Political Effects of the Battle.
And yet it had far-reaching effects. The Hindu victory so weakened the power and prestige of the Adil Shah that he ceased altogether to dream of any present conquest in the south, and turned his attention to cementing alliances with the other Muhammadan sovereigns, his neighbours. The victory also caused all the other Muhammadan Powers in the Dakhan seriously to consider the political condition of the country; and this eventually led to a combination without which nothing was possible, but by the aid of which the Vijayanagar Empire was finally overthrown and the way to the south opened. It furthermore greatly affected the Hindus by raising in them a spirit of pride and arrogance, which added fuel to the fire, caused them to become positively intolerable to their neighbours, and accelerated their own downfall.
It equally affected the fortunes of the Portuguese on the coast. Goa rose and fell simultaneously with the rise and fall of the second Vijayanagar dynasty; and necessarily so, considering that its entire trade depended on Hindu support; for the king of Portugal was never well disposed towards his hereditary enemies, the "Moors." This is a point frequently left unnoticed by writers, on Portuguese colonial history. The two most recent authors of works on the subject, Mr. Danvers ("The Portuguese in India") and Mr. Whiteway ("The Rise of Portuguese Power in India"), pay very little attention to the internal politics of the great country on the fringe alone of which the Portuguese settled, and on the coast of which their vessels came and went. Mr. Danvers devotes one short paragraph to the battle of Raichur,[250] and another[251] to the destruction of Vijayanagar. Mr. Whiteway does not even allude to the former event, and concludes his history before arriving at the date of the latter. Yet surely it is easy to see that the success or failure of maritime trade on any given coast must depend on the conditions prevailing in the empire for the supply of which that trade was established. When Vijayanagar, with its grandeur, luxury, and love of display, its great wealth and its enormous armies, was at the height of its power, the foreign traders were eminently successful: when Vijayanagar fell, and the city became desolate and depopulated, the foreign traders had no market for their goods, and trade decayed. So that this great Hindu victory at Raichur deserved a better fate than to be passed over by the historians as if it had been an event of small importance.
The Events that followed the Battle.
Nuniz gives us in detail an account of the events that followed the victory of Krishna Deva Raya, and considering that he wrote only about fifteen years after their occurrence, we should do well to receive his account as probably true in the main. Firishtah, perhaps naturally, preserves a complete silence on the subject.
Nuniz tells us that when the city of Raichur surrendered, the Hindu king made a triumphal entry into it, and treated the garrison with kindness and consideration; while the other Muhammadan kings sent envoys to Krishna Deva Raya on hearing of his success, and received a haughty and irritating reply. Krishna Deva then returned to Vijayanagar and held high festival. Shortly afterwards an ambassador arrived from the defeated Shah, and was treated with scant courtesy for more than a month, after which he was received in audience; when the king sent answer by him to his enemy, that if the Adil Shah would come to him, do obeisance, and kiss his foot, his lands and fortresses should be restored to him. No attention being paid to this, the Raya set out to search for the Shah, hoping, that he would be induced to do homage in the manner demanded and appearing to ignore altogether the effect which would necessarily be produced on the minds of the other kings of the Dakhan by this contemplated supreme humiliation of one of their number. The submission never took place. Krishna led his army as far north as Bijapur, the Adil Shah's capital, which for a time he occupied and left sadly injured. Then Asada Khan, the Shah's wily courtier, successfully brought about the death of his personal enemy, Salabat Khan, by inducing the Raya to order his execution; an act to, which the king was led by the machinations of the arch-intriguer, who subordinated his chief's interests to his own selfish ends.
King Krishna had, in the city of Bijapur, taken prisoner three sons of a former king of the Bahmani dynasty, who had been held captive by the Adil Shahs, and he proclaimed the eldest as king of the Dakhan.[252] This abortive attempt to subvert the rule of the five kings who had established themselves on the ruins of the single Dakhan sovereignty naturally fell flat, and only resulted in stiffening the hostility which these sovereigns felt towards their common foe.
A little later Krishna Raya's son, a young prince on whom he desired to confer his crown, and in whose favour he had even gone so far as openly to abdicate, died suddenly of poison, and the king, then himself in a dying condition, arrested and imprisoned his own minister, Saluva Timma, and his family. In this he was aided by some Portuguese who happened to be present at the Durbar. On Saluva Timma's son escaping to a "mountain range" — perhaps Sandur, on the south of the capital, where there are still to be seen the remains of a strong fortress built of cyclopean masonry on the summit of the highest hill, now known as Ramandrug — the king summoned Timma and his brother and son, and had their eyes put out.
About this time the Adil Shah advanced again to retrieve his broken fortunes, but fled incontinently on hearing the news that Krishna Deva was advancing in person to meet him. That the king, though sorely ill, did indeed move in the manner stated, seems to be confirmed by the statement of Nuniz that on the way he bought six hundred horses from the Portuguese. Krishna began to make preparations for an attack on Belgaum, then in the Adil Shah's possession, and sent an envoy to invite the assistance in this enterprise of the Portuguese at Goa; but he fell too seriously ill to carry out his project, and died shortly afterwards at the age of from forty-two to forty-five years. It was then the year 1530 A.D.
He was succeeded by Achyuta.