Ali Adil Shah I
Ali Adil Shah I organised the coalition that destroyed Vijayanagara and gained almost nothing from it. Bijapur was one of five sultanates that emerged when the Bahmani kingdom of the Deccan broke up around 1500, and they spent their first half-century fighting one another while the Hindu empire of Vijayanagara to the south played them off and grew stronger on it. Ali Adil Shah himself had allied with Vijayanagara against Ahmadnagar earlier in his reign. The coalition of 1565 reversed that. Four of the sultanates combined, met the Vijayanagara army at Talikota, and won when two Muslim commanders in Vijayanagara service changed sides during the battle. The regent Rama Raya was captured and beheaded on the field, and the capital at Vijayanagara - one of the largest cities in the world - was sacked for months and never reoccupied. What was destroyed is worth naming. Vijayanagara at Hampi had held several hundred thousand people, an irrigation system of tanks and canals cut into dry granite country, temple complexes and a bazaar that Persian and Portuguese visitors compared to anything in Europe. It was looted for five months and abandoned, and the site has been ruins ever since - one of the few great cities anywhere destroyed outright rather than declining. The alliance dissolved immediately afterwards and the sultanates resumed fighting each other, which is why the victory bought them a generation rather than a century. Bijapur took some territory and no lasting advantage. He was a Shia ruler of a largely Sunni state who kept Hindu officials, corresponded with the Ottomans and the Portuguese, built the Gagan Mahal and began the great mosque at Bijapur, and was assassinated in 1580. The sultanate lasted another century before Aurangzeb annexed it in 1686.
- Lived: 1542 CE – 1580 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
