Battle of Talikota

Vijayanagara had played the Deccan sultanates against one another for decades, and in 1565 four of them stopped being played and combined. The armies met near the Krishna in January, and for a time the numbers and the elephants told for Vijayanagara. The turn came when Rama Raya, well past seventy and commanding from a litter, was taken and killed in front of his own army, which dissolved. The victors then rode south to the capital and spent months methodically dismantling one of the richest cities in the world. Vijayanagara as a power survived in reduced form for another century, but the city was never reoccupied.

Even the battle's name is unsettled, since Talikota is some distance from where the fighting probably happened and Indian scholarship increasingly prefers Rakkasagi-Tangadagi after the villages nearer the likely ground. Colonial and later nationalist writing framed the battle as Muslim conquest destroying a Hindu empire, a reading complicated by the Muslim commanders in Vijayanagara's own army, the Hindu allies of the sultanates, and the decades of shifting alliances that preceded it. The sack is documented well enough, mainly by Portuguese and Persian observers, but archaeology at Hampi has shown the destruction was uneven, concentrated on the royal centre and temples tied to royal power rather than the whole urban area (the Virupaksha temple never went out of worship), which has forced some revision of the total-devastation account. The site is now a World Heritage property and among the most intensively surveyed archaeological landscapes in South Asia.