Madurai

The sultanate did not last half a century. Ibn Battuta, who married into its ruling family, left a grim portrait of the sultan Ghiyāth ad-Dīn Damghani, who in 1343 had the captured Hoysala king Ballala III put to death and his stuffed body hung on the walls of Madurai. In the 1370s Kumara Kampana of Vijayanagara overthrew the last sultan, and a Sanskrit poem by his wife tells how he reopened the Meenakshi temple and brought back the images that had been hidden through the Muslim years.

Under the Nayaks, first sent as Vijayanagara's governors in 1529, Madurai became a royal capital again. They walled and widened the temple, crowding it with gateway towers and pillared halls, and Tirumala Nayak, the greatest of the line, brought the court back from Tiruchirappalli and raised a vast palace in the city. The dynasty ended in 1736, when Chanda Sahib, acting for the Nawab of Arcot, took its last ruler, Queen Meenakshi, prisoner.