The Vijayanagara Empire: Sources, Administration and Decline

Vijayanagara, "city of victory", was the name of both a city and an empire founded in 1336, which at its peak stretched from the Krishna river in the north to the southern tip of the peninsula. The city was sacked in 1565 and fell into ruin soon after, so almost everything historians know about it comes from three kinds of evidence: inscriptions, surviving monuments, and the accounts of foreign travellers. That evidentiary angle, not just the dynastic narrative, is exactly what UPSC tests, so knowing which traveller saw what, and which administrative term means what, matters more here than the general story.

Founders and dynasties: Sangama to Aravidu

According to tradition and epigraphic evidence, two brothers, Harihara and Bukka, founded the empire in 1336. Power passed through four ruling lineages: the Sangama dynasty (in control till 1485), the Saluva dynasty (military commanders who took over and held power till 1503), the Tuluva dynasty (from 1503), and by 1542 control at the centre had already shifted to the Aravidu lineage, which ruled until the end of the seventeenth century, a detail worth separating from the 1565 battle discussed below.

Krishnadeva Raya (Tuluva dynasty, ruled 1509 to 1529) is the empire's best-known ruler: he acquired the fertile Raichur doab between the Tungabhadra and Krishna rivers in 1512, subdued the rulers of Orissa in 1514, and defeated the Sultan of Bijapur in 1520. He composed a Telugu work on statecraft, the Amuktamalyada, and founded a suburban township near the capital named Nagalapuram, after his mother.

The amara-nayaka system: an exam trap worth knowing

Nayakas were military chiefs who controlled forts and armed supporters, often moved between areas (frequently with peasants looking for fertile land to settle), and usually spoke Telugu or Kannada. Many submitted to the Vijayanagara kings, but often rebelled and had to be put down by force.

The amara-nayaka system was the empire's major political innovation, and NCERT is explicit that it likely borrowed features from the iqta system of the Delhi Sultanate, a comparison UPSC likes to test directly. An amara-nayaka was a military commander given territory to govern by the raya: he collected taxes from peasants, craftspersons, and traders there, kept part of the revenue for himself and to maintain a stipulated contingent of horses and elephants, and used some of it to maintain temples and irrigation works. In return, he sent annual tribute and personally appeared at court with gifts. Through the seventeenth century, many amara-nayakas turned their territories into independent kingdoms, which is what actually hastened the empire's collapse, not the 1565 battle alone.

Foreign travellers: who visited when

Fifteenth century: the Italian trader Nicolo de Conti, the Persian ambassador Abdur Razzaq (sent by the ruler of Persia to Calicut, and deeply impressed by Vijayanagara's seven lines of fortification), and the Russian merchant Afanasii Nikitin.

Sixteenth century, all Portuguese: Duarte Barbosa, Domingo Paes (whose account describes a tank built by Krishnadeva Raya, and calls the city "as large as Rome"), and Fernao Nuniz. Matching a traveller to their century, and to whether they were a diplomat, trader, or chronicler, is a recurring matching-style question.

Reading the ruins: royal centre and sacred centre

The royal centre held secular structures: the Mahanavami dibba, a platform central to the Mahanavami (Navaratri) festival, when the king displayed his power through image and state-horse worship, animal sacrifice, and a final-day inspection of his army and the nayakas' forces; the Lotus Mahal, possibly a council chamber, named by nineteenth-century British travellers; the so-called "elephant stables"; and the Hazara Rama temple, likely reserved for the king's own family, whose surviving wall panels depict scenes from the Ramayana.

The sacred centre, sited near hills linked in local tradition to the Ramayana's Vali and Sugriva and to the goddess Pampadevi, centres on the Virupaksha temple. The Vijayanagara kings claimed to rule on behalf of the god Virupaksha, signing royal orders "Shri Virupaksha", usually in Kannada script, and took the title "Hindu Suratrana", a Sanskritised form of the Arabic "Sultan" meaning, literally, Hindu Sultan. Much of this temple-building drew on older regional traditions, the Cholas' Brihadishvara temple at Thanjavur and the Hoysalas' Chennakeshava temple at Belur among them, which the rayas built on and, in NCERT's words, "carried to new heights", adding towering raya gopurams that often dwarfed a temple's own central shrine.

Water engineering: tanks and canals

Vijayanagara sits in one of the most arid parts of the peninsula, so elaborate rainwater engineering was essential. The Kamalapuram tank, built in the early fifteenth century, irrigated nearby fields and fed a channel into the royal centre. The Hiriya canal, apparently built under the Sangama dynasty, drew water from a dam across the Tungabhadra to irrigate the valley separating the sacred centre from the city's urban core.

The decline: Rakshasi-Tangadi, 1565

After Krishnadeva Raya's death in 1529, his successors were troubled by rebellious nayakas. In 1565, Rama Raya, the empire's chief minister (not a king himself), led the Vijayanagara army into battle at Rakshasi-Tangadi, also known as Talikota, where the combined armies of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, and Golconda routed his forces. The city was sacked and abandoned within a few years, and the Aravidu dynasty, already ruling from the centre since 1542, shifted its focus east to Chandragiri, near Tirupati.

The exam trap here: relations between the Sultanates and the rayas were not uniformly hostile before this. Krishnadeva Raya himself had supported rival claimants to Sultanate thrones and took pride in the title "establisher of the Yavana kingdom", and the Sultan of Bijapur intervened to help settle a Vijayanagara succession dispute after 1529. It was specifically Rama Raya's own policy of playing one Sultan off against another that finally pushed the Sultanates to combine against him.

Quick revision points

• Founded 1336 by Harihara and Bukka. Dynasty order: Sangama (to 1485) → Saluva (to 1503) → Tuluva, Krishnadeva Raya, r. 1509-29 → Aravidu (from 1542).
• Amara-nayaka system: likely derived from the Delhi Sultanate's iqta system; nayakas kept part of the revenue, maintained troops, sent annual tribute.
• 15th-century travellers: Nicolo de Conti, Abdur Razzaq, Afanasii Nikitin. 16th-century Portuguese: Duarte Barbosa, Domingo Paes, Fernao Nuniz.
• Royal centre: Mahanavami dibba, Lotus Mahal, elephant stables, Hazara Rama temple. Sacred centre: Virupaksha temple; royal title "Hindu Suratrana".
• Battle of Rakshasi-Tangadi (Talikota), 1565: Rama Raya's forces defeated by the combined armies of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, and Golconda.

Once the dynasty order, the traveller-century pairs, and the amara-nayaka comparison are solid, practise the matching-style questions built around this chapter.