Krishnadevaraya
Krishnadevaraya ruled Vijayanagara from 1509 to 1529 and is the reason the empire is remembered as a golden age rather than as a long holding action. He came to the throne of the Tuluva line at a moment when the state was losing ground on three fronts, and he spent the first decade of the reign reversing that. He put down the rebellious chief of Ummattur, then turned east against the Gajapati kings of Odisha, taking the hill fortress of Udayagiri in 1514 and Kondavidu the following year, and pushing as far as Cuttack before settling the war by marrying the Gajapati king's daughter and handing back territory north of the Krishna river - a peace made on terms he could have refused, which is why it held. In 1520 he took Raichur from the Sultan of Bijapur, the fortress town that controlled the doab between the Krishna and the Tungabhadra and had changed hands for two centuries. He was as deliberate about legitimacy as about war. He rebuilt and enlarged the temple complexes at the capital, adding the Krishna temple in 1513 out of the Udayagiri campaign's spoils and much of the work at Vitthala and Hazara Rama, and he founded a town named for his mother. He wrote. The Amuktamalyada, a Telugu poem on the saint Andal, is his, and its digressions on how a king should govern - keep the forts, keep the cultivators, do not let the treasury sit idle - are quoted as a statement of policy by a man who was executing it. He kept a circle of Telugu poets at court remembered as the eight elephants of the compass points, and the reign is the high point of Telugu literature as well as of Vijayanagara power. He dealt with the Portuguese, who had taken Goa in 1510, as a supplier: Arabian and Persian warhorses could not be bred in southern India and had to be bought, and he paid to keep them coming to him rather than to Bijapur. Domingo Paes, who saw him about 1520, left a physical description - smallpox scars, an exercise regime before dawn, a temper - which is more than survives of almost any other Indian ruler of the century. The end was ugly. His young son died, his minister Timmarusu was accused of it and blinded, and the succession Krishnadevaraya left in 1529 was disputed almost immediately.
- Lived: 1471 CE – 1529 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: ruler, head_of_state, writer
