompanied from Bijapur by one of the most remarkable characters in Indian history, Malik Ambar the Abyssinian. Murtaza was a king in name only and Malik Ambar soon possessed himself of the southern and eastern districts of the Nizam Shahi king- dom, while Raju, the Deccani, held the northern districts, including Daulatabad. It is not necessary to recount the circumstances of the inevitable quarrel between Ambar and Raju, or their intrigues with the