Vijayanagara

A hermit's advice on a riverbank

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

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.

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.

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.

Seven walls and a Persian envoy

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.