Sovereignty without a coronation
He came from Persia, distinguished himself defending the Bahmani king at Bidar, and was made governor of Telangana. The archive dates Golconda’s independence from 1518 because its house convention counts de facto sovereignty rather than coronations — and Sherwani’s conclusion is that Sultan Quli never proclaimed his kingship at all, the first Qutb Shahi to do so probably being Ibrahim in 1550.
He built his own tomb in 1543, during his lifetime, as was the custom. It was finished in the year he was killed. The inscription calls him Bade Malik, the Great Master.
The murder
Briggs’s Ferishta gives the act plainly and gives it twice, differently. In the narrative, Jamsheed — there called the eldest son — induced one of his slaves to stab the king while he was examining jewels, in AH 950 (1543), then killed the assassin on the spot to hide his own hand in it. In the appendix printed in the same volume, Jamsheed is the third of six sons, imprisoned in a dungeon at Golconda for plotting against the designated heir, and from that prison instigated his keeper — the commandant of Golconda — to do it.
The two accounts also disagree about how many sons he left, and about which of them was chosen. What they agree on is that the succession was taken by force.