Vijayanagara: The Empire Built to Hold the Line

Walk the ruins at Hampi today and the silence is the loudest thing about them. Forty square kilometres of granite, temples without congregations, a stone chariot whose stone wheels were once made to turn, pillared halls that ring like struck bells. Around the year 1500 this was one of the largest cities on earth. A Persian ambassador said he had seen nothing like it. A Portuguese horse-trader called it the best provided city in the world.

Go there now and the stones put the question themselves. What happened here, and why did it stop so completely?

The short answer is a battle, in 1565, and a sack that followed. The longer answer is the story of an empire that set itself to hold a line, and of how the meaning of that line was rewritten long after the empire was gone.

A kingdom on the rocks

The founding belongs to the early fourteenth century, as the power of the Delhi Sultanate pushed hard into the south and the older southern kingdoms broke apart. Around 1336 two brothers, Harihara and Bukka, of the Sangama line, established a new state on the south bank of the Tungabhadra, at a place already holy as a Shaiva pilgrimage centre and tied in memory to Kishkindha of the Ramayana. The city took the name Vijayanagara, the city of victory.

Tradition adds a sage to the story. It says the brothers acted at the urging of Vidyaranya of Sringeri, the great Advaita teacher, and that the city was first named for him. Historians treat this with caution. Vidyaranya became head of the Sringeri matha only decades later, and his earliest firm mention comes around 1375, well after the founding. Many scholars read the whole account as a later foundation legend, attached to lend the new dynasty the blessing of a saint. The treatise gives it as legend, while noting that the empire’s real and lasting patronage of Sringeri is no legend at all.

What is certain is what the kingdom became. Across three dynasties it grew into the dominant power of the south, the protector and paymaster of temple culture across the peninsula for more than two hundred years.

The city that travellers could not believe

We are unusually rich in eyewitnesses to Vijayanagara, because the wider world came to see it and wrote home.

A Persian envoy, Abdur Razzaq, arrived in the 1440s. Portuguese visitors, Domingo Paes and Fernao Nuniz, came in the early sixteenth century at the empire’s height, and their accounts survive in Robert Sewell’s public-domain translation. They describe a city of staggering scale and order. Paes wrote:

“This is the best provided city in the world, and is stocked with provisions such as rice, wheat, grains, Indian-corn. The streets and markets are full of laden oxen without count, so that you cannot get along for them.”

Abdur Razzaq, walking the bazaars, fixed on a detail no inventory would think to record:

“Roses are sold everywhere. These people could not live without roses, and they look upon them as quite as necessary as food. Each class of men belonging to each profession has shops contiguous the one to the other; the jewellers sell publicly in the bazaars pearls, rubies, emeralds, and diamonds.”

This was the engine the empire ran on: trade, water, irrigation, and an immense capital that drew goods and people from across the seas. The temples rose out of that wealth. The great gateway towers, the gopurams, the pillared halls, the Vitthala temple with its stone chariot and its musical columns, the Virupaksha temple still in worship today, were built and endowed by an empire that could afford to think in stone on a scale the south had not seen in centuries.

The line, and what it really was

Here the story usually hardens into a simple shape: a Hindu south standing as a wall against a Muslim north. That shape is worth examining, because it is half true and half a later invention, and the difference matters.

The half that is true: Vijayanagara was a self-consciously Hindu kingdom. It poured its wealth into temples and Brahminical and Vaishnava institutions, it patronized sacred literature in Sanskrit, Telugu, and Kannada, and it fought long wars against the Muslim-ruled sultanates of the Deccan.

The half that is invention is the idea that this was a clash of faiths and nothing more. The reality the scholarship has uncovered is stranger and more human. Vijayanagara’s armies included Muslim cavalry and archers; one early king granted them estates and built a mosque in the city for their use. The scholar Phillip Wagoner has shown that the kings adopted the court dress of the wider Islamic world and took the Sanskritized title Hindu-raya-suratrana, Sultan among Hindu Kings. Its secular architecture borrows domes and arches from the same world it fought. And when the end came, the coalition that destroyed it was bound together by marriage and politics, not by religion, and it broke apart again as soon as the work was done.

So the empire was Hindu, and it was also fluent in the Islamicate political culture of its age. Richard Eaton and others have shown that its wars were fought over land, honour, and power, with religion as one thread among many rather than the whole cloth. The treatise holds both truths at once, and refuses the easy version that drops the inconvenient half.

The fall, and the story of the fall

The height was reached under Krishnadevaraya, who reigned from 1509 to 1529, a warrior and a poet, victorious against every neighbour, a patron of Telugu literature and temple building at full flood. Paes, who saw him, called him the most feared and perfect king that could be, cheerful and just, and subject to sudden fits of rage. Under him the empire seemed beyond threat.

Within forty years it was a ruin. In January 1565, the empire’s armies, led by the aged regent Rama Raya, met a coalition of the Deccan sultanates on a plain near the Krishna river, at the battle remembered as Talikota. Rama Raya was captured and beheaded on the field. The army broke. The great city was emptied and given over to months of looting, and it was never reoccupied.

Why it fell so fast is genuinely debated, and the treatise leaves the debate open. Some historians stress Rama Raya’s diplomacy, which had played the sultanates against one another until they united against him. Some point to a gap in gunpowder and cavalry technology. Some, like Burton Stein, argue the empire was always more loosely held than it looked, its great regional chiefs only ever half-controlled from the center. The popular tale of treachery on the battlefield, of Muslim generals in the imperial army defecting at the decisive hour, is most likely a later embellishment, and modern scholars treat it with doubt. Even the scale of the destruction is now questioned: archaeologists have found it was uneven, fiercest at the royal centre, with life continuing in places around it.

What is not in doubt is the suddenness. An empire of two centuries’ standing was broken in an afternoon, and a civilization’s centre of gravity in the south shifted and never came back to that city.

What the ruins hold

It is tempting to read Hampi as a simple tragedy, a Hindu glory felled by a Muslim sword, and generations did read it that way, beginning with the colonial historians who first told the empire’s story to the world. The stones deserve a truer reading.

Vijayanagara was, for two hundred years, the great keeper of temple culture in the south, and the temples it raised and the literature it nurtured are among the lasting treasures of the tradition. It was also a kingdom of its age, pragmatic and worldly, borrowing freely from the very world it warred with, ruled by men who called themselves both Hindu kings and sultans in the same breath. It held a line, and the line was a frontier of power, not a wall between souls.

The chariot of stone still stands at Hampi, its wheels carved to turn and fixed forever.

The empire that carved it meant it to last. It did, though not in the way it intended.

The next chapters carry the tradition into the modern age, where it would meet new worlds and have to decide, again, what to keep.