A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c17.34

c17.34

He left behind an infant son, Rājaśekhara, but the throne was occupied by his cousin Virūpāksha II. Virūpāksha was the son of Pratāpadevarāya, a younger brother of Devarāya II, and had been ruler of Penugonda for several years before he assumed the imperial crown. Nuniz records that ‘he was given over to vice, caring for nothing but women, and to fuddle himself with drink.’ It is not surprising, therefore, that large tracts of land were lost to the Muslims including Goa, Chaul and Dabhol. The authority of the central government continued to decline, and total disruption was, once again, only prevented by the initiative of powerful provincial governors. Most prominent among these was Sāluva Narasimha, ruler of Chandragiri rājya, whose inscriptions begin as early as 1456. His dominions must have suffered during the Oḍḍa invasion of 1463, and he now began a war against the Gajapati and captured Udayagiri after a siege (1470). He suppressed a rebellion in the Tamil districts and, taking advantage of the civil war in Orissa that followed Kapileśvara's death, he expelled the Oriyas from the eastern districts of the empire and made himself master of all the territory up to the Godāvari. Kondavīdu and Masulipatam fell into his hands before 1477. It seems probable that Narasimha helped Purushottama Gajapati to regain the throne of Orissa from which he had been expelled by Hambar with the aid of the Bāhmani sultan Muhammad III. Narasimha and Purushottama had to face the hostility of that sultan, and the war that followed, in 1478-81, has been described in the last chapter. The Tuluva general Iśvara particularly distinguished himself by recapturing much of the booty which the sultan had gathered by his daring raid on Kāñchipuram.