Vijayanagara Empire

The last great Hindu empire of southern India, founded as a barrier and destroyed in a single afternoon. Harihara and Bukka established it on the Tungabhadra around 1336, in the aftermath of Delhi's raids into the south, and the state that grew from it held most of peninsular India below the Krishna for more than two centuries. Its capital, Vijayanagara at Hampi, was among the largest cities in the world in the fifteenth century, described by Persian and Portuguese visitors as the equal of anything they knew, with an irrigation system of canals and tanks that supported an enormous urban population on dry granite country. The empire ran a sophisticated military-fiscal system of nayaka commanders holding land in exchange for troops, and imported war horses through Goa in huge numbers because the Deccan could not breed them. Krishnadevaraya, ruling from 1509 to 1529, marks its height as both a conqueror and a Telugu poet whose court supported literature in four languages. Its temples set the southern architectural standard, and its patronage of Tirupati continues to shape that shrine. The combined Deccan sultanates broke its army at Talikota in 1565 and then sacked the capital over several months. Hampi was never reoccupied, and its ruins now cover twenty-five square kilometres. Nayaka successor states carried its administration into the eighteenth century. Hampi is a World Heritage site. The Virupaksha temple there has been in continuous worship for centuries. Portuguese and Persian embassies left the fullest surviving descriptions of the capital. The empire's name means city of victory.

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