Ismail Adil Shah
Ismail Adil Shah inherited Bijapur as a boy of twelve, lost Goa to the Portuguese in his first year and the Raichur Doab to Vijayanagara ten years later, and still left the sultanate stronger than he found it. He was the son of Yusuf Adil Shah, the Persian adventurer who had carved Bijapur out of the collapsing Bahmani kingdom, and when Yusuf died in 1510 the regent Kamal Khan tried to take the throne for himself; the boy's mother had him murdered in the palace. Ismail ruled in his own name from his teens. In November of the same year Afonso de Albuquerque took Goa, the sultanate's best port and the gateway for the Persian and Arabian horses every Deccan army depended on. Ismail's forces retook it within months and lost it for good before the year was out, which is why Goa was Portuguese for the next four and a half centuries. He declared the state Shia, in his father's tradition and against most of his subjects, and spent the 1510s fighting the other successor sultanates, Bidar and Ahmadnagar, over the Bahmani inheritance. In 1520 Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara marched on Raichur, the fortress between the Krishna and the Tungabhadra that the two states had contested for a century, and Ismail came to relieve it with an army the Portuguese observers put in the tens of thousands. He was beaten on the river and lost the fortress. The chroniclers say the victor told him he could have his territory back if he came and kissed the king's foot, which he did not do. He recovered Raichur after Krishnadevaraya's death in 1529, married his sister to Burhan Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar to close that quarrel, and died in 1534 on campaign against Golconda at Kovilkonda, aged about thirty-six. His son Ibrahim, and Ibrahim's son Ali, would join the coalition that destroyed Vijayanagara at Talikota thirty-one years later.
- Lived: 1498 CE – 1534 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: sultan, head_of_state, military
