Vishnuvardhana dedicates the Chennakeshava temple at Belur

Bittiga, or Bittideva, succeeded his brother Ballala I about 1106–1108 and, though he remained a feudatory of the Western Chalukya emperors, became the real maker of the Hoysala kingdom. The Cholas had held Gangavadi, the old Ganga country of southern Karnataka, since the time of Rajaraja I; about 1116–1117 Talakad fell — the credit is claimed both by the king and by his generals, among them Gangaraja — and Vishnuvardhana took the titles Viraganga and Talakadugonda. He celebrated his victories over the Cholas by building temples, and an inscription on the east wall of the Belur temple records that he founded it for the god Vijayanarayana in 1117. The king had adopted the Vaishnava teaching of Ramanuja — Sri Vaishnava tradition says that Ramanuja himself converted him from Jainism — but his queen Shantala and most of his ministers were Jains, and he went on endowing both Shiva temples and Jain teachers.

The temple stands among other shrines, many of them added later, in a court about 120–135 metres across (the dimensions differ in the sources), whose enclosing wall was built only in the 14th century, under Ballala III. A sanctum on a star-shaped plan and a pillared hall with deeply recessed sides, joined by a vestibule, rise from a terrace that follows every projection of the building; the tower over the sanctum has not survived. Walls, pillars and brackets, with their celebrated figures of dancers and celestial women, were carved in chloritic schist, a soapstone that is soft when quarried, by sculptors whose names are recorded, among them Dasoja and his son Chavana. The complex went on growing for about a century. Plundered by the armies of the Delhi Sultanate in the 14th century and repaired under Vijayanagara, it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023, together with the temples of Halebidu and Somanathapura, as the Sacred Ensembles of the Hoysalas.