The Moguls had long sought an excuse to interfere in the affairs of Ahmednuggur; so Murad Mirza, son of the Emperor Akbar, marched thither with great expedition, being joined on his road by several rajahs and generals with their troops. But Meean Munjoo, having suppressed the rebellion, in place of surrendering the fort, resolved to defend it in case he was called upon by the Moguls to fulfil his promise. After laying in a store of provisions, he gave the command to the Princess Chand Beeby, daughter of a former King of Ahmednuggur, and departed with the young Prince Ahmed towards the Bijapur frontier.
Chand Beeby was one of the ablest Indian politicians of her time. She had been for some years queen and dowager-regent of Bijapur. She now took the entire direction of affairs into her own hands; in a few days she had raised her own nephew, Bahadur Nizam Shah, to the throne, though he was at this time a prisoner in a distant fortress, and seemed likely to stay there.
The Moguls, seeing that it was useless to conceal their hostile intentions, prepared openly to besiege Ahmednuggur. On the 14th December, 1595, the first shots were exchanged. The siege was pressed with the utmost vigour. Mounds were raised, trenches opened, battery after battery erected, mines sunk; and on the morning of February 17th, 1596, eighty feet of wall were blown down by the explosion of a mine. Chand Beeby, though many of her principal officers had taken to flight, was not dismayed. She put on armour, covered her face with a veil, and, grasping a drawn sword in her hand, rushed to defend the breach. This intrepidity shamed the fugitives, and re-animated the panic-stricken soldiers. Recovering from their first terror, the soldiers calmly awaited the approach of the Mogul storming-party. An obstinate conflict ensued at the foot of the breach. Again and again did the Moguls press onward—again and again they were driven back by a galling fire of shot and rockets. The ditch was soon more than half filled with dead and dying warriors. Although fresh storming parties succeeded one another from four o'clock in the afternoon till dark, they were all repulsed with fearful slaughter. At last the Moguls withdrew, discomfited, to their camp.
Deccan traditions say that, during the storm, the shot of the garrison having become exhausted, Chand Beeby ordered the guns to be loaded, first with copper coins, then with silver, and at length with gold; and all the coins being likewise used up, she fired away her jewels.
The valour of Chand Beeby formed the chief subject of conversation round the camp-fires and in the tents of the Moguls; and, after this memorable day, her title of Chand Beeby, "the Lady Chand," was changed by common consent to the grander one of Chand Sultana.
The want of provisions, and the approach of seventy thousand men from Bijapur, compelled the Moguls to retreat a few days after the storm. Bahadur Shah was now brought from the fort of Chawund, where he had been held prisoner, and was placed on the throne. But the ambition and duplicity of the Ahmednuggur nobles brought about a second siege in 1599. Chand Sultana, afraid to trust any of them, applied to Humeed Khan, an officer of high rank, who recommended her to defend the place to the last extremity; but Chand declared that so many chiefs had acted treacherously, it was plain no reliance could be placed on them, and she proposed that they should negotiate with the besiegers. Humeed Khan rushed into the streets, crying out that Chand Sultana was treating with the Moguls to surrender the fort. The ungrateful and short-sighted mob, believing him, and forgetting the former services of the heroine, rushed to the private apartments of Chand Sultana, and murdered her in their fury.
It is satisfactory to know that the ungrateful people got the reward they so richly merited. For, a few days after the death of Chand, the Moguls captured the fort, giving little or no quarter.
Mher-Ul-Nissa, or Nour Mahal, the "Light of the Harem," sometimes styled Nour Jehan, the "Light of the World," was the favourite Sultana of Jehanghire, the "World-subduing Emperor" of Hindostan. A romantic story is told of her strange birth, her desertion by her parents, and how, like Moses, she was entrusted to the care of her own mother by her kind preserver, and how, by the benevolence of the latter, the family rose from poverty and obscurity to the government of the greatest empire in Asia. The beauty of Nour Mahal was famous throughout the East; Moore, in his "Feast of Roses," has painted her portrait most exquisitely. Her personal charms were rivalled by her mental powers; and her political talents were speedily seen by the numerous reforms and improvements effected throughout the empire.