Vijayanagara: The City of Victory That Was Erased in Six Months

In the year 1500, the second-largest city on Earth was not in Europe, not in the Middle East — it was in southern India. Only Beijing was bigger. A Portuguese traveller who walked its markets wrote that it was as large as Rome, and that diamonds were sold there by the basket, in the open street. It was called Vijayanagara — the City of Victory. Founded in 1336 by two brothers as a shield for the Hindu south against the armies pushing down from the north, it grew over a century and a half into the capital of the last great Hindu empire of southern India, home to perhaps half a million people. Its wealth came from diamonds, cotton, and war-horses; its streets ran for a kilometre lined with stone colonnades; its temples — the still-living Virupaksha, the masterpiece Vittala with its stone chariot and its pillars that ring like bells — were not the bare grey granite we see today, but plastered and painted in brilliant colour. And it was never the simple Hindu fortress it is sometimes imagined to be. Mosques stood in the Hindu capital; Muslim cavalry and gunners served the Hindu kings; the rulers took the title "Sultan among Hindu kings." This was a cosmopolitan, multi-faith world — which is why the war that destroyed it was not a holy war, but a struggle for power in the Deccan. In January 1565, the regent Aliya Rama Raya — who had spent years playing the five Deccan sultanates against one another — finally forced four of them to unite. At the Battle of Talikota (more precisely, Rakkasa-Tangadi), superior Sultanate artillery turned the day; the seventy-year-old Rama Raya was captured and beheaded, and the Vijayanagara army dissolved at the sight. The royal family fled south with the treasury, and the richest city in India was left without a single defender. What followed is the part most people get wrong. The city was not burned in a single night. It was destroyed methodically, quarter by quarter, over nearly six months — and then the victors went home and left it empty. (The death tolls in some chronicles are now considered greatly exaggerated, but the destruction itself was almost total.) No one ever rebuilt it. Today its ruins — the Group of Monuments at Hampi — are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, more than 1,600 structures scattered across an unearthly landscape of giant boulders. The stone chariot still stands. The musical pillars still sound. The Virupaksha temple still burns its lamps after nearly 700 years. But the houses, the bazaars, and the half a million voices are gone without a trace. This is the story of the City of Victory — and the most complete defeat any great city has ever known. This is Vijayanagara.