When Hyderabad was named for love: 1591
Quli Qutb Shah and the founding myth that gave the city its name.
The accepted story is that Sultan Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah named the city Bhagyanagar after Bhagmati, the courtesan he loved. When she converted to Islam she took the name Hyder Mahal, and the city became Hyderabad. Historians have spent four centuries arguing about it.
Founded in 1591 as a planned city beside the existing fortress town of Golconda, Hyderabad was conceived as the new capital of the Qutb Shahi sultanate. The Charminar — the city's iconic four-minareted gateway — was built the same year as a centerpiece of the new urban plan and, according to some accounts, as a gratitude offering after a plague subsided.
The city's grid layout, its waterworks (Hussain Sagar followed in 1562, named after a Sufi saint Hussain Shah Wali, not — as commonly thought — anyone in the royal family), and its early embrace of Persian-influenced architecture made it one of the most cosmopolitan urban experiments of late-medieval South India.
By the time of the seventh and last Qutb Shahi sultan, Abul Hasan Tana Shah, the city's poetry, food, and cultural register were unmistakable — much of which carried into the Asaf Jahi era after Aurangzeb's 1687 sack of Golconda.
