History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources v4.c65.s3.4

v4.c65.s3.4

The city walls enclose two and a half square miles of land, forming an ellipse. After crossing the deep moat, 40 to 50 feet broad, we meet the massive and strong walls, varying in height from 30 to 50 feet, with an average thickness of 20 feet and strengthened with 96 bastions besides ten at the gates. The broad masonry platform, which constitutes the top of the walls all around the fort, was protected inside by a battlemented curtain wall ten feet high running from bastion to bastion and loopholed for artillery and small arms. The strongest bastions are three, namely the Lion Tower (Sharzi Burj) on the west, built in 1658, and containing the famous cannon Malik-i-maidan; the Landa Kasab Burj in the south wall, completed in 1662, and armed with the largest gun at Bijapur; and the Firangi Burj, built by a Portuguese general in 1576 with extreme durability and massiveness. Aurangzib seems to have let the Sharzi Burj alone and directed the whole fire of his artillery against the Landa Kasab tower, pitted it with shot-marks, and breached the curtain wall close by. Between this tower and the Firangi Burj is the Mangali gate, which was renamed Fath Darwaza after Aurangzib's victorious entrance into the city through it. In the plain outside, some distance south of this gate, stands the tomb of Ikhlas Khan, a convenient advanced post for the besiegers, which changed hands repeatedly during the siege, as its battered condition graphically tells the visitor to this day. As for the five large gateways in the city wall, they were impregnable with the siege appliances known in the 17th century and Aurangzib wisely made no attempt to force them.