The Bahmani Kingdom was perpetually at war with its neighbours, including its rival to the south, the Vijayanagara Empire, which outlasted the sultanate.[8].

[20] Historians have not found any corroboration for the legend,[21][22] but Barani, who was the court chronicler of Sultan Firuz Shah, as well as some other scholars have also called him Hasan Gangu.

[29] Zafar Khan or Hasan Gangu was among the inhabitants of Delhi who were forced to migrate to the Deccan, to build a large Muslim settlement in the region of Daulatabad.

As another rebellion had begun in Gujarat, the Sultan left and installed Shaikh Burhan-ud-din Bilgrami and Malik Jauhar and other nobles in charge of the siege.

[33][34][35][36][37] His revolt was successful, and he established an independent state on the Deccan within the Delhi Sultanate's southern provinces with its headquarters at Hasanabad (Gulbarga), where all his coins were minted.

[33][38] With the support of the influential Indian Chishti Sufi Shaikhs, he was crowned "Alauddin Bahman Shah Sultan – Founder of the Bahmani Dynasty".

The extension of the Sufi's notion of spiritual sovereignty lent legitimacy to the planting of the sultanate's political authority, where the land, people, and produce of the Deccan were merited state protection, no longer available for plunder with impunity.

[40] Turkish or Indo-Turkish troops, explorers, saints, and scholars moved from Delhi and North India to the Deccan with the establishment of the Bahmanid sultanate.

[42] His conflicts with the Vijayanagar empire were singularly savage wars, as according to the historian Ferishta, "the population of the Carnatic was so reduced that it did not recover for several ages.

"[43] The Bahmanids' aggressive confrontation with the two main Hindu kingdoms of the southern Deccan, Warangal and Vijayanagara in the First Bahmani–Vijayanagar War, made them renowned among Muslims as warriors of the faith.

[44] The Vijayanagara empire and the Bahmanids fought over the control of the Godavari-basin, Tungabadhra Doab, and the Marathwada country, although they seldom required a pretext for declaring war,[45] as military conflicts were almost a regular feature and lasted as long as these kingdoms continued.

[47][48] Ghiyasuddin succeeded his father Muhammad II at the age of seventeen in April 1397, but was blinded and imprisoned by a Turkic slave called Taghalchin,[49][50] who had held a grudge on the Sultan for the latter's refusal to appoint him as a governor.

[54] Firuz Shah fought against the Vijayanagara Empire on many occasions and the rivalry between the two dynasties continued unabated throughout his reign, with victories in 1398 and in 1406, but a defeat in 1417.

It was established as a lingua franca of the Muslims of the Deccan, as not only the aspect of a dominant urban elite, but an expression of the regional religious identity.

[62] The Chand Minar, a minaret in Daulatabad, was constructed under his reign, and was commemorated in his honour[63] in 1445[64] for his victory against Deva Raya II of Vijayanagara in 1443,[63] the last major conflcit between the two powers.

[65] For the first half-century after the establishment of the Bahmanids, the original North Indian colonists and their sons had administered the empire quite independent of either the non-Muslim Hindus, or the Muslim foreign immigrants.

However, the later Bahmani Sultans, mainly starting from his father Ahmad Shah Wali I, began to recruit foreigners from overseas, whether because of depletion among the ranks of the original settlers, or the feelings of dependency upon the Persian courtly model, or both.

[70] Ashamed of his own folly, the Sultan punished the Dakhani leaders who were responsible for the massacre, putting them to death or throwing them in prison, and reduced their families to beggary.

[71] The accounts of the violent events likely included exaggerations as it came from the pen of the chroniclers who were themselves mainly foreigners and products of Safavid Persia.

The Dakhanis made up the indigenous Muslim elite of the Bahmanid dynasty, being descendants of Sunni immigrants from Northern India, while the Afaqis were foreign newcomers from the west such as Gawan, who were mostly Shi'is.

[79] Mahmud Gawan had tried to reconcile with the two factions over his fifteen-year prime ministership, but had found it difficult to win their confidence; the party strife could not be stopped.

[2] His Afaqis opponents, led by Nizam-ul-Mulk Bahri and motivated by anger over Mahmud's reforms which had curtailed the nobility's power, fabricated a treasonous letter to Purushottama Deva of Orissa which they purported to be from him.

[74] Upon his death, Nizam-ul-Mulk Bahri, the father of the founder of the Nizam Shahi dynasty became the regent of the Sultan as prime minister.

[85] The last Bahmani Sultans were puppet monarchs under their Barid Shahi prime ministers, who were the de facto rulers.

[9] Modern scholars like Haroon Khan Sherwani and Richard M. Eaton have based their accounts of the Bahmani dynasty mainly upon the medieval chronicles of Firishta and Syed Ali Tabatabai.

[86][87] Other contemporary works were the Sivatattva Chintamani, a Kannada language encyclopedia on the beliefs and rites of the Veerashaiva faith, and Guru Charitra.

[7] The first sultan, Alauddin Bahman Shah, is noted to have captured 1,000 singing and dancing girls from Hindu temples after he battled the northern Carnatic chieftains.