Rama Raya was captured and beheaded, the Vijayanagara army scattered, and the capital at Hampi was sacked for months.
01The battle
Rama Raya, regent and real ruler of Vijayanagara, was then past seventy. He took the field in a litter. The early fighting went his way. Firishta and later writers say the turn came when two Muslim commanders in Vijayanagara service changed sides in the middle of the battle, and when the Ahmadnagar guns fired into the massed ranks at close range. Rama Raya was seized and brought before Hussain Nizam Shah, who had him beheaded on the spot. The army, seeing his head raised on a spear, fled.
02The city of victory emptied
The royal family fled south to Penukonda with what treasure the elephants could carry. The victors reached the capital and stayed for months, pulling down palaces and breaking temple images. The Italian traveller Cesare Federici, who passed through in 1567, found the city standing but deserted, with wild animals living in the houses. The ruins at Hampi, the broken mandapas of the Vitthala temple, are what that sack left behind.
Talikota ended Vijayanagara as a great power; the kingdom lived on from Penukonda and Chandragiri, and its Nayakas carried its temple culture on in Madurai, Thanjavur and Mysore.
