The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c29.163.1

v3.c29.163.1

Sōmēsvara’s accession marks the beginning of a more vigorous reign both in the south and in the north. He carried on a successful war against the contemporary Yādava ruler Krishna Kandara, and extended his boundary northwards to the river Krishna as an inscription of his in Pandharpur near Sholapur of 1236 indicates. But his activities were chiefly along the Chola-Pāṇḍya frontier which called for his presence so constantly that he erected for himself a royal city there and ruled his kingdom from that distant southern capital, except for one short interval in the middle of his reign when he is said to have been in his ancestral Hoysala territory proper. As early as 1236 we find him in residence in the Pāṇḍyamaṇḍala which is said to have been acquired by his strength and valour. Probably about this time or earlier, in the reign of his father, the Hoysala entered into a marriage alliance with the Pāṇḍyas, so that, in inscriptions of Māṟavarman Sundara Pāṇḍya II of about this date, the Hoysala monarch is called ‘uncle Sōmēsvara,’ and a record of this Pāṇḍya ruler in the Tinnevelli district names a village granted at the request of Sōmēsvara, Vikrama-Sōmi-Chaturvēdimangalam in honour of this uncle. It was about this time, or a few years later, that a younger brother of Rājarāja III, afterwards Rājēndra III, became so actively hostile to his elder brother that Sōmēsvara’s intervention was called for as against this new rival.