Jahanpanah

Muhammad bin Tughlaq inherited two cities — Lal Kot in the south-west and Siri to the north-east — and a stretch of open ground between them that was impossible to defend. His answer was to enclose the gap: walls running from one city to the other, turning three settlements into a single fortified sprawl called the Refuge of the World.

The reign that followed is remembered for the sultan's decision to move the entire population of Delhi to Daulatabad in the Deccan, and then, some years later, to move it back. Jahanpanah never recovered the momentum. Its great buildings still stand — the Begumpuri Masjid, the palace mound called Bijay Mandal, the seven-arched weir at Satpula — but they sit in ordinary residential colonies now, and none of them is in this atlas yet.