sources of horses

[maidros]

One thing I'm always curious, how do you get out of the prohibition against sailing? I just kind of hand-waved it with the Cholas since they are known to have done a lot of that already.

I am not sure the prohibition existed in the time of the early Vijayanagar in south India. OTL Vijayanagar had a navy that regularly extracted tribute from the kingdoms of Jaffna, Pegu and Tenesserim in time of Deva Raya II (1424-1446). It was after the arrival of the Portuguese that Vijayanagar's navy faded into oblivion. Until then, they existed just fine.

 

[Flocculencio]

The only thing needed is for India to have its own powerful merchant class, who owe their power to the king. This can be easily conceived if one of the Vijayanagar kings, seeing how the Arabs control all his trade and how they charge exorbitant sums for the horses they bring in, decides to go to the source and see how much he can save. Also, to pay for the centralised army, he would need money and controlling trade is the best way of doing that.

Yup- the way I handled this in my TL was to have the Syrian Christians of Kerala essentially become beholden to the Emperor. I managed that by having a Vijayanagari-Portuguese War spark off right around the time the Syrian Christians rose against the Goan Inquisition. Just to point out that you've got a ready-made mercantile/gentry caste which has cosmopolitan ties and which would be perfectly willing to gain the protection of a greater power. The Syrian Christians were certainly there in the 12th C so that's just an idea for you.

Control of Kerala is probably going to be necessary for a maritime Vijayanagar, anyway- Kerala has much better ports than much of the Eastern coast of India, plus established trading routes out of Muziris and later Cochin along with plentiful forests for shipbuilding. Also, the Pallakad Gap is probably the easiest route down through the Western Ghats to the coast and that leads down to Calicut and Cochin.

 

[Flocculencio]

One thing I'm always curious, how do you get out of the prohibition against sailing? I just kind of hand-waved it with the Cholas since they are known to have done a lot of that already.

Y'know, I suspect that that prohibition was only for certain castes and I think it's more likely a North Indian issue. The South Indian maritime kingdoms never seem to have had a problem with it. Hinduism isn't so much a single religion as much as a common cultural-religious identity with millions of local variants so handwaving stuff like that really isn't a problem.

Then we need rebellions and idiot aristocrats and an awesome leader eventually once this awesome ruler realises that autonomous states aren't going to work he is going to disband them and create a centralised state. In theory

That's how I handled it in my TL, anyway.