The Rajputs trusted hill forts built to outlast siege — Mughal artillery breached them

For centuries the Rajput defence rested on the hill fort: massive walls on a rocky height, with water reservoirs and stored grain, built to outlast a siege. An attacker without artillery had to starve the garrison or break against the stone. The great forts were prized as impregnable; the Akbarnama records that the commandant of Ranthambore 'had in his folly grounded his presumptuous hopes on this piece of stone.'

The new kind of attack arrived with Babur, who brought gunpowder field artillery and matchlocks to North Indian warfare at Panipat (1526) and Khanwa (1527). Under Akbar the Mughals turned this into a siege system: heavy mortars and culverins suited to breaching fixed walls, with sappers, approach trenches and mines. A single new weapon can be absorbed; a whole new way of taking a fort cannot.

In 1567–68 Akbar reduced the doctrine's two great forts. Ranthambore, long thought unassailable, fell quickly: great culverins were hauled up the hill to a battery above the walls, and 'at every discharge there was a reverberation in the mountain… and there was a breach in the walls.' Seeing his stone defences broken, the commandant Surjan submitted. Mewar's capital fort of Chittorgarh fell in the same campaign, after a four-month siege in which Mughal engineers sapped and battered the walls at several points at once.

The forts had been capital-intensive, fixed defences optimised for the previous attack. Once gunpowder artillery arrived, the very height and thickness that made them impregnable became a fixed target for breaching fire — and a kingdom that had spent generations perfecting them could not quickly convert that investment into a mobile defence.