Talikota and the Sack of Vijayanagara
On 23 January 1565 the army of Vijayanagara met the combined forces of four Deccan sultanates on the plain between the villages of Talikota and Rakkasagi-Tangadagi, and by the end of the day the empire had effectively ceased to exist. The coalition was the thing that was not supposed to happen. Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda and Bidar had spent sixty years fighting each other, usually with Vijayanagara as one party's ally, and Aliya Rama Raya's policy for two decades had been to keep it that way. It failed because he had used it too well: the sultanates settled their quarrels, sealed the agreement with marriages, and marched as one. The Vijayanagara army was the larger, and for much of the battle it was winning. Rama Raya, about eighty years old, directed it from a litter in the centre. The break came from inside his own force: two Muslim commanders in Vijayanagara service turned on their own line, the centre collapsed around the litter, and Rama Raya was taken alive and beheaded on the field by Hussain Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar. His head was raised on a spear where the army could see it, and the army broke and ran. What followed was worse than the battle. The court fled to Penukonda with what treasure could be loaded, the capital was left undefended, and the victorious armies entered a city that Persian and Portuguese visitors had described as among the largest in the world and worked on it for months - burning, breaking and quarrying it out. The site was never reoccupied at anything like its former scale, which is the accidental reason so much of it survives to be excavated: Hampi is a ruin field of some twenty-six square kilometres because nothing was built over it. The Aravidu dynasty ruled on from Penukonda and later Chandragiri until 1646 over a remnant, while the Nayaka governors of Madurai, Tanjore and Gingee became independent in all but name. The Deccan sultanates that won did not enjoy it long: within eighty years the Mughals had absorbed them, in a southward expansion the destruction of the one large power in their way had made easier.
- Year: 1565 CE
- Category: War
