POLITICAL HISTORY.
temple still contains inscriptions recounting his successes and relating how he and his queens presented the god with a necklace of 991 pearls and other costly gifts. A picturesque 'account of this expedition by the Portuguese chronicler Nuniz will be found in Mr.R. Sewell's A Forgotten Empire ( Vijayanagar)*[1] and this states that, furious with the hesitating tactics of Pratápa Rudra, Krishna Déva Ráya caused an inscription to be cut in the temple†[2] saying: 'Perhaps when these letters are decayed, the king of Orya (Orissa) will give battle to the king of Bisnaga (Vijayanagar). If the king of Orya erases them, his wife shall be given to the smiths who shoe the horses of the king of Bisnaga,' If this insulting threat was really ever inscribed, it is not likely to have been allowed to remain on record a moment after it could be safely deleted, and it is not now to be found at Simháchalam. The war ended in the humiliation of Pratápa Rudra, who was forced to make a treaty with the conqueror and give him his daughter in marriage, but Krishna Déva (perhaps in a fear of a flank attack from the Musalmans of the Deccan) forebore to hold the country permanently and retired to the south.
Of Pratápa Rudra's sons, two reigned one after the other for a short period but were murdered by a minister named Góvinda Déva, who became king about 1541 and ruled for seven years. Three of this man's sons held the kingdom until 1559-60, when Mukunda Harichandana, a Telugu by birth, raised a revolt, had two of them assassinated, and seized the throne. He reigned till about 1568, when his territories were seized by the Musalman king of Golconda. ‡[3]This ruler was one of the confederacy of Musalman kings of the Deccan who had overthrown Vijayanagar at the great battle of Talikóta three years before, and he had risen to great power in consequence.
The kings of Golconda were nominally subject to the Mughal emperors at Delhi, but they paid them little real allegiance at any time and eventually became virtually independent. Few details of their rule survive. Their chief local officer was the
29
- ↑ * Swan Sonnenschein, 1900.
- ↑ † Nuniz says the temple was at 'Symamdary' and Mr. Se well identifies this with Rajahmundry, supposing that the first syllable has been accidentally dropped, perhaps by the copyist. But Nuniz says that Symamdary was a 'hundred leagues' from Kondapalli, which suits Simháchalam better, and 'Simhádri' is still in use as a form of 'Simháchalam'. Nuniz says the place was a very large city, and he seems to refer thereby to Potnúru, which according to current tradition once extended as far as Bhógapuram, nine miles to the east, which was the quarter where its dancing girls (bhógam) resided.
- ↑ ‡ Babu Man Mohan Chakravarti's paper in J. A. S. B., Ixix, pt. 1, No. 2. This is the authority for several other statements in this section.
