Five Deccan sultanates shared Bahmani coins and rivals
After the Bahmani Sultanate fractured, five Persianate Muslim kingdoms ruled the plateau between the Krishna and the Vindhyas—Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, Bidar, Berar, and Golconda. Rivals most days, they still united in 1565 to smash Vijayanagara, and kept minting Bahmanid coin rather than their own.
Ahmadnagar, Bijapur and Berar broke away in 1490, Bidar around 1492 and Golconda in 1512. Their founders came from startlingly varied backgrounds. Ahmadnagar's dynasty descended from a military slave said to have been a Brahmin from Vijayanagar, though historians suspect that pedigree was a convenient legend; Berar's founder was a Kannadiga boy captured on campaign and raised Muslim; Bidar's was a Georgian enslaved by Turks; Bijapur's was possibly another Georgian slave; and Golconda's was a slave of Iranian Turkmen origin.
All five claimed legitimacy as Bahmani successors. Although usually at odds, they combined in 1565 at the Battle of Talikota, crippling Vijayanagara for good and razing its capital, temples included. They also devoured each other: Ahmadnagar took Berar after a coup there in 1574, and Bijapur absorbed Bidar, the smallest of the five, in 1619.
Ahmadnagar's court shows how volatile these states were. A seven-year-old, Burhan, inherited the throne in 1510 and in 1538 made Nizari Shi'ism the official faith under the imam Shah Tahir's influence. Later factional fighting between native Deccani nobles and foreign-born ones ended in massacres that sent Persian courtiers, among them the historian Firishta, fleeing to Bijapur; the state religion flipped between Mahdawi and Shia teachings.
The Mughals then closed in. Chand Bibi, regent for her infant great-nephew, drove off a Mughal assault in 1596, but after her death in 1600 Ahmadnagar fell. The minister Malik Ambar kept a rump state alive from new capitals, ending at Khadki, later renamed Aurangabad, until Aurangzeb finished it off in 1636. His campaign of 1686–87 took Golconda and Bijapur, the last survivors.
Source: Deccan sultanates
