The khutba and the canopy
Ferishta, writing at Bijapur a century later for this man’s great-great-grandson, gives the act that made the state: in AH 895 Yusuf Adil Khan “caused the Khootba to be read in his name, and assumed the canopy of royalty, at which time the foreigners unanimously acknowledged him King.” Briggs prints 1489 in the margin for that year; the archive’s register keeps 1490, and the succession record carries both.
He had withdrawn from Bidar to Bijapur when the Bahmani ministers “were bent on his destruction”, and “resolving to become the founder of a kingdom, he began to add to his territories by conquest.”
Who he was
Ferishta opens the Bijapur history with Yusuf as a son of the Ottoman sultan Murad II, smuggled out of Constantinople as a child. The archive’s essay on him sets that narrative against the Ottoman-side silence and the modern reconstructions and does not decide; this entry does not either.
He left one son, Ismail, who succeeded him, and three daughters, two of whom were married into the houses of Ahmadnagar and Berar — the first recorded marriages between the Deccan successor states.