Following a court conspiracy against him, the Vizier Safdar Jung, Nawab of Avadh, had battled it out in the streets of Delhi with his former protégé, the sixteen-year-old Imad ul-Mulk, the teenage megalomaniac grandson of Nizam ul-Mulk. The civil war between the old vizier and his teenage replacement raged across the suburbs of the city for six months, from March to November, with the old and new cities of Delhi held by rival factions. The fighting reduced the space between them to ruins.
