Fatehpur Sikri

Akbar had no surviving son when he went to the Chishti shaykh Salim at the village of Sikri, and when a son was born in 1569 the child was named Salim after him. From 1571 the emperor built a city on the ridge there, in red sandstone worked with the joinery of timber rather than the vocabulary of masonry, and moved his court to it.

The buildings are the best preserved Mughal ensemble anywhere and the least like one another: the Diwan-i-Khas with its single carved central pillar and four bridges, the Panch Mahal open on every side, the Buland Darwaza raised after the Gujarat campaign and among the tallest gateways in the world, and the marble tomb of Salim Chishti with its serpentine brackets standing in the courtyard of the congregational mosque. The court left after about fourteen years, and the usual explanation, that the water supply failed, is disputed; the strategic pull of Lahore during the northwestern campaigns is at least as likely a reason.

The site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986. The shrine is still working, and women tie threads to the marble screens of the tomb asking for children, which is the same request the city was founded on. The layout repays attention because it is not a fortress plan. The public and private courts, the mosque and the household quarters sit on separate terraces linked by open ground rather than by defensible corridors, and the buildings borrow freely from Gujarati and Rajput carving as well as from Persian precedent, which is the same openness the debates in the Ibadat Khana were conducted with.

The Ibadat Khana, the house of worship, was built about 1575 for religious discussion on Thursday nights, and at first only Sunni scholars were admitted. Their disputes became so acrimonious that Akbar opened the sessions in 1578 to Shias, Sufis, Brahmins, Jain teachers, Zoroastrian priests, materialists and, from 1580, Jesuit missionaries invited from Goa.

The Jesuits left detailed letters; the visit of the Jain teacher Hiravijaya Suri produced imperial orders restricting animal slaughter on certain days; and the emperor gave up hunting and later meat. In 1579 a document signed by the leading jurists recognised Akbar's authority to decide between conflicting legal opinions, which his critics read as a claim to religious supremacy and his defenders as a device of judicial arbitration. Out of the sessions came what later writers called the Din-i-Ilahi, better described as a small circle of personal disciples bound to the emperor by a rule of conduct than as a religion with a doctrine or a congregation, and it did not outlive him. Two contemporaries describe all of this and they disagree completely. Abul Fazl presents an enlightened sovereign rising above sectarian narrowness, and Badauni, who was present and hostile, presents an apostasy. The atlas records both and treats neither as a neutral witness.