Ahmadnagar Sultanate

The death of Vijayanagara’s capable ruler Tuluva Narasa Nayaka in 1503 had resulted in feudatories rising in rebellion throughout the empire.

Tuluva Narasa Nayaka’s eldest son, rules two years before being assassinated.

Vira Narasimha Raya, the next eldest son, succeeds his brother in 1505 and spends all of his four year reign fighting rebel warlords.

Following his death, apparently from illness, his younger half-brother Krishna Deva Raya is crowned on July 26, 1509, the date that the birth of the Hindu God Krishna is celebrated.

The rule of Krishna Deva Raya marks a period of much military success in Vijayanagara history.

On occasion, the king is known to change battle plans abruptly and turn a losing battle into victory.

The first decade of his rule is one of long sieges, bloody conquests and victories.

He reorganizes the army and recruits troops from several south Indian communities in order to make his cavalry more efficient.

His main enemies are the Bahmani Sultans (who, though divided into five small kingdoms, remain a constant threat), the Gajapatis of Odisha, who have been involved in constant conflict since the rule of Vijayanarara emperor Saluva Narasimha Deva Raya, and the Portuguese, a rising maritime power that is rapidly gaining control of much of the sea trade.

The feudal chiefs of Ummattur, the Reddys of Kondavidu and the Velaas of Bhuvanagiri, who have rebelled against Vijayanagar rule are conquered and subdued.

The annual raid and plunder of Vijayanagar towns and villages by the Deccan sultanates will come to an end during the Raya's rule.

He defeats the last remnant of the Bahmani Sultanate, precipitating its collapse.

In 1509 Krishnadevaraya's armies clash with the Sultan of Bijapur at Diwani and the Sultan Mahmud is severely injured and defeated.

Yusuf Adil Shah is killed and the fertile Raichur Doab triangle is annexed.

Taking advantage of the victory and the disunity of the Bahamani Sultans, the Raya invades Bidar, Gulbarga and Bijapur and earns the title "founder of the Yavana kingdom" when he releases Sultan Mahmud and makes him de facto ruler.

The title advertises the boast that he is now the political arbiter of all the Deccan.

The Sultan of Golconda, Sultan Quli Qutb Shah, is defeated by Timmarusu, Krishna Deva Raya’s prime minister.

The Bahmani dynasty believes that they descend from Bahman, a legendary king of Iran.

The Bahamani Sultans are patrons of the Persian language, culture and literature, and some members of the dynasty had become well-versed in that language and composed its literature in that language.

The most important personality of the Bidar period of the Bahmani sultanate was Mahmud Gawan, who served several sultans as prime minister and general from 1461 to 1481.

He had reconquered Goa, which had been captured by the rulers of Vijayanagar, thereby extending the sultanate from coast to coast.

Gawan also introduced remarkable administrative reforms and controlled many districts directly, thus very much improving the state’s finances, but his competent organization ended with his execution, ordered by the sultan as the result of a court intrigue.

After realizing his mistake, the sultan drank himself to death within the year, thus marking the beginning of the end of the Bahmani sultanate.

After Gawan’s death the various factions at the sultan’s court had begun a struggle for power that ends only with the dynasty itself: indigenous Muslim courtiers and generals are ranged against the ‘aliens’—Arabs, Turks and Persians.

The last sultan, Mahmud Shah, no longer has any authority and has presides over the dissolution of his realm as Sri Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagar defeats the last remnant of Bahmani power.

The governors of the four most important provinces had declared their independence from the Bahmani ruler one after another: Bijapur (1489), Ahmadnagar (1490), Berar (1490), Bidar (1492) and Golconda (1512).

Although the Bahmani sultans will live on in Bidar until 1527, they are mere puppets in the hands of the real rulers of Bidar, the Barid Shahis, who use them so as to put pressure on the other usurpers of Bahmani rule.

The Bidar Sultanate was founded in 1492 by Qasim Barid, a Turkmen from Georgia who had joined the service of the Bahmani sultan Muhammad Shah III.

Beginning his career as a sar-naubat, he later became the mir-jumla (prime minister) of the Bahmani sultanate and during the reign of Mahmud Shah became the de facto ruler.

After his death in 1504, his son Amir Barid became the prime minister and controlled the administration of the Bahmani sultanate.

The city of Vijayapura owes much of its greatness to Yusuf Adil Shah, the founder of the independent state of Bijapur.

Ruled by the kings of the Adil Shahi dynasty, Bijapur has proved to be the most expansive of the successor states to Bahmani.

Embroiled in incessant fighting on the Deccan, …

…Bijapur had lost Goa to the Portuguese in 1510 and has been unable to regain this port.

Bahadur Shah's father was Shams-ud-Din Muzaffar Shah II, who had ascended to the throne of the Gujarat Sultanate in 1511.

Muzaffar Shah II had nominated Sikandar Shah (Bahadur Shah's elder brother) as the heir apparent to the throne.

Bahadur Shah's relationship with his brother and father became tense as Sikandar Shah began to assume greater administrative control.

Fearing for his life, Bahadur Shah fled Gujarat, first seeking refuge with Chittor, and then with Ibrahim Lodi.

He was present at the Battle of Panipat, though he did not take part in fighting.

When he received the news of the death of his father on April 5, 1526 he returned to Gujarat and was joined by almost all the nobles except the murderers of his eldest brother Sikandar, who succeeded his father Muzzaffar Shah II.

The opposition was suppressed immediately and they were executed.

After this Bahadur, turned against his brothers, his nearest rival Latif was severely wounded in an action, taken prisoner and died in captivity.

Mahmud II, the infant son of Muzaffar Shah II, who succeeded Sikandar after his death and three other princes were poisoned.

Only one of his brothers, Chand Khan, survived, as he had taken refuge at the Malwa court and the Sultan Mahmud II of Malwa refused to surrender him[.

During his reign, Gujarat is under pressure from the expanding Mughal Empire, and from the Portuguese, who are establishing fortified settlements on the Gujarat coast to expand their power in India from their base in Goa.

After Bahadur ascended to the throne in 1526, he had been requested by the rulers of the Khandesh and Berar to attack the Ahmednagar Sultanate.

In 1528, Bahadur had invested the fort of Daulatabad, but later he was forced to retire because of the stiff resistance put up by the Ahmadnagar army.

Next year, he again started the campaign and overcoming a stiff opposition again besieged Daulatabad.

At this point, one of his allies, the ruler of Berar, had betrayed him and retired to Bidar.

Finally, both the rulers of the Ahmadnagar and Berar were forced to sign a humiliating treaty.

Next, Bahadur invaded Malwa.

Mahmud II literally made no resistance and on March 28, 1531 Mandu fell to Bahadur's army and is annexed into his kingdom.

The city of Vijayanagar itself contains numerous temples with rich ornamentation, especially the gateways, and a cluster of shrines for the deities.

Most prominent among the temples is the one dedicated to Virupaksha, a manifestation of Shiva, the patron-deity of the Vijayanagar rulers.

Temples continue to be the nuclei of diverse cultural and intellectual activities, but these activities are based more on tradition than on contemporary political realities. (However, the first Vijayanagar ruler—Harihara I—was a Hindu who converted to Islam and then reconverted to Hinduism for political expediency.)

The temples sponsor no intellectual exchange with Islamic theologians because Muslims are generally assigned to an "impure" status and are thus excluded from entering temples.

When the five rulers of what was once the Bahmani Sultanate combine their forces and attack Vijayanagar in 1565, the empire crumbles at the Battle of Talikot.

The Hindu Kingdom of Vijayanagara jockeys for supremacy with South India’s three main Muslim kingdoms, recently established in the northern Deccan and often referred to collectively as the Deccan Sultanates.

Portuguese trader Lourenço Marques establishes an eponymous settlement, today’s Maputo, on the extreme southern coast of what is today Mozambique, peopling it with his native wife and mixed-race children.

As in the Americas, a hybrid African-European people begins to develop here.

Vijayanagara, the capital city of the Vijayanagara empire and a bulwark of Hindu civilization in South India, has flourished between the fourteenth century and sixteenth centuries.

The reign of Vijayanagara’s Emperor Achyuta ends in 1542 with about the same external boundaries of the kingdom as in 1529, but the internal struggle with the regent Rama Raya plus the activities of other nobles and chieftains have weakened the hold of the center over some of the provinces.

The process of decentralization had set in again, but now the strongman who will pull the kingdom together is already on the scene.

Rama Raya brings himself to the undisputed pinnacle of power when he defeats his rival in the succession struggle following Achyuta's death and crowns his own candidate, Achyuta's nephew Sadasiva.

South India’s Muslim kingdoms, often collectively termed the Deccan sultanates, had become established in the northern Deccan after the fall of the Bahmani sultanate in 1527.

Ahmadnagar is the strongest and best organized of the Bahmani successor states during the sixteenth century, followed by Bijapur and then Golconda.

All three are much larger and more important than Berar and Bidar, and all three either began with or had soon come to accept the Shi'ite form of Islam (the religion of the Persian newcomers) as the official faith of their rulers.

The three major states form shifting patterns of alliances, which sometimes (both before and after 1565) also include Vijayanagar, while the two smaller Muslim states range themselves on one side or the other in order to protect their independence.

The goal of military campaigns normally is to humble the adversary without doing irreparable harm, for all three major Muslim states fear the supremacy of any one state, and a tripartite division of territory seems more likely to insure the continued independence of all.