Chapter three focuses on south India from the mid-fourteenth through mid-fifteenth centuries with an emphasis on Vijayanagara. We consider the rise and fall of this powerful kingdom including its military nature and its cultural orientation. While the rulers of Vijayanagara cast themselves as exemplary Hindu kings, they also embraced Islamicate cultural expression in their courtly dress and their palace buildings. The robust economy of Vijayanagara allowed for successful territorial expansion facilitated by active and successful trading. Contemporary with Vijayanagara was the Muslim ruled Bahmani kingdom situated to the northwest. The prime minister Mahmud Gawan’s ability to control its two dominant factions, nobles from Iran on one hand and Indian Muslims on the other, is among the topics explored.

In the medieval period, the twofold frontier of mobile wealth, nomadic and maritime, largely developed under the aegis of Islam. This chapter analyses the establishment of Indo-Islamic conquest states by post-nomadic Turks, Mongols, Afghans, and others. Mass conversion to Islam only occurred in the Indus borderlands under the impact of widespread nomadic destruction over extended periods of time. In the post-nomadic states of the subcontinent there was no nomadic destruction but instead a fusion of frontier and settled society and little or no conversion to Islam. In the same centuries, the rise of Islam in the littoral regions and island archipelagos of the Indian Ocean took place in the context of the steadily expanding trade and increased dynamism of the medieval centuries – largely beyond the pale of settled Hindu society.