Siege of Chittorgarh (1567–1568)

From October 1567 to February 1568 the Mughal emperor Akbar besieged Chittorgarh, the great hill fortress and capital of the Rajput kingdom of Mewar in what is now Rajasthan. After four months of mining, bombardment and costly assaults, the fort fell on 23 February 1568. Its capture, followed by the killing of much of the population inside, was a turning point in Akbar's relations with the Rajput states and in the expansion of the Mughal Empire across northern India.

By 1567 Akbar had put down a revolt by Uzbek nobles and turned to the Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan. The Kachhwaha ruler of Amber had already accepted Mughal supremacy, partly through a marriage alliance, but most other Rajput houses remained hostile. Chittor mattered strategically because it lay on the routes towards Malwa and Gujarat and further south. Mughal chroniclers also cited the Mewar ruler Udai Singh II's sheltering of the Afghan rebel Baz Bahadur to justify the campaign. Akbar marched from Agra with a large army and artillery and began the siege on 23 October 1567.

On the advice of his councillors, Udai Singh withdrew with the royal family to the hills of western Mewar, to his newly founded city of Udaipur. Later authors sometimes charged him with cowardice, a view not found in the contemporary Persian writers. He left the fort under Jaimal Rathore, with a garrison usually put at some 7,000 to 8,000 cavalry and musketeers. Mughal detachments sent to capture the Rana failed, but plundered the country around Udaipur and sacked the town of Rampura.

Direct assaults on the walls failed, leaving the Mughals two options: starve the garrison or approach the walls under cover. Akbar set some 5,000 builders, masons and carpenters to dig covered approach trenches, known as sabats, and two mines, while three batteries bombarded the fort and a huge siege gun was cast. The work was slow and deadly; the besiegers reportedly lost about 200 men a day, and contemporary Persian accounts record several occasions when Akbar himself narrowly escaped death. After 58 days the sappers reached the walls and fired the mines, but the breach was quickly sealed.

On 22 February 1568 the Mughals opened breaches at several points at once. That night, while Jaimal was supervising repairs, he was hit by a musket shot fired by Akbar himself. Contemporary Mughal, Rajput and Jain records say he died on the spot, though some Rajput ballads have him fall in the final fight next day. Inside the fort, many Rajput women committed jauhar, self-immolation to avoid capture. On the morning of 23 February, the festival of Holi, the remaining Rajput men, led by Patta Chundawat, came out in saffron robes for a final stand. By nightfall the fort was in Mughal hands.

According to the sources, Akbar then ordered a general massacre in which around 30,000 people in the fort, mostly non-combatants, were killed, many women and children were enslaved, and Hindu and Jain temples were desecrated. Before and after the siege Akbar framed the campaign in religious terms: his victory letter of 9 March 1568 described it as a holy war against unbelievers, while Mughal dead were hailed as ghazis. Mughal chroniclers, as noted above, also gave strategic and political reasons for the war. Akbar left Asaf Khan in charge of the fort, went on foot to the shrine of Moinuddin Chishti to fulfil a vow, and returned to Agra, where he set up statues of Jaimal and Patta outside his fort, perhaps to honour them, perhaps as a humiliation.

The fall of Chittor brought most of the Rajput kingdoms that had resisted Akbar under his authority, although Udai Singh himself remained at large until his death four years later. In local tradition the jauhar and the killings are remembered each year at Holi, the day the fort fell.

Our 1530 map shows Mewar before the siege, and our 1600 map shows the Mughal Empire after Akbar's conquests in Rajasthan.