The Bahmani kingdom and the Deccan sultanates

The Bahmani kingdom was founded in 1347, when Hasan Gangu, who took the title Bahman Shah, broke away from the Delhi Sultanate in the Deccan. Its capital was first at Gulbarga and later at Bidar. The Bahmani rulers fought long wars with Vijayanagara to the south and with the rulers of Malwa and Gujarat to the north, and their court at Bidar became a centre of Persian culture, learning, and architecture, with the great madrasa built by Mahmud Gawan, the kingdom's famous minister, in the fifteenth century.

Mahmud Gawan, who served as prime minister in the later fifteenth century, reformed the administration by dividing the kingdom into smaller provinces and checking the power of the great nobles. His success made enemies, and he was executed in 1481 on a false charge of treason, an event that weakened the kingdom. Within a few decades the Bahmani kingdom broke into five successor states, known as the Deccan sultanates: Bijapur, Golconda, Ahmadnagar, Berar, and Bidar.

The successor states were culturally rich. Bijapur, under the Adil Shahi dynasty, built the Gol Gumbaz, whose dome is among the largest in the world, and its ruler Ibrahim Adil Shah II was a patron of music and painting. Golconda, under the Qutb Shahi dynasty, controlled the diamond mines that produced famous stones and built the city of Hyderabad, founded in 1591 by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah. Ahmadnagar is remembered for Chand Bibi, who defended the fort against the Mughals in the 1590s.

The Deccan sultanates survived into the seventeenth century, when they were gradually absorbed by the Mughal Empire, with Ahmadnagar falling first and Bijapur and Golconda last, under Aurangzeb in the 1680s. Their legacy is visible in the Indo-Islamic architecture of the Deccan, in the Dakhani language and literature they patronised, and in the reminder that medieval India was a patchwork of competing regional states, not a single empire.