The Empire That Built the Taj Mahal

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Mughal Empire's cultural peak arrived under Shah Jahan, who ruled from 1628 to 1658 and used the enormous revenue of an empire at its territorial and economic height to fund one of the most ambitious architectural programmes in world history. The Taj Mahal, built at Agra between roughly 1632 and 1653 as a mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, is the best known result, a white marble complex blending Persian, Central Asian and Indian architectural traditions with such precision that Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it among the most celebrated examples of Mughal art in the world, but it was one project among many. Shah Jahan also built the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid in his new capital, Shahjahanabad, the walled city that is now Old Delhi, projects that consumed the labour of thousands of artisans, including Persian and Central Asian master builders drawn by Mughal patronage. That architectural flowering rested on an administrative achievement earlier emperors, especially Akbar, had built: a revenue system sophisticated enough to fund it, a mansabdari service nobility that bound military and administrative elites, many of them Rajput Hindus and other non-Muslim nobles alongside Muslim officials, to the throne, and relative religious tolerance that let the empire draw talent and taxation from a religiously diverse subcontinent. The same fiscal and military overextension that funded Shah Jahan's monuments and Aurangzeb's subsequent wars of conquest weakened the empire within decades of its architectural high point.