Vijayanagara Empire

The Vijayanagara Empire was the last great Hindu empire of southern India, a powerful state that dominated the peninsula for some three centuries and served as a bulwark of Hindu culture and political power against the expansion of the northern Muslim sultanates.

It was founded in 1336 by the brothers Harihara I and Bukka Raya I of the Sangama dynasty, former feudatories who established a new capital, Vijayanagara ('City of Victory'), on the banks of the Tungabhadra River in modern Karnataka. The empire arose amid the turmoil caused by the incursions of the Delhi Sultanate into the south and grew to unite much of the region under its rule, ultimately governed by four successive dynasties. Vijayanagara developed a strong centralised administration, a large army incorporating cavalry and war elephants, and a sophisticated provincial system, while drawing immense wealth from agriculture, a thriving textile and spice trade, and access to maritime commerce on both coasts. The empire was a great patron of Hindu temple architecture, literature in Sanskrit and South Indian languages, music, and the arts, and its capital became one of the largest and most splendid cities in the world, its ruins at Hampi still bearing witness to its grandeur. The empire reached its zenith in the early sixteenth century under Krishnadevaraya of the Tuluva dynasty, an able warrior, administrator, and patron of culture, whose reign marked the height of Vijayanagara's territorial extent and prosperity. The empire's power was shattered in 1565 at the Battle of Talikota, where a coalition of the Deccan sultanates decisively defeated the Vijayanagara army and sacked and destroyed the magnificent capital. Although the empire survived in a reduced form under the Aravidu dynasty, ruling from new capitals, it never recovered its former strength and gradually fragmented as its provincial governors, the Nayakas, asserted independence. The last remnants of the empire dissolved by around 1646.

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