The Dynasties of the Kanarese Districts of the Bombay Presidency from the Earliest Historical Times to the Musalman Conquest c10.13

c10.13

The districts which form the subject of this article, the home of the Maráthás and the birth-place of the Marátha dynasty, stretch for about 150 miles along the Sayhádri hills between the seventeenth and nineteenth degrees of latitude, and at one point pass as far as 160 miles inland. All the great Marátha capitals, Poona Sátára and Kolhápur, lie close to the Sayhádris under the shelter of some hill fort; while the Musalmán capitals, Ahmadnagar Bijápur Bedar and Gulbarga, are walled cities in the plain. Of little consequence under the earlier Musalmán rulers of the Dakhan; growing into importance under the kings of Bijápur and Ahmadnagar; rising with the rise of the state, the foundations of which Shiváji laid in the seventeenth century, these districts became in the eighteenth century the seat of an empire reaching from the Panjáb to the confines of Bengal and from Delhi to Mysor.