On 23 January 1565, by the date most historians accept, the armies of four Deccan sultanates met the army of the Vijayanagara Empire on the plains near the Krishna river in what is now northern Karnataka. The battle ended with the capture and execution of Aliya Rama Raya, the regent who ruled Vijayanagara, and the rout of his army. His capital was then plundered for months and never reoccupied. Britannica calls the battle decisive in breaking up the Vijayanagara empire.
A league against Vijayanagara
By the 1560s real power in Vijayanagara lay with Rama Raya, who ruled in the name of the king. Four of the neighboring sultanates of the Deccan joined forces against him: Bijapur under Ali Adil Shah, Ahmadnagar under Hussain Nizam Shah, Golconda under Ibrahim Qutb Shah and Bidar under Ali Barid. Some lists, such as that of the New World Encyclopedia, add Berar as a fifth ally.1
Britannica says the armies had been gathering in the area since late December 1564. Robert Sewell, the historian of Vijayanagara who followed the Persian chronicler Firishta, describes how the allies found the fords of the Krishna defended, marched along the river for three days to draw the defenders away, and then doubled back at night and crossed.2
The battle
Both armies were huge, but nobody knows how huge. Britannica speaks only of several hundred thousand men in all. Sewell quotes the Portuguese chronicler Diogo do Couto, who gave Vijayanagara 600,000 foot and 100,000 horse, and Firishta, who claimed 900,000 infantry, and he warns that such figures cannot be taken as accurate. The New World Encyclopedia gives far lower modern totals.3
Britannica concludes that the battle seems to have been decided by the allied artillery and by the capture of Rama Raya. In Sewell's account, based on Firishta, the guns massed in front of Hussain Nizam Shah's center broke the Vijayanagara attacks. The aged regent, who directed the battle from a litter, was seized when his bearers dropped him in panic at the approach of a war elephant, and Hussain Nizam Shah had him beheaded and his head raised on a spear. When his soldiers saw it, the army broke and fled.4
23 or 26 January?
Britannica and Sewell both date the battle to 23 January 1565, and so does our article on the Battle of Talikota. The New World Encyclopedia and a number of other sites give 26 January instead. The original date is an Islamic one: Sewell notes that Firishta places the battle on Friday, 20 Jumada al-Thani of the year 972 of the Hijra, but that this day of the month corresponds to a Tuesday, 23 January, not to a Friday.5
Because the battle took place before the Gregorian reform of 1582, 23 January is a date in the Julian calendar.
The fall of the city
According to Sewell, the defeated princes fled south with the treasury, and the city of Vijayanagara was left without defense. Britannica says the capital was captured and destroyed over a period of five months and never reoccupied, and Sewell, writing in 1900, also speaks of five months of plunder.6
Rama Raya's brother Tirumala withdrew to Penukonda, where he took the throne in 1570 and founded the Aravidu dynasty. A smaller Vijayanagara state survived for decades, but the empire never recovered its power. For the wider story, see our guide to the battles of India.7
Also on this day
- 1900: Battle of Spion Kop. British troops trying to relieve besieged Ladysmith fought the forces of the two Boer republics for the hilltop of Spion Kop in Natal, early in the Second Boer War.
