Krishnadevaraya, the warrior emperor who wrote his own Telugu epic
When Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty, sized up India's rulers, he ranked the southern emperor Krishnadevaraya as the mightiest. Portuguese visitors saw a commander who led from the front and tended wounded soldiers. Between campaigns he spoke four languages and composed a long devotional poem still read in Telugu.
Krishnadevaraya ruled the Vijayanagara Empire from 1509 until his death in 1529, the third king of the Tuluva dynasty his father had founded. With the Delhi Sultanate in decline, his realm became the largest and strongest in India. His rivals were the Deccan sultanates to the north, the Gajapati kings of Odisha to the east, and the Portuguese, who dominated sea trade.
His armies were almost always on the move. Early victories ended years of raids on his territory and brought the fertile Raichur Doab under his control. A year-long siege of Udayagiri fort, launched in 1512, broke the Gajapati army through starvation, and a later invasion drove the Gajapati king back to Cuttack until he surrendered. The high point came on 19 May 1520, when he took Raichur Fort after a hard siege that cost 16,000 of his soldiers. With the Portuguese at Goa, by contrast, he chose friendship from 1510, buying guns and Arabian horses and using their engineers to improve his capital's water supply.
At home he kept ministers on a tight rein, scrapped hated levies such as the marriage fee, cleared land for farming and dug irrigation works around the capital. He toured the empire every year to hear grievances in person. His own poem Amuktamalyada doubles as a guide to kingship, urging rulers to build tanks and canals and lease land cheaply to the poor, earning wealth and merit together.
His court marks a golden age of Telugu writing, home to eight celebrated poets, yet he also patronised Kannada, Sanskrit and Tamil authors and issued inscriptions in all four; Kannada was the court language. His last years were bleak. His young heir, crowned in 1524, was soon poisoned, and the king had his long-serving minister Timmarusu blinded on suspicion. He fell ill while planning a new campaign and was succeeded by his brother Achyuta Deva Raya.
Source: Krishnadevaraya
