Krishnadevaraya's Reign — Vijayanagara at Its Height
Krishnadevaraya's twenty years on the throne are the point at which Vijayanagara stopped defending the Deccan and started dictating to it. He inherited in 1509 a state that had lost the Raichur doab to Bijapur, was being raided from Odisha, and had a rebellious tributary in its own southern hills. He dealt with them in order. Ummattur was reduced first. Then came six years against the Gajapati kings of Odisha, in which the hill fort of Udayagiri fell in 1514 after a siege that required cutting a road through rock, and Kondavidu fell in 1515 with the Gajapati heir taken prisoner; the war ended with a marriage and the return of the land north of the Krishna, a settlement generous enough that the northern frontier stayed quiet for the rest of the reign. In 1520 he turned west and took Raichur from Bijapur. The state that did this was not a war machine only. The revenue rested on irrigated agriculture behind an enormous system of tanks and canals, on cotton and spice exports, on the Deccan diamond fields, and on a monopoly the crown paid heavily to maintain: warhorses from Arabia and Persia, which could not be bred in the south and reached it through Portuguese Goa after 1510. Krishnadevaraya spent the proceeds visibly. The Krishna temple went up in 1513 from the Udayagiri campaign, much of the Vitthala complex and the Hazara Rama temple date from these years, and the great gopurams at Virupaksha are his. He wrote the Amuktamalyada in Telugu and kept eight poets at court whose work makes the reign the high point of Telugu letters as well as of Vijayanagara power. It is also the best-documented reign in the empire's history, because Domingo Paes was in the capital around 1520 and wrote down what he saw: the size of the city, the nine days of the Mahanavami festival, the prices in the bazaars, and the king himself. The reign ended badly - a son dead, a minister blinded on suspicion of it, and a disputed succession in 1529 that put the empire in the hands of a regent within thirteen years.
- Year: 1509 CE
- Category: Military
