The Fall of Vijayanagara — one of the world’s great cities broken in a day and abandoned

Summary

The Vijayanagara Empire — the great Hindu power that had dominated southern India for more than two centuries from its capital at Vijayanagara, the city now known by its ruins at Hampi — was broken on 23 January 1565 at the Battle of Talikota, also called the Battle of Rakshasi-Tangadi. A coalition of four Deccan sultanates — Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda, and Bidar — combined against it and annihilated its army. The empire's aged de facto ruler, the regent Aliya Rama Raya, was captured on the field and beheaded. In the weeks that followed, the victorious armies plundered and burned the capital, one of the largest and richest cities on earth, over a period of some five months; it was never reoccupied, and its ruin is permanent.

The empire that fell at Talikota was not in obvious decline. Founded in 1336, Vijayanagara had reached extraordinary heights under Krishnadevaraya in the early sixteenth century and remained, in 1565, immensely wealthy and militarily formidable. Its capital, described by Persian and Portuguese travellers as a city of perhaps half a million people, rivers of trade, and palaces and temples without equal, was reckoned among the greatest cities in the world. What destroyed it was not slow rot but a single catastrophic battle — and the political miscalculation that brought four normally divided rivals together against it.

The mechanism of the fall lay in diplomacy as much as on the battlefield. For decades Vijayanagara had thrived by playing the mutually hostile Deccan sultanates against one another, intervening in their quarrels and tilting the balance to its own advantage. Under Rama Raya this policy grew overbearing, and his interference and reputed arrogance drove the sultanates, despite their own deep rivalries, into an unprecedented alliance sealed by marriage. At Talikota their combined cavalry and superior artillery overwhelmed the Vijayanagara host; by several accounts two Muslim commanders within Rama Raya's own army defected at the crucial moment. With Rama Raya dead, the army disintegrated.

The consequences reshaped southern India. The capital's destruction ended Vijayanagara's role as the paramount power of the south and opened the peninsula to the expansion of the sultanates and, in time, the Mughals. A diminished Vijayanagara survived for decades under the Aravidu dynasty from new capitals, but the empire as a great power was finished. The abandoned city, stripped and burned, became the haunting field of ruins at Hampi — a UNESCO World Heritage Site that preserves, in scorched granite, the scale of what was lost.

Timeline

The greatest city of the south

For more than two hundred years Vijayanagara was the dominant power of southern India, and its capital one of the marvels of the medieval world. The empire was founded in 1336 by the brothers Harihara I and Bukka Raya I of the Sangama dynasty, rising in the wake of the northern sultanates' incursions into the south and consolidating Hindu rule across the peninsula below the Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers. Across four dynasties — Sangama, Saluva, Tuluva, and finally Aravidu — it grew into a vast, prosperous state that controlled the lucrative trade in horses, cotton, spices, and gemstones.

The empire reached its height under Krishnadevaraya, who reigned from 1509 to 1529 and is remembered as one of the great rulers of Indian history — a conqueror who humbled his rivals, a builder of temples, and a patron of literature in Telugu, Kannada, Sanskrit, and Tamil. Under him and his successors the capital became a byword for wealth. The Persian ambassador Abdur Razzaq and the Portuguese traveller Domingo Paes, who saw it at its height, described a city of immense circuit and dense population — by modern estimates perhaps half a million people, among the largest cities on earth, ringed by walls and irrigation works and crowded with bazaars where, Paes wrote, diamonds and pearls were sold in the streets.

By the mid-sixteenth century, however, the throne had weakened. After Krishnadevaraya's death the Tuluva line declined, and real authority passed to a powerful regent, Aliya Rama Raya, who ruled in the name of the figurehead king Sadasiva Raya. Rama Raya was an able and ambitious statesman who had spent years in the service of the Deccan sultanates and knew their politics intimately. Under him Vijayanagara remained outwardly formidable, but its power now rested on the skill of one aging man and on a diplomacy of division that depended on the sultanates remaining at one another's throats.

The alliance and the day at Talikota

The strategy that had long preserved Vijayanagara's supremacy was also the seed of its destruction. The five Deccan sultanates that had emerged from the breakup of the Bahmani kingdom were chronically at war with one another, and Rama Raya made an art of intervening in their quarrels — allying now with one, now with another, to keep them weak and divided. But his interventions grew heavier-handed over the years, and the chronicles record a mounting resentment at the arrogance with which he treated the sultans and, in some accounts, their faith. In playing the balance of power so aggressively, Rama Raya gave four old enemies a common one.

In 1564 the sultanates of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda, and Bidar — the fifth, Berar, stood aside — overcame their rivalries and formed a confederacy against Vijayanagara, cemented by marriage alliances between the ruling houses. In January 1565 their combined armies advanced to the plain near the Krishna River, between the villages of Rakshasi and Tangadi, where Rama Raya, by then very old, took the field at the head of a great host. On 23 January the two armies met in the Battle of Talikota. The early fighting reportedly went well for Vijayanagara, but the allied artillery and cavalry — the sultanates fielded better gunpowder weapons and horse — turned the engagement, and by several accounts two Muslim cavalry commanders within Rama Raya's own army defected to the enemy at the decisive moment.

The collapse, when it came, was total. Rama Raya's position was overrun, the regent himself captured, and he was beheaded on the field — by tradition at the hands or order of the Ahmadnagar sultan. The sight of their dead commander broke the army's will; the host that had stood firm dissolved into a rout, and tens of thousands are said to have died in the flight. What had been the paramount military power of southern India was destroyed in the course of a single day. The figurehead king Sadasiva Raya and the surviving nobles fled south with what treasure they could carry, leaving the capital open.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The Battle of Talikota permanently reconfigured the politics of southern India. The destruction of Vijayanagara removed the paramount power that had checked the Deccan sultanates for two centuries, and although the victors soon resumed their quarrels among themselves, the field was open to the steady northern expansion that would in the following century bring the Mughal Empire deep into the peninsula. The Nayaka governors of the old empire — at Madurai, Tanjore, and Gingee — turned their provinces into effectively independent kingdoms, fragmenting the unified power that Vijayanagara had embodied.

The diminished Aravidu line ruled on from Penukonda and later capitals, preserving the name and some of the forms of the empire, but never its former dominance, until it dissolved in internal strife and external pressure by the middle of the seventeenth century. The deepest mark the fall left, however, is physical. The abandoned capital, stripped and burned in 1565, survives as the vast archaeological landscape of Hampi on the banks of the Tungabhadra — temples, market streets, palaces, and water systems spread across square miles of granite, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986. The ruins are among the most evocative in Asia precisely because they record, intact in their devastation, the scale of a city that died in a season.

Lessons

References

• Battle of Talikota WIKIPEDIA
• Vijayanagar | Empire, Capital, Map, & Facts ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA
• Vijayanagara Empire WIKIPEDIA
• Vijayanagara WIKIPEDIA