Rashtrakuta Empire

A feudatory's patient revenge

formationDrafted from (ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960)

Dantidurga did not begin as a rebel. He served the Chalukya emperor Kirttivarman II loyally enough at first, even marrying a Chalukya princess he had taken by force on the battlefield at Kaira — a match that tied his own family to the imperial line he would later overthrow. His ambitions grew slowly and were pursued with patience rather than a single decisive stroke.

(ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960) · Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

A rival isolated before he was ever attacked

Rather than move directly against his own overlord, Dantidurga spent years building strength on the margins of Chalukya power: subduing the Gurjaras of Malwa, campaigning against Kosala and Kalinga, and marching all the way to Kanchipuram, where he struck an alliance with the Pallava king Nandivarman Pallavamalla by giving him his own daughter in marriage. By the time he finally turned against Kirttivarman directly, the Chalukya emperor had already been stripped of his outlying provinces and diplomatic support.

A conquest declared before it was fully won

Dantidurga's own Samangad copper-plate grant, dated 753, already describes Chalukya sovereignty as overthrown — an accomplished fact rather than an ongoing campaign, even though Kirttivarman continued to issue grants from his own camp for some years afterward. The source treats this less as a single military disaster than as "a rapidly progressing attenuation" of Chalukya power that Dantidurga's own maneuvering had engineered over years. In declaring himself sovereign of the Deccan, Dantidurga founded a dynasty that would hold that position for two centuries — considerably longer than the empire it had replaced.

(ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960) · Nikel3012 · CC0

A boy emperor's long war

expansionDrafted from (ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960)

Govinda III, who succeeded his father Dhruva and ruled from 793 to 814, pushed the empire Dantidurga had founded to a reach it had never held before - defeating enemies "from Kanauj to Cape Comorin on a hundred different battlefields," in the source's own account, and annexing Malwa as an imperial viceroyalty. When he died in 814 he left the throne to his son Sarva, a boy of thirteen or fourteen who took the title Amoghavarsha - "unfailing rainer of blessings" - and would go on to reign for more than sixty-four years, one of the longest securely dated reigns of any monarch anywhere.

(ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960) · Unknown · Public domain

A kingdom that nearly ended before it properly began

The regency arranged by Govinda III, under Amoghavarsha's cousin Karkka, held for barely two years before a serious rebellion broke out around 817. Contemporary records blame "deceitful Kali" for turning feudatories, ministers and relatives against the boy emperor; whatever the cause, the revolt spread until the young Amoghavarsha was driven to flee the country entirely and Rashtrakuta power collapsed for a time. Karkka fought the rebels back and restored his ward to the throne by May 821, but only after Vijayaditya II, the Chalukya king of Vengi whom Govinda III had once deposed, joined the revolt and claimed to have fought the Rashtrakutas in a hundred and eight battles over twelve years. Rashtrakuta records themselves admit that Amoghavarsha had to "raise afresh the glory of his house, which had sunken deep into the Chalukya ocean."

Three fronts, on and off, for thirty years

The kingdom Amoghavarsha spent the rest of his reign defending had to be defended on every side at once. He drove the Vengi Chalukyas back at Vingavalli around 830, only to lose the province again to a rival general within fifteen years and never recover it. His own cousins, ruling as loyal Rashtrakuta viceroys in Gujarat for two generations, turned on him after 835 in a war against his own family that dragged on for about twenty-five years before ending in reconciliation. The Ganga kings of the south rebelled and were driven back more than once, until Amoghavarsha finally settled the enmity around 860 by marrying his own daughter to a Ganga prince. Unlike his father and grandfather, Amoghavarsha was never a celebrated general in his own right - but the empire he had so nearly lost as a boy of seventeen was still standing, intact in its essentials, when he handed it to his own son more than sixty years later.

The unfailing rainer of blessings

expansionDrafted from (ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960)

It was in Amoghavarsha's reign, and probably at his own direction, that Manyakheta - modern Malkhed - became the Rashtrakuta capital in place of whatever earlier seat the dynasty had used at Achalapura or near Ellora. The Arab historian al-Mas'udi knew the city by the name Mankir, a mark of how far its reputation had already travelled beyond the Deccan by the time later geographers were writing.

(ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960) · Unknown · Public domain

A synthesis of two faiths

In the latter half of his long life Amoghavarsha turned from war toward religion and literature. He was, by his own court's account, either the author or the inspiration behind the Kavirajamarga, the earliest surviving work of Kannada poetics, and the Jain scholar Jinasena, author of the Adipurana, names Amoghavarsha his own pupil. Yet the same king kept up an intense devotion to the goddess Mahalakshmi, once offering her a finger of his own left hand - recorded by his court poet in the Sanjan plates and independently confirmed by the Jain grammarian Bhattakalanka - to avert a calamity he believed threatened his people. "Monarchs usually make others bleed for themselves," the source observes; "rulers like Amoghavarsha, who voluntarily bleed for others, are rare indeed in the annals of human history."

(ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960) · Amitabha Gupta · CC BY 4.0

A throne set down and taken up again

After about 860, once he had passed sixty and the empire had settled into comparative peace, Amoghavarsha began periodically withdrawing from government altogether to devote himself to religious retreat, leaving his son and eventual successor Krishna to rule in his place until he returned. The practice explains why later charters sometimes name father and son as reigning king in the same years - a confusion the source resolves by treating whichever charter names an active ruler as reflecting one of these interludes rather than a disputed succession. Amoghavarsha's last known date is March 878; reckoning his age at about seventy-eight that year, his death and his son's full accession followed within two years, closing a reign that had opened when its own occupant was still a boy of thirteen.

(ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960) · B. Lewis Rice · Public domain

A merchant's testimony

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Altekar, The Rashtrakutas and Their Times (1934)

Arab writers who never set foot far from the coast still had a clear picture of who ruled the Deccan's interior. They called the Rashtrakuta emperor the Balhara - a rendering of Vallabha, a title every king of the dynasty bore - and treated his kingdom as one of the major powers of the age. Sulaiman, a merchant writing around 850, recorded a principle he had observed of Indian kingship generally but applied it, in the Rashtrakuta case, to a ruler whose reach he had seen for himself: "when a king subdues a neighbouring state in India, he places over it a man belonging to the family of the fallen prince," governing thereafter as a tributary. Of the Rashtrakuta emperor specifically, Sulaiman's own verdict was blunter still - that every neighbouring prince, "though master in his own state," was made to pay him homage. Al-Mas'udi, writing later in the same tradition, described the Balhara's own army in similarly plain terms: "his horses and elephants are innumerable."

No flattery, a historian concludes

Altekar, writing in the twentieth century with the epigraphic record open before him, treats the merchant's judgment as sober reporting rather than a traveller's exaggeration: "the observation of Sulaiman, that the Rashtrakutas were the most feared and powerful rulers of India, is no flattery, but a mere statement of facts." The empire Dantidurga had founded from a position of feudatory obscurity had, by the ninth century, become one a passing foreign merchant could not help but name first among its neighbours.

Altekar, The Rashtrakutas and Their Times (1934) · Shishirdasika · CC BY-SA 4.0

A crown prince's elephant

peakDrafted from (ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960)

Krishna III, who came to the Rashtrakuta throne in 939, inherited an empire already the dominant power of the Deccan, but it was his own campaign against the Cholas that would make his reign the dynasty's own high point. After early Rashtrakuta gains in Chola territory, the Chola king Parantaka I rallied his forces and sent an army under his own crown prince, Rajaditya, to drive the invaders back.

A battle decided by one man's death

The two armies met in 949 at Takkolam in the North Arcot district. By the Rashtrakuta's own account, the Cholas fought with such initial force that "none dared to counter-attack" — until Krishna's own brother-in-law, the Ganga king Butuga, rallied the Rashtrakuta line, charged directly at Rajaditya's own elephant, killed the animal beneath him, and climbed into the howdah to kill the crown prince himself on the spot. The Chola army, disheartened by the sudden loss of its own commander, broke and fled, leaving the field to the Rashtrakutas. In reward for the feat, Krishna granted Butuga governorship over nearly the whole of the Bombay Karnatak.

(ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960) · Holenarasipura · CC BY-SA 3.0

A conquest pressed to its furthest point

With the Chola army broken, Krishna pushed the advantage as far as it would go, defeating both the Kerala and Pandya kings in turn and occupying Ramesvaram itself, where he built temples — named for himself — as permanent monuments to a conquest no local ruler could tear down. Even the king of Ceylon, the source notes, sent his own submission rather than risk the same fate. For a time Krishna held effective possession of a large part of the Chola kingdom, a reach south of the Krishna river no Rashtrakuta king before or after him would match.

An overlordship no predecessor had achieved

The source's own judgment on Krishna's reign is unambiguous: "no other king in ancient India was ever overlord of the entire Deccan in so complete a sense of the term as was Krishna in c. A.D. 965." Where earlier Rashtrakuta kings had taken Kanchi without ever breaking Chola power at its own southern reach, Krishna alone combined both — a single reign in which the empire Dantidurga had founded two centuries earlier reached the furthest extent it would ever hold.

A descendant's return

endDrafted from (ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960)

Krishna III's own successors could not hold what he had built. His brother Khottiga, who inherited the throne in 967, saw the Rashtrakuta capital itself briefly occupied by an invading Paramara army - a humiliation the empire had never suffered even at the height of its wars with the Cholas. When Karkka II succeeded Khottiga in September 972, the damage to Rashtrakuta prestige was already done, and a charter issued within a month of his own accession, full of conventional praise for victories that existed, the source notes dryly, "only in the fancy of the grateful poet," could not disguise how exposed the empire had become.

A small lord with a long memory

The man who took advantage of this weakness was Taila II, ruler of a minor fief at Bagewadi who had served loyally as an ordinary feudatory under Krishna III. Taila believed himself a direct descendant of the imperial Chalukya family of Badami — the same dynasty the Rashtrakutas had overthrown two centuries before — and both his own lineage and his marriage to a Rashtrakuta princess convinced him he had as much claim to rule the Deccan as the family currently holding it. His mother's own Chedi relatives, embittered by unprovoked Rashtrakuta attacks under Krishna III, gave him further backing.

A weak king with no one left to trust

Karkka's own position was already fragile before Taila moved against him. He had overridden the succession claims of Indra, grandson of Krishna III, alienating Indra's powerful maternal uncle; his own ministers were, by his enemies' account, vicious and widely resented; and when Taila finally attacked at the end of 973, Karkka found himself without reliable allies even inside his own capital.

A dynasty ends where it began

The battle was fierce and decisive. Taila's own records admit the fighting was sanguinary before he secured "the sovereignty of the world," and Karkka's two chief advisers were killed on the field. Karkka himself escaped, carving out a small principality in Mysore where he continued, with a certain defiance, to use the full imperial titles of a throne he no longer held, ruling there until 991. Taila marched on to occupy Manyakheta itself, restoring Chalukya power on the very ground from which Dantidurga's own family had displaced his ancestors two centuries earlier — a debt of two hundred years, settled in a single afternoon.

A city outlives its dynasty

afterlifeDrafted from (ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960)

Manyakheta itself did not fall with the dynasty that had built it. Taila II occupied the city in 973 and kept it as the seat of his restored Chalukya power for a generation, and the fort on the Kagina river continued to appear in inscriptions - a Mysore record of 902 already names it the headquarters of the "Manyakheda six thousand" province, and it went on being graced by the presence of Chalukya sovereigns after Taila's own conquest.

(ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960) · SUPADHYAY · CC BY-SA 4.0

A Chola prince's raid on the old Rashtrakuta capital

The city's second violent moment came from the south. Around 1007-8, the Chola crown prince Rajendra - the future Rajendra I - led an army deep into Chalukya territory in reprisal for a Chalukya invasion of Vengi, and inscriptions of his own reign claim the capture of the Raichur doab, the Kadamba capital Banavasi, and finally "Mannaikkadakkam" - Manyakheta itself, by then the Chalukya king Satyashraya's own seat. A near-contemporary Chalukya inscription, in its own "picturesque language," accuses Rajendra's army of crossing the frontier "900,000 strong" and ravaging the country - language the source treats as plainly exaggerated, but which nonetheless records a genuine and deep incursion. It was not a lasting occupation: Satyashraya kept his throne until his own death in 1008, and the Chalukya line he represented, the dynasty that had itself displaced the Rashtrakutas thirty-five years before, continued to rule from Manyakheta and later from Kalyani for more than a century afterward. The city that had once housed the court a ninth-century Arab merchant judged mightier than any of its neighbours spent its final chapter as a prize fought over by the two powers that came after it.