Abstract Rafiʿ al-Din Shirazi, a Bijapur Sultanate-based historian, describes the Deccan Sultanate armies’ destruction of the city of Vijayanagara following the Battle of Talikota (1565) in his Tazkirat al-mulūk (ca. 1611). Superficially, this violent account seems to align with narratives foregrounding Hindu-Muslim conflict and to undermine scholarship exploring early modern India’s cosmopolitan diversity. Read more carefully, Shirazi turns out to be struggling with a separate problem: that of human greed and its consequences. In Shirazi’s portraits of built and “wild” landscapes lay clear warnings—signs of God’s power and of human frailties. In an era of moral uncertainty, Vijayanagara’s fate was meant to remind Shirazi’s readers of their own precarious place within the Divine order. The article uses Shirazi’s epilogue, a description of various “wonders and rarities” [ ʿajāʾib o gharāʾib ], as an interpretive key for other parts of the text.