What happened at the Battle of Talikota?
The allied armies of the Deccan Sultanates of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda and Bidar won a decisive victory over the Vijayanagara Empire on 23 January 1565. The regent Aliya Rama Raya was captured and beheaded, his army broke, and the victors went on to plunder his capital, the city now called Hampi, for months.1
On 23 January 1565, on the plains south of the Krishna river in today's northern Karnataka, the army of the Vijayanagara Empire met the combined forces of four Deccan sultanates. Its regent, Aliya Rama Raya, was captured and beheaded, and his capital was plundered for months and never recovered. One modern account in The Week holds that it caused more casualties than all three battles of Panipat put together.2
Part of Battles of India · Before: Second Panipat, 1556 · Next: Haldighati, 1576
Who won the Battle of Talikota and why?
The alliance of four Deccan sultanates, Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda and Bidar, won. Vijayanagara's wings pressed the allies hard, but the Ahmadnagar center and its massed guns held, and when the regent Rama Raya was captured and beheaded in the middle of the fight his army broke and fled. Federici adds that two of his captains changed sides.3
Background: a regent who played the sultans against each other
Vijayanagara had dominated southern India for two centuries. After 1542 its formal king was Sadasiva, but real power lay with Rama Raya and his brothers, who kept the king in seclusion. Rama Raya was called Aliya, son-in-law, because he had married into the family of the great emperor Krishna Deva Raya, and the historian Richard Eaton has shown that he had earlier served the sultan of Golconda.4
North of the Krishna lay the sultanates that had grown out of the old Bahmani kingdom, often at odds with one another. Rama Raya exploited their quarrels: a few years before the battle he and Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur together defeated Ahmadnagar, and according to Sewell, following Ferishta, he besieged Ahmadnagar itself and took districts from Golconda when it suited him. Eaton and Phillip Wagoner argue that his push to control Kalyana, an old royal city of the northern Deccan, alarmed the sultans most of all.5
The pattern was set in 1560, when Hussain Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar attacked Bijapur and Ali Adil Shah called on Rama Raya for help. The allies drove the Nizam Shah back, and Ahmadnagar bought peace by surrendering the fortress of Kalyani to Bijapur. In a later campaign Vijayanagara and Bijapur besieged Ahmadnagar itself, until the floods of the monsoon forced them to withdraw.6
The wars of the early 1560s left the sultans humiliated. Golconda had to buy peace by giving up forts, among them Kovilkonda and Pangal, and Ferishta writes that Rama Raya went on encroaching on Muslim lands. By his account Rama Raya now treated the sultans' envoys with open contempt, keeping them standing in his presence and making them follow his train on foot; Nilakanta Sastri likewise notes that their ambassadors were not received properly. Ferishta also charges Vijayanagara troops with outrages against Muslims and their mosques during these invasions, and holds that they did much to turn the sultans against him.7
An alliance of four sultans
Ali Adil Shah I of Bijapur took the lead. Ferishta tells how his advisers warned that no single sultan could match Rama Raya's revenues and armies, and how Ibrahim Qutb Shah of Golconda eagerly joined and brokered a reconciliation between Bijapur and Ahmadnagar. The pact was sealed by a double marriage: Hussain Nizam Shah's daughter Chand Bibi married Ali Adil Shah, and Hussain's eldest son Murtaza married Ali's sister.8
To have a pretext for war, Ali Adil Shah then demanded the return of Etgir, Bagalkot, Raichur and Mudgal, districts taken from Bijapur in earlier wars; Rama Raya, as expected, expelled his envoy. The four rulers, Ali Barid Shah of Bidar among them, met with their armies on the plains of Bijapur and marched south at the end of December 1564.9
The armies and their commanders
Nobody knows how many men fought. The Portuguese chronicler Diogo do Couto gave Vijayanagara 600,000 foot and 100,000 horse, and the Persian-language historian Ferishta at one point claims 900,000 infantry; the British historian Robert Sewell saw no need to accept such figures in 1900. One modern account gives Vijayanagara over 100,000 infantry, around 40,000 cavalry and about 1,000 elephants against roughly 110,000 allied troops. The allies brought about 600 guns.10
Rama Raya commanded the Vijayanagara center, with his brothers Tirumala and Venkatadri on the wings, and Hussain Nizam Shah I of Ahmadnagar faced him in the allied center. The sources disagree about the wings. In Ferishta, followed by the Jesuit historian Henry Heras, Venkatadri faced Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur while Tirumala faced the Golconda and Bidar troops of Ibrahim Qutb Shah and Ali Barid Shah; Sewell and Nilakanta Sastri put Tirumala opposite Bijapur and Venkatadri opposite Golconda and Bidar.11
Crossing the Krishna
Rama Raya treated the allied envoys with scorn, but he did not neglect the defense. He sent his brother Tirumala ahead with 20,000 horse, 500 elephants and 100,000 foot to hold the passages of the Krishna, then Venkatadri with a second army, and followed by slow marches with the rest of the empire's forces.12
On the south bank the main crossing was fortified with earthworks and cannon. Unable to force it, the allies marched along the north bank for several days, drawing the defenders with them, then doubled back at night and crossed the abandoned ford. The battle that followed was fought on the plains south of the river. Talikota, where the allies had halted, lies some 25 miles north of the Krishna according to Sewell, and the exact spot of the fighting is unknown.13
The battle on 23 January 1565
The usual date, Tuesday 23 January 1565, is Sewell's conversion of Ferishta's Islamic date; Ferishta calls the day a Friday, which does not fit. Modern accounts keep 23 January.14
The allies drew up with their guns in the center, masked at first by archers. Hussain Nizam Shah's front was covered by some 600 guns in three lines, heavy pieces in front, lighter ones behind and swivel guns at the rear. The fighting began around noon, with Vijayanagara rockets and artillery opening the attack. The first Vijayanagara attack was thrown back, but on the wings its troops, backed by their own field guns and rockets, pressed the allied flanks hard. Rama Raya directed the fighting from a litter, against the advice of his officers. His age is uncertain: Ferishta makes him seventy, the Ahmadnagar chronicle Burhan-i-Ma'asir eighty, and Couto ninety-six. When a second assault reached the allied guns, the front rank fired bags of copper coins at close range and some 5,000 attackers fell. Allied cavalry then charged through the gaps.15
For a time the battle went against the allies. Ferishta admits that Ali Adil Shah and Ibrahim Qutb Shah began to despair of victory and even prepared to retreat, while Hussain Nizam Shah held firm in the center; Nilakanta Sastri likewise judges that the Vijayanagara army at first fought with success and nearly won.16
The turning point: the capture of Rama Raya
In Ferishta's account a war elephant of the Nizam Shah charged the litter, the bearers dropped it and fled, and Rama Raya was seized before he could mount a horse; a modern account says his own elephant was first brought down by a cannon shot. Rama Raya was taken to Rumi Khan, the officer commanding the allied guns, and then to Hussain Nizam Shah, who had him beheaded and his head raised on a spear for his troops to see.17
Did treachery also play a part? The Venetian merchant Cesare Federici, who reached the ruined city in 1567, wrote that two Muslim captains in Vijayanagara service, each leading 70,000 to 80,000 men, turned against their king in the thick of the fight, and that the battle lasted under four hours. A recent account names them as the Gilani brothers, Noor Khan and Bijli Khan. Ferishta's narrative, as Sewell retells it, mentions no defection, so the story remains one strand of the evidence, not settled fact.18
Casualties
Ferishta claims that more than 100,000 Vijayanagara soldiers died in the battle and the pursuit, a figure Nilakanta Sastri repeats but no one can check. The fate of Rama Raya's brother Venkatadri is disputed: Federici says he vanished, Ferishta that he escaped to a fortress, a modern account that he was carried off wounded. No reliable figure exists for allied losses.19
The sack of Vijayanagara
Tirumala took King Sadasiva and the treasury south to the fortress of Penukonda, on 550 elephants according to Sewell's sources and 1,550 according to Nilakanta Sastri and a recent account. On the third day the allied armies arrived, and for five months by Sewell's count, six by UNESCO's and Federici's, they plundered and wrecked the city; Sewell describes palaces broken down and fires lit in the Vitthala temple by the river. In 1567 Federici found the houses standing but empty.20
The Vijayanagara side
Tirumala and his successors ruled from Penukonda, though Sewell describes provincial nobles breaking away one after another. The court later moved further south to Chandragiri, and a shrunken kingdom survived well into the seventeenth century. The old capital was never again a city.21
Ferishta writes that the tributary chiefs each seized power in their own districts, and Nilakanta Sastri traces the effective independence of the Nayaks of Madurai, Thanjavur and Gingee to these years.22
Its ruins at Hampi, in Karnataka, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986; UNESCO names the battle as the cause of the massive destruction of the city's fabric. The Virupaksha temple there is still in worship.23
The sultanates' side
For the allies Talikota was a celebrated victory, painted at Ahmadnagar in the chronicle of Hussain Nizam Shah. Ferishta presented the coalition as a league of Muslim rulers against a common enemy, and one modern account sees religion as the bond that briefly united them.24
Yet the alliance did not outlast its victory. Ali Adil Shah soon marched south again, hoping to install Rama Raya's son as ruler at Penukonda, but turned back in 1567 when Ahmadnagar moved against his own lands, and by the late 1570s Golconda was helping the Vijayanagara king against Bijapur. Over the next century the Mughals, whose rise began at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526, absorbed the sultanates themselves; Bijapur fell to them in 1686.25
Historiography: faith or politics?
Older histories told Talikota as a clash of religions, and UNESCO still calls the city the capital of the last great Hindu kingdom, conquered by a Muslim confederacy. Modern historians such as Eaton and Wagoner reject the idea that religion drove the war. They point to Rama Raya's service under a sultan and his shifting alliances, and argue that the Deccan was never simply a Muslim north facing a Hindu south.26
The battlefield today
Talikota is a small town north of the Krishna, and the exact place where Rama Raya fell has never been identified. The memory of the battle lives on at Hampi, where the broken temples and palaces of the capital still stand among granite hills by the Tungabhadra.27
Because the fighting took place south of the Krishna, well away from the town where the allies had camped, Heras and Nilakanta Sastri call it the battle of Rakshasa-Tangadi, after two villages that lie nearer the field.28
