Kampili fell; Kampiladeva died fighting and the women of the fort performed jauhar.
01Shelter refused to no one
Ibn Battuta, who reached Delhi a few years later, heard the account there. When the Sultan’s army closed in, Kampiladeva sent the rebel prince away to the Hoysala king Ballala III for safety. He then had a great fire lit, and the women of his household and of his nobles gave themselves to it. The raja went out with his men and was killed. Kannada and Telugu ballads remember his son Kumara Rama as a hero of this war.
02From Kampili to Vijayanagara
Tradition holds that the brothers Harihara and Bukka served at Kampili and were carried off to Delhi after its fall. Less than ten years later they founded a new kingdom a few kilometres away on the same river, at Hampi. Vijayanagara grew in the very country where Kampili had stood. Ibn Battuta adds that the Sultan’s men, entering the burnt fort, found only the dead; the defenders had left them nothing to take.
Kampili’s stand and fall are the prelude to Vijayanagara, founded in 1336 on the same stretch of the Tungabhadra.