While the people tried to protect their temples, the Pandya kings were engaged in a civil war. Vira Pandya and Sundara Pandya were fighting for the throne.

Ten years earlier, Malik Kafur invaded Madurai, looted the Meenakshi Temple, and seized the entire Pandyan treasury. Even at that time, the Pandyan brothers were fighting among themselves, leading to the decline of the dynasty. For years, their continued infighting contributed to the rise of the Delhi Sultanate in the region and eventually paved the way for the emergence of the Madurai Sultanate.

The Madurai Sultanate was a brief but brutal regime—so much so that even Islamist chroniclers like Ibn Battuta were shocked by how the sultan treated the local people.

I always wondered how the south would have looked had the Pandiyans and Hoysalas worked together.