01City of victory
By the 1330s the old Hindu kingdoms of the south had been broken one after another: Devagiri, Warangal, Dwarasamudra and Madurai. Harihara and his brother Bukka, sons of Sangama, had served the chiefs of Kampili on the Tungabhadra. The tradition of Sringeri, kept by the matha itself, says that the sage Vidyaranya guided them to set up a kingdom for dharma. In 1336 Harihara founded a new capital on the south bank of the Tungabhadra, opposite Anegondi, among the boulder hills around the Virupaksha shrine at Hampi. It was called Vijayanagara, the city of victory.
02Building the kingdom
Harihara and his brothers divided the work. Bukka held the centre, Kampana took the east towards Nellore, Marappa the west at Chandragutti, and Muddappa the south. When the Hoysala king Veera Ballala III was killed fighting the Madurai Sultanate in 1343, the Hoysala lands passed to the Sangamas, and with them most of Karnataka. Harihara made grants to the Sringeri matha. In 1347 a new Sultanate, the Bahmani, rose to the north, and the long contest for the Raichur doab began.
