Place · battle · India
Talikota
The January 1565 CE battle at Rakkasa-Tangadi near Talikota in Karnataka, where a coalition of the four Deccan Sultanates (Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda and Bidar) under Hussain Nizam Shah I destroyed the Vijayanagara army of Rama Raya. Rama Raya was captured mid-battle and beheaded by Hussain Nizam Shah; his death triggered the Vijayanagara rout. The capital at Hampi was sacked over months — the sultanates' armies systematically burned and demolished temples, palaces and the royal structures for six months — and never reoccupied, which gives Hampi its vast corpus of unfinished and interrupted architecture visible today. The empire fragmented into Nayak successor states (Thanjavur, Madurai, Senji, Keladi) that lasted into the 17th century.
- Date
- 1565 CE
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 16.480, 76.310
Worth knowing
The battle was fought roughly a hundred kilometres from the capital, and the capital was sacked over months afterwards. That is why Hampi survives as a ruin field rather than a city: it was never reoccupied, so nothing was built over it.
Connections (7)
- Power passed toHampi / Vijayanagara
After Talikota in 1565, when a coalition of Deccan sultanates destroyed the Vijayanagara army, the capital was sacked systematically over several months and never reoccupied. That is precisely why Hampi survives as it does: a great medieval city abandoned rather than rebuilt over, so its streets, bazaars, water systems and suburbs can still be read on the ground, which is true of almost no other Indian capital.
- CampaignBijapur (Vijayapura)
Bijapur was one of the Deccan sultanates in the coalition that destroyed the Vijayanagara army at Talikota in 1565 — the one moment the five successor states acted together. The victory removed their southern rival and opened the Karnataka country to them, but it also cleared the way for the Mughals, who absorbed Ahmadnagar within seventy years and Bijapur and Golconda within a century.
- CampaignGolconda
Golconda was one of the allied sultanates whose combined cavalry and artillery destroyed Vijayanagara at Talikota in 1565. The alliance held for one campaign and then dissolved back into the usual Deccan pattern of shifting hostility. Within a century Aurangzeb had taken Golconda itself by siege and bribery, after which the Qutb Shahi state ended and its territory passed into the Mughal Deccan that the Nizams later inherited.
- Power passed toMadurai Meenakshi
After Talikota the Vijayanagara provinces went to their own governors, and the Nayakas of Madurai, Thanjavur and Gingee became independent in all but name. They carried on the imperial building programme at their own capitals — Madurai's temple city is largely seventeenth-century Nayaka work — so the empire's architecture outlived the empire by a century and a half and became what Tamil Nadu now looks like.
- Power passed toPenukoṇḍa
The Aravidu survivors fell back on Penukonda after Talikota in 1565 and then on Chandragiri, ruling a shrinking territory for another eighty years. It was from Chandragiri in 1639 that the East India Company was granted the strip of coast on which it built Madras — so the last Vijayanagara court issued the charter for the first English settlement on the Coromandel, which is a tidy closing of one era into another.
- Power passed toBidar
The four sultanates that combined at Talikota — Bijapur, Ahmednagar, Golconda and Bidar — were all fragments of the Bahmani state that had ruled from Bidar. They had fought one another for seventy years and united only against Vijayanagara, then went back to fighting one another. Bidar itself was annexed by Bijapur in 1619, fifty-four years after the victory it helped win.
- CampaignAyyalaraju Ramabhadra
Ramabhadra's Ramabhyudayamu and Bhattumurti's title both honour Aliya Rama Raya, Krishnadevaraya's son-in-law, who was regent after him and commanded the Vijayanagara army at Talikota in 1565, where he was killed. The last two of the eight poets are named for the man who lost the empire, and the sack that followed ended the circle.
On these journeys
Sources
List of wars in the Indian subcontinent; standard reference accounts
Open Talikota in the repository →