The drama that played out between Vijayanagara and its northern adversaries took place against the backdrop of a military revolution – or, as some historians would say, the military revolution.43 The term conventionally refers to the socio-political transformations that occurred in early modern Europe following the advent of large siege cannon capable of smashing the tall, vertical walls of medieval forts. It is widely assumed that such technologies and transformations first appeared in Europe and then diffused to the rest of the world in the early period of European colonialism, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, the presence of gun-ports built into the walls of forts at Bidar, Kalyana and Raichur indicate that as early as the 1460s cannon were being used defensively in the heart of the plateau. In the early 1470s the Bahmani minister Mahmud Gawan directed military operations in which he seems to have referred to the use of siege cannon. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, Portuguese merchant-soldiers who had just entered the Indian Ocean reported the presence of artillery in cities along India’s western coast. And in 1510, when Portuguese naval squadrons captured the strategic seaport of Goa from the sultan of Bijapur, they found the arsenal in that city well stocked with munitions, including adaptations of some of their own firearm technology that had been captured from a naval engagement several years earlier. In the decades preceding 1510, Bijapur’s military engineers in Goa had been assimilating firearm technologies from both Mamluk and Ottoman, as well as European sources. Indeed, Afonso de Albuquerque (d. 1515), the viceroy and mastermind of the Portuguese enterprise in the Indian Ocean region, was so impressed with the weaponry manufactured at Goa that he reported to the king of Portugal in 1513 that Muslim gunsmiths there were making firearms of higher quality than those produced in Germany, which the Portuguese had considered the finest anywhere. Albuquerque even sent to Lisbon one of these master gunsmiths, together with samples of heavy cannon made in Goa, with the idea that Portuguese engineers might learn munitions techniques from him.44 Such evidence of technologies moving from India to Europe instead of vice versa challenges the conventional image of Europe as the undisputed font of military technology in the early modern era, and of the rest of the world as its passive recipients.
The first time such techniques were put to use on an Indian battlefield, both defensively and offensively, was at Raichur.45 Located in the fertile tract between the Krishna and the Tungabhadra Rivers, the fortress had long been contested between Vijayanagara and the Bahmani sultans. In the early sixteenth century this fort, defended by 200 heavy cannon positioned along its curtain walls, passed from Bahmani to Bijapuri control. Then in May 1520 Krishna Raya, owing to a dispute with Bijapur’s Isma‘il ‘Adil Khan (r. 1510–34), besieged the place, seeking to dismantle its walls with pickaxes and crowbars, for he possessed very few firearms of his own. After the siege had dragged on for weeks with no resolution, news reached the Vijayanagara camp that Isma‘il had mobilized Bijapur’s army to relieve the fort. So Krishna Raya suspended the siege and took 27,600 cavalry up to the Krishna, where he confronted a Bijapuri army of 18,000 cavalry, 150 war-elephants and 400 heavy field cannon. Upon crossing the river, Isma‘il arranged his entire cannon in a single line and ill-advisedly fired all of them at once into Krishna Raya’s massed heavy cavalry. Although the latter’s front lines broke, Vijayanagara’s remaining cavalry divisions swiftly circled behind Bijapur’s artillerymen before they had time to reload their ordnance. This caused panic in the rest of Isma‘il’s army, which Vijayanagara’s archers drove back towards and into the river with great loss of life. The sultan himself barely escaped the debacle. Then, returning to Raichur fort to resume his siege, Krishna Raya was joined by a contingent of Portuguese mercenary sharpshooters, one of whom shot and killed the fort’s governor with a matchlock gun. The next day, 15 June 1520, the dispirited defenders surrendered the fort. The Vijayanagara army thus prevailed against Bijapur both in a pitched battle by the Krishna and at the siege of Raichur.46
Two points stand out regarding the Battle of Raichur. First, the side that possessed what might seem the superior military technology – the 200 cannon defending the fort, and the 400 field cannon at the pitched battle – lost to an army using pickaxes and crowbars at the fort, and mounted archers at the pitched battle. Given the apparent advantages of gunpowder technology, such an outcome might seem counter-intuitive. But in both venues, Bijapur’s forces lost because of their faulty use of firearms. At the fort their cannon, placed on immobile carriages and fixed in their gun-ports, were unable to be easily manoeuvred in any direction, severely reducing their effectiveness. And at the Krishna, instead of firing their cannon in an orderly sequence of staggered volleys, Isma‘il’s artillerymen launched them all at once, enabling Krishna Raya’s remaining ranks of cavalry to attack the Bijapuris from the rear.
Second, the two armies drew exactly opposite conclusions from the battle’s outcome. Krishna Raya, though impressed with the matchlocks used by his Portuguese mercenaries, failed to see firearms as the way of the future. Both in the pitched battle by the river and at the besieged fort he had prevailed against Bijapur’s artillery without making significant use of firearms, which seems to have reinforced the king’s confidence in the efficacy of the conventional technologies and tactics of the day. There is no evidence that he followed up his victories by establishing an arsenal or a matchlock foundry in Vijayanagara. Nor did he or his successors ever mount cannon on the walls of their capital or provincial forts, or in other ways adapt their defensive systems to accommodate gunpowder technology. To the contrary, his victories at Raichur and other sites throughout southern India had the effect of lulling Krishna Raya and his commanders into a state of complacency, with the result that Vijayanagara’s military system stagnated. Apart from hiring some foreign mercenaries adept at using handguns, for the rest of its existence the state of Vijayanagara failed to take gunpowder technology very seriously.
Bijapur, by contrast, responded quite differently to the battle’s outcome, suggesting that the assimilation of new technologies can be a slow, painful process of trial and error, in the course of which failures can be as important as successes. Leaders in Bijapur understood from their twin failures at Raichur that, despite the advances in cannon technology they had made at their Goa arsenal, they needed to learn much more about the development and deployment of firearms, both defensively and offensively. They therefore launched an accelerated drive to pioneer new gunpowder technologies. Strategically, they aimed to control the wide tract of territory lying before their forts, thereby preventing attackers from approaching their walls with siege equipment. To accomplish this, their engineers replaced the fixed, relatively immobile breech-loading wrought-iron cannon on their forts with large, wrought-iron or cast bronze muzzle-loaders that could be manoeuvred both laterally and vertically. From the Ottomans they adopted the technique of the trunnion – that is, the pivot projecting from a cannon’s sides, enabling a gun to be moved up or down. And from the small swivel guns that the Portuguese had placed on the gunwales of their ships, they took the idea of mounting a much larger cannon on a cubic block of granite set on an iron pin, enabling the gun to move horizontally [see Fig. 8]. Engineers soon improved on this by replacing the unwieldy granite block with an iron swivel fork. Much of this pioneering experimentation took place in the late 1550s at the hill fort of Yadgir, 150 kilometres south-west of Hyderabad.47
By 1560, huge cannon ranging from two to five metres in length – with the longest of them exceeding nine metres – began appearing mounted on the bastions of forts across the northern plateau. Others were placed on tall, free-standing platforms as high as twenty-seven metres above ground level, giving them 360-degree coverage of the surrounding plains. To accommodate the new guns, forts across the northern Deccan were considerably modified: curtain walls were strengthened, while bastions were equipped with prominent gun-mounts for the big swivel guns. Realizing the superiority of the new technology, Bijapur’s neighbours – Ahmadnagar, Golconda and Bidar – soon engaged in a frenzy of activity to modernize their own forts. Of the Deccan’s seventy-four dated bastions built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and capable of carrying the new guns, nearly half appeared during the thirty years between 1560 and 1590. At the same time, engineers in the northern Deccan also developed larger and more efficient cannon designed for use in pitched battles.48
Inasmuch as the battlefield is the ultimate test for new weapon systems, the Battle of Talikota of 1565 exposed the wide gap in military technology that had opened up between the northern and southern Deccan since 1520. The outcome of that battle, in which a coalition of northern sultanates completely routed the Vijayanagara army, lay in good part in the latter’s victory at Raichur forty-five years earlier. After defeating Bijapuri forces at both Raichur fort and the Krishna river, Krishna Raya not only failed to integrate the new gunpowder technology into his armed forces; he also exhibited blatant contempt for his adversary, Isma‘il ‘Adil Khan, promising to return to him all the spoils of his victory on the condition that he first come to his court and kiss his foot. When the sultan refused to suffer such a humiliation, the arrogant king marched up to Bijapur and forced Isma‘il to withdraw into the countryside for several days while his forces occupied and plundered the ‘Adil Shahi capital. Participating in these manoeuvres – and evidently taking notes on how to treat the northern sultanates – was Krishna Raya’s son-in-law Rama Raya. Forty-five years later Rama Raya would lead Vijayanagara’s army to catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Talikota. Although the southern kingdom’s forces did possess firepower in that battle, the more efficient use of field artillery by the northern sultanates carried the day. In a tactic resembling that earlier used by the Ottomans against the Safavid rulers of Iran, the coalition forces fastened together 600 cannon of different calibres in three rows, with 200 heavy cannon in the front row, intermediate cannon in the middle and swivel cannon at the back. Masking the artillery were several thousand archers, who showered arrows on Rama Raya’s advancing infantry. When the infantry came within close range, the archers withdrew while the gunners fired two devastating volleys: the first with cannon balls, the second with copper coins that functioned like shrapnel. This repulse decided the outcome. With the Vijayanagara army thrown into disarray and with Rama Raya himself captured and executed, the allies marched straight from the battlefield to loot metropolitan Vijayanagara, which lay defenceless before them.
The innovations in military technology pioneered in the northern Deccan and used with such effect at Talikota found no parallel anywhere in contemporary India, or, for that matter, the world. In Europe, when the advent of cannon enabled attackers to batter down stone walls, defenders of cities or forts responded by building lower, slanting walls so as to give incoming projectiles less of a target to hit, while adding angled, arrow-shaped bastions – the so-called trace italienne – to cover blind spots along the walls. In the Deccan, by contrast, engineers built bastions with higher profiles than those they replaced, complete with gun platforms on which their huge swivel cannon could be mounted in order to dominate the countryside. The idea was not to minimize the damage that enemy fire could inflict on a fort, which was the European approach, but to prevent besiegers from approaching close enough to fire at all. The reason that states in the Deccan took this path followed from the region’s unique topography, with its many hilltops spiking up from an otherwise flat plateau. For centuries prior to the advent of gunpowder, Deccanis had taken advantage of the plateau’s naturally hilly terrain by building forts on its many promontories. Being easier to defend than plains forts, hill forts enabled chieftains to control the surrounding countryside by using both the stick of coercion – that is, a fort’s garrisoned cavalry – and the carrot of holding, or withholding, grain stored in their granaries. Power itself was therefore understood in terms of seizing prominent heights in order to dominate the peoples below. With this background, when firearms reached the Deccan, it seemed natural to adapt the new gunpowder technologies to serve a familiar strategy, which meant building upwards and placing larger cannon on higher positions.