Appearance
6.10 — Vijayanagara, the Bahmanis and the Southern Century
Abdur Razzaq, an ambassador sent by the ruler of Persia, arrived at Vijayanagara in 1443 and wrote that the city had no equal in the world, that it had seven concentric walls, that the bazaars were wide and long, that jewellers sold pearls, rubies, emeralds and diamonds openly in the market, and that the king's treasury contained chambers filled with molten gold.
Domingo Paes, a Portuguese horse trader who saw it around 1520, wrote that it was as large as Rome and very beautiful to look at, with many groves of trees and aqueducts, and that it was the best-provided city in the world.
Forty-five years after Paes wrote that, it was destroyed, and it was never rebuilt. What remains is a landscape of ruins spread over 25 square kilometres among boulder-strewn hills.
Why the Deccan became a separate theatre
Alauddin Khalji's armies had reached Madurai by 1311 (Chapter 6.9), and Muhammad bin Tughlaq had moved the capital to Daulatabad in the Deccan. Neither could hold the south from Delhi. The distance was too great, the terrain too broken, and the revenue systems too thin.
So the Deccan broke away in two directions at once, in the 1330s and 40s.
The Bahmani Sultanate was founded in 1347 by a rebellious Tughlaq governor, covering the northern Deccan from coast to coast.
Vijayanagara was founded around 1336 by two brothers, Harihara and Bukka, on the south bank of the Tungabhadra. The traditional account says they had been captured, converted to Islam, sent back as governors, and then reverted and declared independence under the guidance of a sage named Vidyaranya. How much of that is later construction is uncertain; the founding of the state is not.
The Tungabhadra and Krishna rivers became the frontier, and the two states fought over the fertile land between them — the Raichur Doab — for two centuries.
What Vijayanagara was
At its height it controlled the whole peninsula south of the Krishna, including Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra and parts of Kerala.
The city was built as a fortress. The site is surrounded by hills of enormous granite boulders, and the fortifications used them — walls run between outcrops, and the natural rock does much of the work. Seven lines of defence are described by visitors.
Water engineering was the enabling technology. The region is semi-arid (Chapter 6.1), and the city supported a very large population — estimates run to several hundred thousand — through an elaborate system of tanks, canals and aqueducts drawing on the Tungabhadra. Some of those channels are still in use for irrigation.
The economy was agrarian with a large commercial overlay. Vijayanagara controlled ports on both coasts and traded across the Indian Ocean. Its single largest import was horses (Chapter 6.1), bought from Arab and later Portuguese traders at enormous cost, and the competition with the Bahmanis for horse supply was a continuous strategic concern for both.
Administration ran through nayakas — military commanders granted territory in exchange for maintaining troops. This is the same design as the Sultanate's iqta and it had the same weakness: the nayakas became hereditary and increasingly independent, and after the empire's fall several of them became independent kingdoms, notably at Madurai, Tanjore and Gingee.
Temple building was on an enormous scale. The Vitthala temple at Hampi, with its stone chariot and its carved pillars that produce musical notes when struck; the Virupaksha temple, still in worship; and the great gopurams — the towering gateway structures — that define the South Indian temple skyline were substantially a Vijayanagara development. Temple patronage was also political: endowing temples bound local elites and religious institutions to the state.
And the Bahmani side built too — the Gol Gumbaz at Bijapur, built by the successor Adil Shahi dynasty in the seventeenth century, has one of the largest unsupported domes in the world, with a whispering gallery in which a sound is reflected around the circumference. Golconda's fort near Hyderabad had an acoustic warning system by which a clap at the entrance was audible at the top.
The relationship between the two sides
The popular framing is a Hindu empire against Muslim sultanates, and that framing is a simplification that the evidence does not support.
What is true: the two blocs were founded in explicit opposition, the wars were long and often savage, and religious rhetoric was used on both sides.
What is also true, and less often said:
Vijayanagara employed Muslim cavalry in large numbers, and had a mosque in the city for them. Contemporary accounts describe Muslim commanders in Vijayanagara service, and the Qur'an being placed before the king so they could swear loyalty in an acceptable form.
Bahmani and successor sultanates employed Hindu officials and troops, and their courts were substantially staffed by Marathi-speaking Brahmin administrators — a tradition that fed directly into the Maratha state of Chapter 6.13.
The alliances crossed the line constantly. Vijayanagara allied with individual Deccan sultanates against others; the sultanates allied with Vijayanagara against each other. The wars were about the Raichur Doab, horses, and dynastic advantage.
Krishnadevaraya, Vijayanagara's greatest ruler (1509–1529), was a poet in Telugu and a patron in Sanskrit, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu, and his court is remembered as one of the great literary moments in South Indian culture. He also fought and defeated the Adil Shahi sultan at Raichur in 1520 with heavy use of Portuguese-supplied matchlock men.
Talikota, 1565
The Deccan sultanates — Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda and Bidar, who spent most of their existence fighting each other — combined.
The immediate cause was Vijayanagara's regent Rama Raya, who had spent years playing the sultanates against one another, intervening in their succession disputes, and by several accounts humiliating them. He created the one thing that could beat him: a coalition.
The battle was fought on 26 January 1565 near Talikota. Accounts differ on the details, and the common thread is that the Vijayanagara army was initially doing well when two Muslim commanders in its own service defected, and Rama Raya, who was in his seventies, was captured and beheaded on the field. The army collapsed.
And then the city was destroyed. The victorious forces occupied Vijayanagara and, over a period of months, systematically looted and burned it. Archaeology confirms deliberate, thorough destruction — burnt layers, smashed sculpture, and structures deliberately pulled down.
The empire did not end immediately. A successor line ruled from Penukonda and later Chandragiri for several decades. But the city was finished, the nayakas became independent, and the political unity of the far south was gone.
What Talikota is used for, and what it actually shows
The battle is frequently presented as the destruction of the last great Hindu empire by a Muslim alliance, and it is used in modern political argument accordingly.
What the record shows is more specific and more instructive.
The coalition was formed in response to a specific policy, and it dissolved almost immediately afterwards — the sultanates went straight back to fighting each other, and Bijapur and Golconda were themselves conquered by Aurangzeb a century later.
Vijayanagara's army contained Muslim units and its opponents contained Hindu ones. The defection that decided the battle was of commanders, and commanders defected in every Indian war of the period for reasons of payment, faction and advantage.
The destruction of the city was thorough and it was punitive, and both religious and simple looting motives are visible in it.
And the structural cause of the defeat is the one Chapter 6.15 keeps returning to: an empire whose military system depended on assigned commanders with their own troops is an empire whose battles can be lost by defection, and a state that unifies its enemies has made a strategic error regardless of anyone's religion.
What the south looked like afterwards
The nayaka kingdoms — Madurai, Tanjore, Gingee, Ikkeri — continued Vijayanagara's temple patronage and built the great gopurams that dominate Tamil Nadu's temple towns today. The Meenakshi temple complex at Madurai in its present form is substantially nayaka work.
The Deccan sultanates were conquered by Aurangzeb between 1686 and 1687, which extended the Mughal empire to its greatest extent and, as Chapter 6.12 argues, contributed directly to its collapse.
And the Marathas rose in the western Deccan out of the administrative and military traditions of exactly these sultanates (Chapter 6.13).
Where this shows up in your life
Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the most extraordinary archaeological landscapes anywhere — a whole imperial capital abandoned at a known date and never built over, which is why it is so informative.
The South Indian temple as you see it today — the towering painted gopurams, the enormous walled enclosures, the pillared halls — is substantially a Vijayanagara and nayaka creation layered on Chola and Pallava foundations (Chapter 6.7).
Telugu and Kannada literature had major flowerings under this patronage.
And there is a lesson in Rama Raya's diplomacy that generalises. He spent two decades keeping his enemies divided and profiting from it, and the method worked until the day it produced a coalition. A strategy of playing rivals against each other has a failure mode: it eventually gives all of them the same enemy. Chapter 11.2 finds the same mechanism in the alliance system before 1914.
What the next page covers
In 1526, at Panipat north of Delhi, a Central Asian prince with a small army, artillery and a grievance defeated the Lodi sultan and founded a dynasty that ruled most of the subcontinent for two hundred years. Chapter 6.11 covers the Mughals — how they took India, how Akbar built an administrative system that actually worked, what the mansabdari system was and why it mattered, how a Muslim dynasty governed an overwhelmingly non-Muslim population for so long, and what the empire looked like at its height. Chapter 6.12 then writes out the ledger.