Battle of Talikota

Background

By the 1540s real power at Vijayanagara lay with Aliya Rama Raya, son-in-law of the great emperor Krishnadevaraya, who ruled as regent for the nominal emperor Sadashiva Raya. Rama Raya's policy toward the five sultanates that had grown out of the Bahmani kingdom was to keep them divided, allying with one against another, sending troops into their quarrels, and taking territory as his price. The sultanates were at least as often at war with each other as with Vijayanagara, and Rama Raya had at different times fought alongside Bijapur, Ahmadnagar and Golconda. His successes made him the most feared power in the Deccan, and Persian chroniclers on the sultanate side describe his conduct as arrogant and humiliating to his allies.

The alliance and the battle

In 1564 the sultans of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda and Bidar settled their own disputes, sealed by marriage alliances, and marched south together; Berar stayed out. The armies met in January 1565 on the plain near the villages of Rakkasagi and Tangadagi, some distance from Talikota itself, whose name the battle has borne in most histories.

Accounts of the fighting differ in detail. The sources agree that the allied artillery did heavy damage, that Rama Raya, then an old man, was captured and beheaded on the orders of Hussain Nizam Shah, and that the Vijayanagara army broke when its commander fell. Some accounts add that two Muslim commanders in Vijayanagara's service went over to the sultans during the battle; this is reported but not certain.

The sack of the capital

Rama Raya's brother Tirumala withdrew to the capital, collected the treasury and the emperor Sadashiva, and left for Penukonda. Vijayanagara, one of the largest cities in Asia, was left without defence. The allied armies and local raiders plundered it over several months. The Italian traveller Cesare Federici, who passed through in 1567, described the city as empty and its houses inhabited by wild animals. The capital was never reoccupied, and its ruins are now Hampi.

Consequences

The empire did not end in 1565. Tirumala founded the Aravidu dynasty, which ruled from Penukonda, then Chandragiri and Vellore, until the middle of the seventeenth century. But central authority weakened, and the great Nayaka governors of Madurai, Thanjavur and Gingee became rulers in their own right. In the north the allies fell out again within a few years. Bijapur and Golconda gained most, expanding south into the Karnataka plateau and the Tamil country over the following century.

Interpretation

Robert Sewell's A Forgotten Empire (1900) presented Talikota as the last stand of a Hindu empire against Islam, and that reading has had long influence. Historians such as Burton Stein and Richard Eaton have argued that it fits the evidence poorly: Vijayanagara employed Muslim soldiers and officers, Rama Raya had been the sultans' ally as often as their enemy, and the coalition of 1565 was a short-lived political combination against an overbearing neighbour. Both readings are still met with, and the religious framing remains common in popular history.