Mumtaz Mahal Dies

June 17, 1631

Shah Jahan's beloved wife Arjumand Banu Begum, the Mughal empress he called Mumtaz Mahal, died giving birth to their fourteenth child in a military camp on the Deccan. The grief-stricken emperor would spend the next two decades building her a marble tomb at Agra beside the Yamuna, creating the monument the world would come to know as the Taj Mahal.