This siege was personally directed by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb against the Golconda Sultanate, ruled by king Abul Hasan Qutb Shah.

[2] In 1682, Aurangzeb (now crowned Mughal emperor) moved his camp to the Deccan to counter the rebellion of his son, prince Muhammad Akbar.

[4] Golconda was a nucleus of power and wealth in the Deccan region, with control over important agricultural tracts, diamond mines, and trade routes; such factors may have influenced Aurangzeb's continued determination to conquer the Sultanate.

Shah Alam's army defeated a Qutb Shahi force at Malkhed, a border town of the Sultanate, and entered Hyderabad with no significant resistance, freely plundering the royal palaces.

These terms were: the ceding of some disputed territories to the Mughals; grant of a large lump sum; and the dismissal of Madanna and Akkanna, the Brahmin ministers of the kingdom.

The pressure on the kingdom led to its nobles organising an assassination of Madanna and Akkanna in March 1686, as well as other members of the fort's Hindu quarter, in an effort to appease Aurangzeb's demands.

[16][17] The Mughal army encamped at Fateh Maidan, an open area outside the walled city of Hyderabad serving as a command center for the siege, situated around 1.25 miles away from the fort.

[11] The full circumference of the fort was invested by the Mughal army by the end of January,[20] with the circle divided under the command of various generals.

Shah Alam had been secretly negotiating terms with Abul Hasan for a peaceful settlement, as had been his policy in the last Mughal invasion of Hyderabad, and had offered to act as the king's intermediary with emperor Aurangzeb.

[20] Effective command was hindered by rivalries between generals;[26] the commander Saf Shikan Khan, appointed mir atish (chief of artillery), eventually resigned in order to spite the commander-in-chief Ghaziuddin Khan, causing progress on the trenches to stall as the post passed to less capable generals.

[11] Subsequent to these failures, Aurangzeb ordered the construction of mud and wood walls enclosing the circumference of Golconda fort, sealing it off completely.

[28] On the fifth of July,[29] he also made an official proclamation of Golconda's annexation into a province of the Mughal territories, giving it the royal epithet Dar-ul-Jihad (lit.

[28] With the Mughal army's morale at a low point, reinforcements arrived under prince Azam and the paymaster-general Ruhullah Khan on the tenth of July, but these only exacerbated the dearth of food.

[36][33] The Rajput ruler Anup Singh, who participated in the final Mughal charge against Golconda, was granted the title Maharaja by Aurangzeb.

[3][37] Riches valued over sixty million rupees were seized from the Golconda Fort's treasury, and transported towards the Mughal capitals in the north via camels.

[38] The Mughal siege had caused acute food shortages and general depletion of resources in the former kingdom, and rebuilding the economy was a major task for the new administration.

[40] Richards notes that after its conquest, the Mughals had a very lenient attitude towards the fort; its inhabitants were spared and destruction of property was minimal.

[3][16] In 1695 (during Aurangzeb's reign) a sum of 80,000 rupees was spent by the Mughal provincial administration to repair and reinforce the fort's walls.

[41][43] Aurangzeb's conquest of Golconda was a major success of his reign, expanding the Mughal Empire to its southernmost point and making it the sole Islamic polity of the Indian subcontinent.

A dominant strain of thought in Mughal scholarship asserts that the conquest of Golconda contributed to a crisis in jagirs (land grants), wherein the incentives offered by the empire in enticing and hiring officers from enemy lines, exceeded the amount of revenue yielded from the annexed lands, meaning that the supply of jagirs in the empire could not meet its demand.

Aurangzeb would never return to the Mughal capital city of Delhi in the north, but would continue to fight the Maratha threat in the Deccan until his death.