The rise of the Marathas can be traced to the Mughal attack on Ahmednagar, a town 95 miles east of Pune, in 1595. In 1595, King Bahadur Nizam II (a Mughal king 1595-1605) honored a Maratha, Maloji Bhonsle with the title of raja and gave him the estates of Pune and the fort of Chakan, near Pune. Maloji Bhosle was the grandfather of Shivaji Bhonsle, the founder of the Maratha Empire. Shivaji Bhosle was born in 1627, in the fort of Shivner, near Pune.
In 1629, Shivaji's father Shahaji, who had succeeded his father Maloji, in Pune and Chakan, disengaged himself from the service of the Mughal government. Consequently, in 1635 the Mughal army attacked Pune. Shahaji surrendered; therefore his estates were returned to him. Soon, Shahaji put Dadaji Kondadev in charge of Pune, while he left to capture the South.
In Pune, Dadaji built a palace 'Lal Mahal', for Shivaji and his mother Jijabai. At the age of sixteen (1643 A.D.), Shivaji took great delight in stirring up his friends' hopes and nursed the thought of becoming independent. By 1647, Shivaji had captured two forts and had the complete charge of Pune. In 1657, he committed his first act of hostility against the Mughals by plundering a large booty in Ahmednagar. Thus, began a sequence of attacks on the Mughals. By 1680, the year of Shivaji's death, nearly whole of the Deccan belonged to his kingdom.
Shivaji was succeeded by his son Sambhaji. He showed the same vigor as his father, but was taken prisoner and executed by the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb, in 1689. Rajaram, Sambhaji's younger brother then took the throne, since Sambhaji's son, Shahu was still a minor. The death of Rajaram in 1700 seemed to end the power of the Marathas, but Tarabai, the elder widow of Rajaram, put her young son Shahu on the throne, at the tender age of ten.