authors wrote about Tirthankaras and other aspects of religion. The Veerashaiva authors wrote about Shiva, his 25 forms, and the expositions of Shaivism. Lingayat poets belonging to the vachana sahitya tradition advanced the philosophy of Basava from the 12th century. During the period between the 13th and 15th centuries, there was decline in Jain writings and an increase in the number of works from the Lingayat tradition; there were also contributions from Vaishnava writers. Thereafter, Lingayat and Vaishnava writers dominated Kannada literature. Vaishnava writers focused on the Hindu epics – the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata – as well as Vedanta and other subjects from the Puranic traditions. The devotional songs of the Haridasa poets, performed to music, were first noted in the 15th century. Writings on secular subjects remained popular throughout this period. An important change during the Bhakti "devotion" period starting in the 12th century was the decline of court literature and the rise in popularity of shorter genres such as the vachana and kirthane, forms that were more accessible to the common man. Writings eulogising kings, commanders and spiritual heroes waned, with a proportional increase in the use of local genres. Kannada literature moved closer to the spoken and sung folk traditions, with musicality being its hallmark, although some poets continued to use the ancient champu form of writing as late as the 17th century. The champu Sanskritic metre (poems in verses of various metres interspersed with paragraphs of prose, also known as champu-kavya) was the most popular written form from the 9th century onwards, although it started to fall into disuse in the 12th century. Other Sanskritic metres used were the saptapadi (seven line verse), the ashtaka (eight line verse) and the shataka (hundred-line verse). There were numerous translations and adaptations of Sanskrit writings into Kannada and, to a lesser extent, from Kannada into Sanskrit. The medieval period saw the development of literary metres indigenous to the Kannada language. These included the tripadi (three-line verse, in use from the 7th century), one of the oldest native metres; the shatpadi (six-line verse, first mentioned by Nagavarma I in Chhandombudhi of c. 984 and in use from 1165), of which six types exist; the ragale (lyrical narrative compositions, in use from 1160); the sangatya (compositions meant to be sung with a musical instrument, in use from 1232) and the akkara which came to be adopted in some