Vijayanagara

A hermit's advice on a riverbank

formationDrafted from Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900)

Two brothers, Harihara and Bukka, served as minister and treasurer to the Hindu chief of Anegundi, a fortified hill town on the Tungabhadra river. In 1334 the Delhi Sultanate's ruler marched south against a rebel nephew who had taken refuge with that chief; the fortress fell, its ruler died fighting rather than surrender, and — by an account a contemporary Muslim traveler confirms independently — eleven of his sons were carried off and converted to Islam rather than killed. The Sultan installed his own governor over the shattered territory and withdrew north.

Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · Nikel3012 · CC0

A restoration that outlasted the conqueror

The new governor found the country ungovernable and the population in open revolt, and appealed to his own king for guidance. Rather than commit further troops to holding hostile ground, the Sultan restored the territory to Hindu rule — elevating, in a decision the source calls consequential beyond anything its author could have intended, the two brothers who had served the old chief as minister and treasurer. Harihara took the title of Raya; Bukka stood as his minister.

Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · Unknown · Public domain

A city built where a hermit pointed

Tradition credits the choice of a new capital to a holy man, Madhava Vidyaranya, whom Harihara is said to have met on the riverbank after witnessing a hare turn and attack his hunting dogs — an omen the sage read as marking the spot for a city. Whatever the truth behind the legend, a new capital rose on the south bank of the Tungabhadra, opposite Anegundi, amid a natural fortress of granite hills that would shelter it for two centuries. Harihara ruled until his death around 1343, and was succeeded by his brother Bukka, from whom, according to the source, all the kings who followed were in some fashion descended.

Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · Ingo Mehling · CC BY-SA 4.0

A jest and a massacre

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Bukka succeeded his brother Harihara I around 1343 and reigned for thirty-six years. Early in the reign of the Bahmani sultan Muhammad Shah, officials discovered that Vijayanagara and Warangal were melting down large quantities of Bahmani gold and silver coin, and the sultan had merchants put to death over it; Bukka, backed by his ally at Warangal, answered by demanding the return of disputed territory. The sultan stalled through diplomacy for a year and a half before finally attacking Warangal outright, plundering the country up to its capital before withdrawing on a large indemnity.

Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · Unknown · Public domain

A drunken order, and a king's contempt

The war with Vijayanagara itself began, by Sewell's own telling from the Muslim chronicler Firishtah, in an almost accidental way. Delighted by music one evening, Muhammad Shah ordered a gift of three hundred gold pieces drawn on the Vijayanagara treasury for the musicians who had pleased him - a jest, his own minister assumed, of a man in his cups. The sultan insisted the order stood. Bukka, receiving the demand, had the messenger paraded through the city seated backward on a donkey and sent him home in open contempt, then mobilized an army said to number thirty thousand horse, three thousand elephants and a hundred thousand foot.

An oath, and half a million dead

Bukka's forces sacked the frontier town of Mudkal and put every inhabitant to the sword; a single survivor carried the news to the sultan's capital. Muhammad Shah swore, in Firishtah's account, never to sheathe his sword until a hundred thousand "infidels" had died in expiation, crossed the Krishna with a picked force, and caught Bukka's army by surprise in a night attack, routing it with heavy slaughter. Firishtah - a Muslim court historian writing two centuries later, and, Sewell cautions, no neutral witness - put the Hindu dead at half a million across the campaign that followed; the sultan's own artillery train, unusual for the period if the account is accurate, helped him press deep into Vijayanagara's own territory before the campaign wound down. It was, by Firishtah's own incidental admission, the first time a Delhi-descended Muhammadan sovereign had led an army in person across the Tungabhadra and into Vijayanagara's own dominions.

Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · Manjunath Doddamani · Public domain

Growth of the empire

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Bukka's son Harihara II succeeded him around 1379 and reigned at least twenty years, the first Vijayanagara king to style himself Maharajadhiraja - great king of kings - rather than a lesser title. Early in his reign he expelled the Muhammadans holding Goa on the western coast, and inscriptions from across the length of the growing empire - Mysore, Dharwar, Conjeeveram, Chingleput, Trichinopoly - mark how far Vijayanagara authority now reached, consolidating what Bukka had only begun.

A worshipper of Siva, tolerant of everyone else

Harihara II was himself a devotee of Siva under the form Virupaksha, but an inscription dated 1385 on a pillar of a Jain temple near Vijayanagara records one of his own generals endowing it - plain evidence, Sewell notes, of real religious tolerance rather than mere official indifference. He granted freely to temples of every kind across his reign, and the ministers and generals named in his inscriptions - Sayana, brother of the scholar Madhavacharya; the generals Mudda, Iruga and Gunda - suggest a court settled enough in its own authority to leave a substantial administrative record behind it. The Bahmani sultanate to the north stayed largely at peace with Vijayanagara through most of this reign - Muslim chroniclers themselves admit an unbroken twenty years of quiet - a stability Harihara's long and otherwise unremarkable rule seems to have earned by simple persistence. The latest inscription of his reign is dated October 1399, and near the very end of his life, whether at his own direction or his son's, a Vijayanagara army crossed into the disputed territory between the Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers - the opening move of a war his successors would have to finish.

Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · Dr Murali Mohan Gurram · CC BY-SA 3.0

The farmer's daughter

expansionDrafted from Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900)

Harihara II's eldest son Bukka II held the throne only a few years before his younger brother Deva Raya I was crowned in November 1406. Within weeks of his own accession, by Firishtah's telling, Deva Raya was consumed by reports of a farmer's daughter named Pertal, living in the disputed border town of Mudkal, whose beauty a Brahman go-between had praised to him without limit. When her family, warned only after the fact, learned that royal riders were coming to seize her for the king's household, they fled with her before the raiding party arrived

• who then plundered the countryside on their way home and lost two thousand men to a local counterattack.

A war fought over a girl who was never caught

The raid gave the Bahmani sultan Firuz Shah his opening. He marched on Vijayanagara itself that winter, broke into parts of the city before being driven back, and settled in for a siege that pinned Deva Raya inside his own capital for months while Bahmani detachments ravaged the countryside to the south, took the fortress of Bankapur, and carried off sixty thousand prisoners. Deva Raya sued for terms Sewell calls humiliating to the last degree: an immense indemnity, the permanent cession of Bankapur, and his own daughter's hand in marriage to the sultan who had just devastated his kingdom - the first time, by the chronicler's own account, that a Vijayanagara king had married a daughter outside his own caste. Firuz Shah attended the wedding at Vijayanagara itself with evident ceremony, though the peace between the two kings soured almost immediately afterward over a perceived slight. Pertal herself was never caught in the raid that started the war; Firuz Shah later had her brought to his own court regardless and married her to his eldest son.

A throne passed quietly, for once

Deva Raya I ruled at least into 1412 without further recorded catastrophe and was succeeded by his son Vira Vijaya, who left the kingdom to Deva Raya II in turn - a quiet transition, notable mostly for not producing another crisis, in a dynasty that had spent much of its first seventy years fighting for its own survival on the Krishna frontier.

Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · Unknown · Public domain

Seven walls and a Persian envoy

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By the early fifteenth century, under Deva Raya II, Vijayanagara's reach was well established enough to draw a formal embassy from Persia. Abdur Razzaq, sent by the Persian court, arrived in 1443 after a diplomatic detour: the ruler of Calicut, though not himself subject to Vijayanagara, deferred to it enough to forward the Persian ambassador on at the Raya's own request — a request the source notes was backed by a claim to three hundred ports each equal to Calicut and territory requiring three months to cross.

Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · Unknown · Public domain

A city beyond comparison

What Abdur Razzaq found at the capital left a permanent mark on his own account: "the pupil of the eye has never seen a place like it, and the ear of intelligence has never been informed that there existed anything to equal it in the world." He described seven concentric fortified walls ringing the city, each enclosing the next, with cultivated fields and gardens in the outer rings giving way to dense markets, jeweled bazaars selling pearls and rubies openly in the street, and a royal audience hall raised above every other building in the capital. Roses, he noted with evident surprise, were sold everywhere — the people, he wrote, seemed to regard them as necessary as food.

Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · PP Yoonus · CC BY-SA 3.0

A kingdom already too large to survey

Abdur Razzaq placed Vijayanagara's dominion as running from the frontier near Ceylon to the borders of the Bahmani sultanate, with an army the source records at over a million men and elephants "in their size resembling mountains." However much these figures were rounded upward for a foreign audience, the underlying claim — a Hindu power commanding the greater part of the peninsula against a persistent Muslim rival to its north — described a state already a full century away from either its founding or its eventual fall, and a full century away as well from the reign that later observers would judge its absolute height.

As large as Rome

peakDrafted from Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900)

The throne changed hands violently before Vijayanagara reached its own highest point. Around 1490 a powerful lord named Narasimha, previously styled only a minister, had himself declared king, ending the line descended from Harihara and Bukka and founding a second dynasty. His successors held power unevenly until 1509, when Krishna Deva Raya came to the throne — a king a Portuguese eyewitness who saw him in person would later call the greatest of every Vijayanagara ruler before or since, in open contradiction of Muslim chroniclers who barely mention him by name.

Tirumala Venkateswara temple · Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · Unknown · Public domain

A crushing blow at Raichur

Krishna Deva Raya's reign settled, in his own favor, a long-running dispute over the Raichur doab, the fertile triangle of land between the Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers that both Vijayanagara and the Bijapur sultanate claimed. In 1520 his army handed Bijapur's Ismail Adil Shah a defeat so complete that even Firishtah, a hostile Muslim historian who otherwise treats Krishna Deva Raya as barely worth naming, admitted the Sultan had been dealt a crushing blow. Vijayanagara held Raichur and the doab it commanded for the rest of Krishna Deva Raya's reign.

Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · Unknown · Public domain

A city as large as Rome

It was in this same period, around 1520, that the Portuguese traveler Domingo Paes visited the capital and left an eyewitness account later generations would treat as unmatched by any similar record from the period. Climbing a hill to survey the city, unable to see it whole from any single vantage point, Paes wrote that what he could see "seemed to me as large as Rome, and very beautiful to the sight" — a city of groves and gardens, water channels running through it, palaces backed by lakes, and streets given over in turn to every craft and nation trading in the kingdom's wealth. Nuniz, writing a generation later, confirmed that it was Krishna Deva Raya himself, not any general acting in his name, who had led the armies that made this wealth possible — a king remembered, in the sources that saw him directly, as ruling in person rather than as a figurehead for others.

Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

A heap of ruins

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Krishna Deva Raya was succeeded in 1530 by Achyuta, a king Nuniz — who observed his court directly — describes as feeble, selfish, cowardly and cruel in roughly equal measure. What Krishna Deva Raya's own generalship had built, Achyuta's weakness began undoing, and by the reign of Sadasiva, enthroned in 1542, the king himself was little more than a prisoner of the men who actually held power. Real authority belonged to Rama Raya, nominally a minister but in practice regent and commander of the kingdom's armies, ruling alongside his two brothers Tirumala and Venkatadri.

A coalition where there had been rivals

For generations the Deccan's Muslim sultanates had fought Vijayanagara separately and often fought each other just as bitterly. Rama Raya's own diplomacy — playing one sultanate against another to Vijayanagara's advantage — helped provoke the one outcome that diplomacy could not survive: in 1564 four of those sultanates, Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda and Bidar, set aside their own rivalries and combined against the common Hindu power that had grown too dominant for any of them to face alone.

An afternoon that ended two centuries

The armies met at Talikota on January 23, 1565. Rama Raya, by tradition ninety-six years old and directing the battle from a litter, was thrown to the ground when a war elephant panicked near him, captured, and beheaded on the spot by one of the allied sultans; his head was raised on a spear in sight of his own troops, who broke and fled. The rout became a massacre — a hundred thousand dead by the victors' own reckoning — and the road to the undefended capital lay open. Sadasiva was carried south to safety by Tirumala, the last of the three brothers left alive, along with five hundred and fifty elephants loaded with treasure; behind them the city was left to five months of systematic destruction, its temples burned, its statues smashed, its palaces reduced, in the source's own words, to little more than a heap of ruins.

Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · Alexander Greenlaw · Public domain

A name a governor did not think worth using

The royal house did not vanish outright. Sadasiva's regents established a much reduced court first at Penukonda and later at Chandragiri and Vellore, and kings claiming the Vijayanagara title are attested in scattered inscriptions for well over a century afterward — one of them granted the site of Madras itself to English traders in 1639, asking that the new settlement be named for him. The local governor who actually administered the place ignored the request and named it after his own father instead. Vijayanagara's name endured on palm-leaf grants and temple walls for generations after Talikota; its power to make anyone act on those grants had ended in a single afternoon.

The third dynasty

afterlifeDrafted from Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900)

The Muhammadan armies went home within days of finishing their work, and the man they left behind was Tirumala, now sole regent, holding King Sadasiva as his prisoner at the fortress of Penukonda. His first recorded act as ruler of the wreckage was to summon Portuguese horse traders from Goa, take delivery of a large consignment of animals, and then dismiss the merchants without paying them - men who, by an Italian traveller's own account, were left "desperate, and, as it were, mad with sorrow and grief," unable even to leave the country safely while robber bands roamed the roads. It was not a promising start to a reign, and the nobles of the empire drew the obvious conclusion: one after another, they stopped waiting for orders from Penukonda and began ruling their own districts as independent men.

Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · Lvenkat · CC BY-SA 4.0

A murder that founded a dynasty

Tirumala went on recognizing Sadasiva as his own sovereign for three more years - inscriptions dated as late as February 1567 still name the captive king as overlord - before dispensing with the fiction altogether. In 1568 he murdered Sadasiva and took the throne outright, founding what genealogists would later call the third dynasty of Vijayanagara, its descent from the old royal house real but never conclusively traced. There was no capital left to defend it: what remained was a title, a treasury, and a shrinking radius of obedience.

Everything beyond the horizon

The shrinking did not stop. Bijapur took the fortress of Bankapur in 1573 after an eighteen-month siege of its own already-independent governor, destroying a temple there and building a mosque on its foundation; the same Bijapur campaign against Adoni found the place already held by a former Vijayanagara vassal ruling in his own name. Three years later a Bijapur attack on Bellamkonda frightened Tirumala's successors into abandoning Penukonda itself for Chandragiri, deeper south and further still from the ruined capital across the river. Golconda, no more scrupulous than its rival, broke a standing agreement in 1579 to seize Vinukonda and Kondavid along with two lesser forts, and in 1589 its king founded an entirely new city, Hyderabad, on ground the old empire's writ had once reached. None of it was reconquest in any organized sense - each sultanate simply helped itself to whatever a court at Chandragiri no longer had the strength to hold.

A king who killed his own family

afterlifeDrafted from Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900)

Venkata I, who succeeded his brother Tirumala's own heir in 1586, reigned at Chandragiri for twenty-eight years and died an old man in 1614 - the longest and, by the account of a Portuguese eyewitness named Barradas who was present at court, one of the steadiest reigns the diminished kingdom had known since Talikota. On his deathbed the old king called for his nephew Chica Raya, offered him the royal ring twice over the young man's own tearful protests, and had him formally proclaimed heir before dying three days later at sixty-seven. Three of his queens burned themselves on his funeral pyre, dressed in their richest jewels, which they distributed to relatives and Brahmans and threw to the crowd before mounting the flames.

Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · D13nidhi · Public domain

A crown taken within days

Chica Raya's reign lasted barely long enough to be noticed. Three of the old king's own nobles - his army commander, his minister, and a kinsman named Narpa Raya, each nursing a private grievance against the new ruler's demands - secretly joined a fourth noble, Jaga Raya, in a conspiracy to depose him. Admitted to the fortress under the pretense of paying homage, their combined forces seized its gates within an hour; Chica Raya, surrounded and abandoned, surrendered on a promise of safe treatment, and Jaga Raya crowned his own great-nephew king in his place before the deposed ruler had even left the palace grounds.

The washerman's laundry

One captain alone, Echama Naique, refused to recognize the new regime, calling Jaga Raya's puppet "a boy who was the son of no one knew whom." Unable to reach the imprisoned Chica Raya directly, he bribed the man who washed the royal family's clothes to smuggle out the king's twelve-year-old second son hidden among soiled laundry, past guards warned off by cries of "keep at a distance." A second rescue attempt, an underground tunnel dug toward the king's own cell, came within moments of success before a guard's foot broke through the passage floor by accident and gave it away.

What Jaga Raya ordered instead

The failed tunnel decided Chica Raya's fate. Jaga Raya sent his own brother to the prisoner with a choice: kill himself and his family, or be killed by the messenger's dagger. Chica Raya beheaded his wife, his youngest son, and his young daughter with his own hand, had his married elder son kill his own wife in turn, and then fell on his sword; the son did the same. Only a small daughter was spared the king's own hand - Jaga Raya's brother killed her himself, so that no one of the royal blood would survive to challenge the succession he had just engineered by murder.

A battle that undid the murder

The killings that were meant to secure the throne cost Jaga Raya the war for it. Nobles horrified by the massacre defected to Echama Naique, who met Jaga Raya's larger army in the field, broke it in a single engagement, and captured the royal insignia along with treasure Sewell's source valued at two million in precious stones alone. He proclaimed the rescued twelve-year-old, Chica Raya's own surviving son, king of the whole empire in Jaga Raya's place - though Jaga Raya himself escaped to the jungle, rallied fresh support, and kept the civil war alive for at least two more years, drawing in the rival Nayaka lords of Madurai and Tanjore on opposite sides until, Barradas wrote from Chandragiri in 1616, armies numbering close to a million men between them had gathered on the plains around Tiruchirappalli.

The shadow of a name

afterlifeDrafted from Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900)

The civil war of 1614-16 was the last time a Vijayanagara succession mattered to anyone beyond the family fighting over it. Everything the dynasty had ever governed kept slipping away on its own schedule, independent of who wore the ring at Chandragiri. The Nayaka governors of Madurai and Tanjore, appointed to rule those provinces in the empire's own name, stopped answering to it in 1602; the chiefs of Ikkeri went on styling themselves under-lords of Vijayanagara out of habit or convenience until 1650, by which point the title bound them to nothing at all; and the empire's own viceroy in Mysore governed that kingdom until 1610, after which his descendants simply ruled it as kings in their own right, with no further pretense of holding it for anyone else.

The last shreds

What little remained standing fell to a newer power altogether. Sivaji and his Marathas overran the Konkan coast by 1673, and within four years had swept up what Sewell's source calls the last shreds of Vijayanagara authority at Kurnool, Gingee and Vellore - the family's final fortresses, taken not by the Deccan sultanates that had broken the empire a century earlier but by a Hindu power that owed it nothing. Sivaji's own brother Ekoji seized Tanjore the year before, in 1674, and founded a Maratha dynasty there that would rule the old Nayaka capital for a century of its own.

A title with nothing left to grant

The family did not vanish so much as become ceremonial. In March 1639, still resident at Chandragiri years after the war that had nearly ended the line, a king styled Sri Ranga Raya VI granted the site of Madras to an English trader - a grant the local Muhammadan governor who actually controlled the ground simply ignored, naming the new English settlement after his own father instead. The gesture kept being made anyway. As late as 1792 and 1793, more than two centuries after Talikota and over a hundred years after Sivaji's Marathas took the last fortress the family actually held, local grantees in the south were still recording land gifts to temples "by permission of Venkatapati Maharaya of Vijayanagara" - a formula with no army, no treasury, and no territory behind it, repeated on at least eight other surviving eighteenth-century inscriptions for no better reason than that the old royal name still meant something to the people making the grant.

Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (1900) · Francis Swain Ward · Public domain

What was left, writing in 1900

The bloodline itself never broke. By the time Sewell compiled his own account of the empire, its last two acknowledged male descendants were living not as kings but as a zamindar family under the Nizam of Hyderabad - the Rajah of Anegundi, styled Sri Ranga Deva Raya, and his nephew Kumara Raghava, holding the old family estate on the north bank of the Tungabhadra, across the river from the ruins the Deccan sultanates had made of their ancestors' capital three hundred and thirty-five years before.