Honnavara

Honnavara was a port on the Kanara coast, at the mouth of the Sharavathi. Its Nawayath Muslim chiefs ruled a small trading sultanate in the fourteenth century.

In 1342 Ibn Battuta found Sultan Jamaluddin ruling Hunnur, with its mosque and minaret. The Portuguese built a fort in the sixteenth century and the English later opened warehouses. Marathas took Kanara in the 1750s; Hyder Ali and Tipu made Honnavara a major Mysore port before it passed to the East India Company in 1799.