The fortifications of Kashan predate the castle itself. The city's original defensive walls were commissioned by Zobeyde Khatun, the wife of the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid, who funded construction and development projects across the Islamic world. When the Seljuks came to power, Malik-Shah I ordered the existing walls repaired, two existing castles strengthened, and a new fortress built on the city's western edge. That fortress was Jalali Castle. Historical documents describe a moat encircling the structure, and the combination of thick mudbrick walls, towers, and ramparts made Kashan one of the most defensible cities on the Iranian plateau. The fortification was not merely a military installation; it anchored the commercial life of the city, with the Dolat gate -- the castle's most important entrance -- opening directly onto the bazaar and a caravansary where merchants rested between journeys.

Impregnability is a double-edged quality. During the Safavid era, Shah Ismail I ordered Jalali Castle destroyed after it became a hideout for outlaws and bandits. For unknown reasons, nobody carried out the order. Instead, the castle was repaired and strengthened -- a decision the city would regret. Mohammad Khan Torkaman, exploiting the weak rule of Shah Mohammad Khodabanda, seized the castle and turned it into his personal stronghold. For twelve years, the people of Kashan and the surrounding villages lived under his predation. His violence reached far beyond the local: one of Torkaman's men murdered Khayr al-Nisa Begum, the mother of the future Shah Abbas I, in Isfahan. When Abbas finally claimed the throne, crushing Torkaman and his followers was among his first acts. The warlord who had used the castle's strength against its own people paid with his life.

After Abbas I restored peace, the castle's interior structures deteriorated gradually through the late Safavid period. Only the thick outer walls, towers, and the yakhchals -- ancient ice storage chambers built from mudbrick -- remained intact. The Afghan invasion inflicted severe damage, though Nader Shah later ordered partial repairs. Then came the earthquake of 1778. The tremor wrecked what centuries of warfare had not, crumbling towers and collapsing rampart sections. Karim Khan ordered the governor of Kashan, Abdolrazzagh Khan, to rebuild. Workers restored the walls, added two new gates to the existing five, and re-dug the moat around the perimeter. That moat proved decisive once more: when Agha Mohammad Khan attempted to take Kashan, the freshly excavated ditch helped deny him the city.

Jalali Castle's final military engagement came during the Persian Constitutional Revolution in the early twentieth century, when Nayeb Hossein Khan Kashi and his sons used it as a base. After that, the fortress passed from active use into the quieter fate of urban archaeology. As Kashan expanded through the twentieth century, the city grew over and around the castle's footprint. Neighboring buildings were demolished to make way for modern development. Today, stretches of the ancient mudbrick wall still stand in the western part of the city, weathered but recognizable -- remnants of a structure that absorbed the blows of mangonels, earthquakes, and warlords across nine centuries. The yakhchals survive too, their domed ice chambers a reminder that this was never just a fortress. It was the infrastructure of a living city, where people stored ice for the summer heat within the same walls that kept armies at bay.