History

The Vijayanagara Empire was founded in 1336 by Harihara I and his brother Bukka Raya I, two brothers from the Sangama dynasty who had served as ministers in the Kampili kingdom before its defeat by the Delhi Sultanate. According to tradition, a Shaivite sage named Vidyaranya guided them to a site on the rocky south bank of the Tungabhadra where a sage named Vidyaranya received a divine vision, and the brothers established their capital there, calling it Vijayanagara — “City of Victory.” The location was strategic: surrounded on three sides by the Tungabhadra and its tributaries, and on the fourth by concentric rings of granite ridges that formed natural fortification lines, the city was virtually impregnable to the cavalry-based armies of the Deccan.

The empire expanded through the 14th and 15th centuries under successive dynasties — Sangama, Saluva, and Tuluva — eventually controlling most of peninsular India south of the Krishna River. Under Emperor Krishnadevaraya (r. 1509–1529), considered the greatest of the Vijayanagara rulers, the kingdom reached its territorial and cultural peak. Krishnadevaraya was a poet, musician, and military strategist who composed works in Telugu and Sanskrit, patronised the construction of the Vittala and Hazara Rama temple complexes at Hampi, and received at his court the Portuguese envoy Domingos Paes, whose detailed account of the city’s markets, processions, and palace rituals is one of the most vivid records of a pre-modern South Asian city. The empire maintained maritime trade connections with Persia, Arabia, China, and Portugal, exporting cotton textiles and receiving horses — critical military assets for an inland kingdom.

The empire’s end came at the Battle of Talikota on 23 January 1565, when a coalition of the five Deccan Sultanates — Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Bidar, Berar, and Golconda — united against Vijayanagara for the first time. The Vijayanagara army was defeated in part because two Muslim generals serving it defected to the Sultanate coalition at a critical moment. Emperor Aliya Rama Raya was captured and beheaded on the battlefield. The Sultanate forces then marched on Hampi and spent six months systematically dismantling the city — smashing sculptures, melting bronze, collapsing roofs — before withdrawing. The city was never reoccupied. Within a generation of its destruction, the jungle and the granite had begun to reclaim it. The Virupaksha Temple, protected by an enduring Shaivite community, was the sole major structure maintained continuously through the subsequent centuries.