Place · Kakatiya capital fort · India

Warangal Fort

Also known as Kakatiya capital, Warangal

Date

1163–1323

Function

Authority & administration

Patron dynasty

Kakatiya

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

17.955, 79.610

Worth knowing

The Kakatiya torana is the emblem of the state of Telangana, and the temple the gateways belonged to — the Svayambhusiva, with four shrines facing outward from one platform — was pulled down, its parts scattered across the enclosure and partly reused. The fort also had a bazaar and a tank system that supported a working city, not only a garrison.

Connections (13)

• PatronageKākatiya Rudreśwara (Ramappa) Temple

  Kakatiya patronage built the fort at Warangal with its free-standing carved gateways and the Rudreswara temple at Palampet within about fifty years of each other — a dynasty whose surviving works are a military capital and a temple named after its sculptor rather than its king. Both were UNESCO-nominated, and the temple was inscribed in 2021; the fort's walls came down after Delhi took the city in 1323.

• Site adjacencyThousand Pillar Temple, Hanamkonda

  Rudradeva's Thousand Pillar Temple at Hanamkonda, of 1163, stands a few kilometres from the fort that became the Kakatiya capital — a three-shrined star-plan temple with a detached Nandi mandapa, in the black granite the dynasty used rather than the Hoysalas' soapstone, which is why its carving is bolder and less fine. It was dismantled and rebuilt by the Archaeological Survey in the 2000s.

• Trade routeKollur / Golconda diamond fields

  The Kakatiyas held the country the diamond gravels lay in, and the stones from the Krishna valley went out through their port at Motupalli under the charter that guaranteed foreign merchants their goods. When Delhi took Warangal in 1323 the treasury went north, and the Koh-i-Noor is usually said to enter the record at that point — so the fields, the port and the fort are one economic system and it was dismantled in a single campaign.

• Power passed toQutb complex, Delhi

  The Kakatiya treasury passed to Delhi with the Khalji campaigns of 1310 and 1323, and the Koh-i-Noor is usually said to enter the record at that point. Warangal's carved toranas still stand free where the temple around them has gone. The Deccan campaigns of those decades broke the Kakatiyas, the Hoysalas and the Yadavas within a few years of each other, and the wealth of all three moved north to the Qutb complex's city.

• PatronageSrisailam/ Sri Shailam

  Kakatiya inscriptions record extensive grants to Srisailam from the twelfth to the fourteenth century — villages, tanks, worship rights, lamps — and the dynasty's rulers treated the hill as a state shrine. The link places Srisailam at the centre of the medieval Telugu political world rather than at its edge, and much of what is known about Kakatiya administration comes from the wording of exactly these temple grants rather than from any chronicle.

• TransmissionBasavakalyan

  Basavakalyan's Kalachuris and the Kakatiyas of Warangal were contemporary Deccan powers with a common frontier, and Kakatiya inscriptions record Lingayat presence at Warangal — so the Virashaiva movement that began at Kalyana in the 1160s had reached the Telugu country within a generation. Both states were broken by the Delhi Sultanate's Deccan campaigns within a few decades of each other.

• CampaignTughlaqabad

  Ulugh Khan took Warangal for the Delhi Sultanate in 1323 after two attempts, ending the Kakatiya state and carrying its treasury north — which is where the Koh-i-Noor is usually said to enter the record. The Deccan campaigns of the 1300s broke the Hoysalas and the Kakatiyas within a decade of each other, and Vijayanagara was founded a few years later by men who had been in Delhi's custody.

• Imperial administration ofRudrama Devī

  Rudrama ruled the Kakatiya state from Warangal for some twenty-seven years, having been designated heir by her father Ganapatideva and formally given a male regnal name, Rudradeva, in inscriptions and on coins. She survived a revolt of the Kakatiya nobles early in the reign, faced Yadava and eastern Ganga pressure on both frontiers, and strengthened the fort's concentric walls. She appears to have died on campaign against a subordinate chief around 1289.

• CampaignDaulatabad

  Warangal was annexed in 1323 by the prince who became Muhammad bin Tughlaq, and four years later he moved the capital to Devagiri to hold the Deccan he had conquered. Warangal's Kakatiya governors reasserted themselves within a decade as the Musunuri Nayakas, which is part of why the Daulatabad experiment was abandoned.

• CampaignMadurai Meenakshi

  Malik Kafur's campaigns of 1310 and 1311 reached Warangal and then Madurai, and what they took was portable: elephants, horses and temple treasure, carried back to Delhi and spent on Alauddin's building. Neither south Indian capital was held. The Madurai sultanate that emerged in 1335 was a breakaway of the garrison, not a plan of Delhi's.

• Power passed toChandragiri Fort

  Warangal was annexed by Delhi in 1323 and its city dismantled; Chandragiri was the last capital of the empire that eventually inherited the Telugu country. Between them the plateau passed from Kakatiya to Tughlaq to Bahmani to Vijayanagara to the Qutb Shahis in two centuries, and the four free-standing gateways at Warangal that now lead nowhere are the clearest monument to that.

• SackedAlauddin Khilji

  Alauddin Khilji's general Malik Kafur sacked the Kakatiya capital at Warangal in 1310, taking the Koh-i-Noor among the plunder — the diamond's first well-attested historical appearance. The Kakatiya state submitted and paid tribute but was not immediately annexed, and the Kakatiya recovery under Prataparudra II held the Delhi army at Warangal in 1318 and 1321 before Muhammad bin Tughlaq's final 1323 reduction. The 1310 Warangal campaign was part of the systematic Khilji drive through the Deccan under Malik Kafur that reached Madurai by 1311.

• Power passed toKoh-i-Noor

  The Koh-i-Noor's documented history begins with Alauddin Khalji's 1310 Siege of Warangal and the subsequent subjugation of the Kakatiya dynasty of southern India. Alauddin's court poet Amir Khusrau quotes a Kakatiya messenger describing the diamond as 'unrivaled in the world' and the 18-century Mughal chronicler Khafi Khan identifies this Kakatiya stone as the Koh-i-Noor. The Kakatiya capital at Warangal Fort was where the Delhi Sultanate forces took possession of the stone before carrying it north to Delhi.

On these journeys

• Ghurid conquest & the Delhi Sultanate
• Deccan dynasties — Rashtrakuta, Chalukya, Hoysala, Kakatiya
• Journey of Koh-i-Noor
• Forts of the south & Deccan

Sources

Wikipedia, “Warangal Fort”. Archaeological Survey of India, Hyderabad circle records; Cynthia Talbot, Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region and Identity in Medieval Andhra (2001).

• Wikipedia — Warangal Fort