Bijapur Sultanate

The Bijapur Sultanate was the Deccan's Shia kingdom from 1490 to 1686, ruled by the Adil Shahi house. Yusuf, said to be an Ottoman prince's son bought as a slave, governed Bijapur for the Bahmanis and declared independence as their sultanate broke in 1490, proclaiming Shia Islam in a Sunni land. His heirs fought every neighbour in turn: the Portuguese at Goa, whom they never retook, Vijayanagara to the south, and each other. In 1565 four Deccan sultans, Bijapur among them, forgot their quarrels long enough to destroy Vijayanagara's army at Talikota and sack its capital, the battle that broke Hindu power in the south. Ibrahim II, the tolerant king, wrote poetry in Dakhni, played the tambur, built the Ibrahim Rauza, and patronised Hindu temples beside mosques; his Gol Gumbaz, raised for his successor, carries the second largest dome in the world. The Mughals pressed from the north for decades, marrying and besieging by turns, until Aurangzeb himself camped before Bijapur in 1685 and starved it into surrender the next year, ending the Adil Shahi line and folding the Deccan into his empire.