Page:Madras District Gazetteers - Anantapur.pdf/42

In 1577 he appeared before Penukonda. The Vijayanagar king, as has heen stated, had already moved to Chandragiri, but the garrison succeeded in bribing off part of the attacking army and the siege failed. In £589 another attempt was made by the king of Golconda, but the king’s son-in-law, Jayadéva Raya, the chief of Channapatna, in Mysore, offered a most plucky resistance and drove off his forces. Later, however, the place fell to the Musalmans and with it Gooty, and eventually the whole district, came under their sway. They ruled it by governors of their own appointment or through local chieftains, called poligars, who acknowledged their supremacy and paid them tribute but in all other ways were virtually in independent power. The principal of these was the poligar of the Hande family of Anantapur, who is referred to in the account of that town in Chapter XV below.

‘But in the west of the peninsula a new power had been arising— that of the Mardthas. In 1677 Sivaji, the famous Maratha chief, took most of the possessions held by the king of Bijdpur in the Carnatic and in the next year visited the Deccan. In 1680 the rights held by Bijapur over this part of the country were formally made over to him and the poligars paid their tribute to him.

In 1687 the emperor Aurangzeb of Delhi marched south to reduce Bijapur and Golconda to obedience to his rule and overthrew the power of the Mardthas within the district and added the country to the Mughal Subah of Bijapur.

In 1723, the Nizam, the emperor's governor at Haidarabad, whife continuing nominally in subordination to Delhi, made himself independent and ruled his province, which included the Anantapur district, as though he were king of it. But his power over it, which had never been absolute, remained very partial, and though he claimed sovereign rights within it the Mardthas continued to collect tribute from its poligars, Much of it, indeed, became virtually -a Maratha possession. Mordri Rao, the well-known Maratha free-lance, whose exploits fill so many pages of South Indian history,! established himself at Gooty about 1746, obtained possession of Penukonda, exacted separate tribute from (at any rate some of) the poligars and made himself arbiter of the destinies of the district.

Meanwhile, however, yet another power was arising, that of the Hindu kingdom of Mysore. In 1761 Haidar Ali, the famous soldier of fortune, usurped its throne and began to extend its possessions. His first acquisitions in Anantapur district were the forts of Penukonda and Madakasira,? which belonged to Mordri Rao, and in 1775 he took

1 See Orme, i., passim, 2 Miles’ Hydur Naik, 122,