Aliya Rama Raya

Achyuta has dealt successfully with all the state’s enemies until the late 1530s, when he is imprisoned by Aliya Rama Raya, the chief minister, with whom he had agreed to share power.

Opposition by some of the nobles to Achyuta's imprisonment, combined with a revolt in the south, lead to his release and the beginnings of civil war; but the new ruler of Bijapur, Ibrahim 'Adil Shah, after early attempts to create divisiveness in Vijayanagar, arbitrates a settlement between Achyuta and Rama Raya.

Under the settlement, Achyuta virtually hands over his sovereignty to the regent, retaining nominal kingship.

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.

Vijayanagar's relations with the Deccan sultanates are most crucial during the period of Rama Raya's rule.

Vijayanagar has usually competed on a more than equal basis and in the same system of state rivalries with the five Muslim states, at least since the time of Krishna Deva Raya, who died in 1529.

Thus, an invasion from Bijapur is repulsed in 1543.

Sadasiva has from the first been kept under guard; Rama Raya, together with his brothers Tirumala and Venkatadri, rules the Vijayanagara kingdom.

Rama Raya is able to control, although not to subdue entirely, rebellious nobles in the east and the extreme south.

He also concludes a treaty in 1546 with the Portuguese, whose settlements have been expanding and who have caused no small amount of damage to indigenous settlements over the past few years.

Rama Raya had aided Burhan Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar in taking a fort from Bidar in 1548.

After seven or eight years of rule, Rama Raya also assumes royal titles.

Vijayanagara’s ruling minister Rama Raya allies himself with Bijapur in 157 against the Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar and Golconda.

The result of the last war is a collective treaty, by which any of the four parties, attacked unjustly by another, can call upon the other allies to stop the aggressor.

The treaty between Vijayanagara and Portugal is broken in 1558, and Rama Raya now exacts tribute in compensation for damage to temples caused by the Portuguese.

Husayn Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar breaks the collective treaty by invading Bijapur in 1560.

Vijayanagar and Golconda respond with an attack that results not only in Ahmadnagar's loss of the fort of Kalyani to Bijapur but also in an invasion of Bidar and the defeat of its ruler by Rama Raya.