After the King of Warangal was defeated by Muhammad bin Tughlaq, Bukka and his brother were taken prisoners and sent to Delhi, where they both converted to Islam.

It appears from inscriptions that he was administering the northern parts of present-day Karnataka from his seat at Gooty (Gutti), Ananthpur district in 1339.

Kannada inscriptions of his time call him Karnataka Vidya Vilas ("master of great knowledge and skills"), Bhashege tappuva rayara ganda ("punisher of those feudatories who don't keep their promise"), and Arirayavibhada ("fire to enemy kings").

Vijayanagar was the first southern Indian state to have hegemony over three major linguistic and cultural regions and to have established a degree of political unity among them.

Within and among these regions, a complex mosaic of rival chiefly houses exercised power to varying degrees, though not with the virtual autonomy that some historians have suggested [citation needed].

The central administration had both a revenue and a military side, but the actual business of raising taxes and troops was mostly the responsibility of the provincial governors and their subordinates.

[10] Harihara was fully conscious of the dangers which the parvenu state faced both from both Hindu rival kings and the Delhi sultans.