A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c17.91

c17.91

Yet Tirumala seems somehow to have held the bulk of the empire together; he tacitly approved the new status of the Nāyaks of the south and made them his friends. The Voḍeyars of Mysore and the Nāyaks of Vellore and Keladi still owned allegiance as before. He set up each of his three sons as viceroy over a linguistic area for general control and supervision: Śrīranga, the eldest, over the Telugu area with Penugonda as his capital; Rāma, his second son, over the Kannada country, to rule from Śrīrangapattana; and Venkatapati, the youngest, to rule over the Tamil country from Chandragiri. He assumed the title ‘Reviver of the Decadent Karnātaka Empire’ and had himself crowned emperor in 1570. But he was already an old man, and seems to have retired after a short rule, and been succeeded by Śrīranga in 1572. Tirumala's work restored the empire, though in a truncated form, and prolonged its life for about a century.