Vijayanagara is founded

The year 1336 comes from later tradition. The first secure records of the Sangama brothers as independent rulers are grants of the 1340s, among them a Sringeri inscription of 1346 in which the brothers gather to celebrate Harihara's conquest of the land "from the eastern to the western ocean". The city they built around the Virupaksha temple at Hampi became one of the largest in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century India, described by Persian, Italian and Portuguese visitors, until its army was defeated at Talikota in 1565 and the city sacked.

On the map, Vijayanagara and the Bahmani sultanate to its north divided the Deccan after the Tughluq withdrawal, and fought for two centuries over the Raichur doab between the Krishna and the Tungabhadra.

The founders' origins are disputed. One tradition makes them officers of the Kakatiya king of Warangal and then of Kampili, who were captured by Muhammad bin Tughluq, converted to Islam, sent back to govern the region, and reconverted under the sage Vidyaranya. Historians are divided over the conversion story; those who reject it see the brothers as local commanders in Hoysala service. Since the nineteenth century the question has also been a contest between Telugu and Kannada claims on the empire.