Foreign visitors to the Vijayanagara capital in the 14th and 15th centuries were greatly impressed by the fortifications that ringed the city. They reported that they entered the city through large gateways protected by barbicans and high towers (bastions), that they passed through several lines of walls of monumental size, and that they observed walls that ascended the hills along their route. Walls on low ground were protected by moats and by fields of large stones while bodies of water and irrigated fields were located nearby.

Today, the physical features relating to security and defence comprise -- along with temples and shrines, courtly and civic structures, roadways, and ubiquitous agricultural facilities -- a prominent, widespread, and often highly visible dimension of the landscape of the Vijayanagara capital and its immediate hinterlands. The security arrangements protecting the Vijayanagara capital formed a geographically extensive and very coherent system. This scheme was essential given the precarious geopolitical position of a city located, as it was, on the very northern limits of the empire and in close physical proximity to its most powerful rivals – the Bahmani Sultanate and its successors.

At the heart of this system lay literally dozens of kilometres of defensive walls characterized by quarried granite block faces and backing ramparts of earthen fill. Reflecting an enormous investment of resources, such walls often (as preserved today) include square, forward-projecting stone bastions situated at intervals along with numerous masonry gateways of varying size, complexity and defensive elaboration. Described by early visitors as occurring in close proximity to these walls and still preserved in some locations today, additional components of this system included moats or ditches and fields of “horse stones” – multiple lines of large, irregularly-placed natural boulders – placed so as to preclude the movement of mounted troops. Complementing these varied facilities are additional features generally situated in elevated settings that probably functioned primarily as observation posts. Varying in formality and degree of architectural elaboration, such facilities include large, fortuitously positioned boulders, free-standing bastions and columned structures. Additional components of this security infrastructure possibly date to the later stages of the Vijayanagara period and subsequent eras, namely, a series small, Islamicate forts generally situated in hilltop settings and characterized by double-faced masonry walls and circular rather than square bastions.

Grounded in previous field work conducted by the Vijayanagara Research Project (VRP) and the Vijayanagara Metropolitan Survey (VMS) and conducted under the auspices of these projects, Dr Robert Brubaker undertook fieldwork on fortifications in 1997 and 2007. He systematically documented the varied facilities described above, determined their geographic extent through reconnaissance survey, and collected quantitative and qualitative comparative data with which to explore variation in the city’s many masonry walls. His survey resulted in the discovery of numerous additional walls on the margins of the Vijayanagara Metropolitan Region. Situated across the valleys that provided the primary routes of access through the rugged terrain surrounding the city these walls, together with the adjacent ridges, formed a partly-natural, partly man-made outer perimeter enclosing an area of c. 650 square kilometres around the imperial capital.

Although analyses of the comparative data collected on Vijayanagara’s masonry walls are as yet incomplete, preliminary results indicate that this largely homogeneous tradition of masonry military architecture exhibits temporally sensitive micro-variation in components, form, terrain and location that help us to attain a better understanding of how Vijayanagara’s system of security arrangements developed over time. The evolution of the systems of defence of which fortification form a part, can, in turn, be related to understandings of the development of other, better understood dimensions of Vijayanagara’s urban landscape (e.g., sacred landscapes) and ultimately, to broader, historically-based understandings of the course and vagaries of Vijayanagara’s imperial history. For example, the 16th century rulers of the capital may not have adapted its fortifications to resist weapons using gun powder, both because offensive policies against their enemies were successful and because capital investments in temple complexes and vast irrigation projects were more pertinent to internal social and political integration and economic development.

For description of the capital’s fortification and analysis of their role and history see Brubaker’s Vijayanagara: Warfare and the Archaeology of Defence in Project Publications.