Travellers' accounts and city life

Detail

Who were these travellers, and why do they matter?

• Vijayanagara left few court chronicles of its own daily life. So much of what we know about the city comes from foreign visitors who walked its streets and wrote it down.
• These men came for trade, for diplomacy or for adventure. They were outsiders. That is both their strength (they noticed what locals took for granted) and their weakness (they misread things, and they flattered).
• Writers came from Arabia, Italy, Portugal and Russia — a sign of how far the city's fame had travelled [3].

The traveller table — learn it cold

Traveller	Origin / role	Century
Nicolo de Conti	Italian trader	15th
Abdur Razzaq	Ambassador of a Persian ruler, sent to Calicut	15th
Afanasii Nikitin	Russian merchant	15th
Barbosa, Paes, Nuniz	Portugal	16th

• Split by century: 15th century = Conti, Abdur Razzaq, Nikitin. 16th century = the three Portuguese (Barbosa, Paes, Nuniz).
• Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi came as a diplomat from Herat (a city in present-day Afghanistan, then a Persian-culture capital) [3].
• The 16th-century group is Portuguese for a plain reason: Portugal had set up trading bases on the west coast, so its traders and horse-dealers had regular business with the Vijayanagara court.

Domingo Paes — "as large as Rome"

• Paes, a Portuguese visitor, wrote that the city "seemed to me as large as Rome". For a European, Rome was the biggest city he could name. That was his measuring stick.
• What he saw inside the city:
• Groves of trees — the city was green, not bare stone.
• Water conduits (built channels that carry water) and lakes — water was moved and stored on purpose, by engineering.

• The king's palm-grove, a royal orchard.

• He called it "the best-provided city in the world" — meaning best supplied with food and goods.

• The markets were cheaply stocked with rice, wheat, India corn (maize/jowar-type grain), pulses and horse-gram. Note what this list is: everyday food for ordinary people and fodder for horses, not luxuries.
• The bazaar also sold "rubies, and diamonds, and emeralds, and pearls". So the same city market held cheap grain and precious stones. That mix is the point — a huge population to feed, plus a rich elite to supply.

Fernao Nuniz — abundance, right down to rats

• Nuniz, also Portuguese, called the city Bisnaga — the Portuguese way of saying Vijayanagara. Expect "Bisnaga" in a question stem; it means the same city.
• He described markets "overflowing with abundance of fruits" and every kind of meat — including "rats and cats and lizards".
• Read this carefully for the exam:
• It shows the sheer range of food on sale.
• It also shows a traveller's eye for the strange. He records what shocked him, because that is what his readers back home wanted.

What the city itself shows — the archaeology behind the accounts

• The travellers' city is not lost. Its remains stand at Hampi, in the Tungabhadra river basin, Bellary district, central Karnataka [2].
• Group of Monuments at Hampi was put on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986 [2].
• The protected property covers 4,187.24 hectares — about 42 sq km [2].
• More than 1,600 surviving remains have been recorded: forts, riverside features, royal and sacred complexes, temples, shrines, pillared halls, mandapas (open pillared halls), memorial structures, gateways, defence check posts, stables and water structures [2].
• This matches Paes directly. He wrote of water conduits and lakes; the site still holds its water structures [2]. The written account and the ground agree.
• Many temples had wide bazaars running up to them, lined on both sides by storeyed mandapas (pillared halls of more than one floor) [3]. So the bazaars the Portuguese described were permanent stone architecture, not just cloth stalls.
• Hampi today is a living site — 29 villages and working farmland sit inside it [2]. People never fully left.
• The Vitthala (Vittala) temple is the most richly carved structure on the site and marks the high point of Vijayanagara temple building [2].
• Named complexes to remember at Hampi: Krishna temple complex, Narasimha, Ganesa, Hemakuta group, Achyutaraya temple complex, Vitthala temple complex, Pattabhirama temple complex, Lotus Mahal complex [2].

The problem of perspective — the most important idea in this section

• Every source has a point of view. A source is not a camera. NCERT drives this home with two pictures of one king, Krishnadeva Raya.
• Source A — the sculpture. The statue of Krishnadeva Raya on the gopuram (the tall gateway tower of a South Indian temple) at Chidambaram shows an ideal king: handsome, perfect, godlike.

• This is self-projection. The king paid for it. It says what he wanted people to believe about him.

• Source B — Paes's words. Paes saw a real man: "of medium height … rather fat than thin", with smallpox marks on his face.

• Paes had no reason to flatter. He was writing for readers far away.

• What to do with the clash: do not pick one and throw the other away.

• The statue tells you about royal ideology — how kingship wanted to be seen.
• Paes tells you about the person.

• Both are evidence. Of different things.

• Same caution applies to the market descriptions. "Best-provided city in the world" is praise from a man who had just crossed oceans and seen little like it. The abundance was real; the superlative is his.

Prelims Hooks

• Nicolo de Conti — Italian trader, 15th century.
• Abdur Razzaq — ambassador of a Persian ruler, sent to Calicut; came from Herat; 15th century [3].
• Afanasii Nikitin — Russian merchant, 15th century.
• Barbosa, Paes and Nuniz — all from Portugal, all 16th century.
• "As large as Rome" and "the best-provided city in the world" — both phrases are by Domingo Paes.
• "Bisnaga" = Portuguese name for Vijayanagara, used by Fernao Nuniz.
• The "rats and cats and lizards" market line is Nuniz, not Paes.
• Paes described Krishnadeva Raya as of medium height, rather fat than thin, with smallpox marks; the idealised statue of the same king is on the Chidambaram gopuram.
• Group of Monuments at Hampi — UNESCO World Heritage List, 1986; Tungabhadra basin, Bellary district, Karnataka; about 42 sq km (4,187.24 hectares); over 1,600 surviving remains [2].
• The Vitthala temple is the most ornate structure at Hampi and the peak of Vijayanagara temple architecture [2].

Mains Points

• Travellers' accounts are essential but must be cross-checked. Vijayanagara's own records say little about street-level life, so Paes, Nuniz, Abdur Razzaq, Conti and Nikitin fill the gap. But they were outsiders writing for home audiences, drawn to the exotic and the enormous. The correct method is to read them against the archaeology at Hampi — over 1,600 remains, water structures, bazaars fronted by storeyed mandapas [2][3] — and treat agreement as confirmation, not assume it.
• The market descriptions are evidence of a working urban economy, not just wealth. Cheap rice, wheat, India corn, pulses and horse-gram point to a large non-farming population that had to be fed from the countryside, plus a big cavalry needing fodder. Rubies, diamonds, emeralds and pearls in the same bazaar point to long-distance trade and an elite with spending power. One market, two economies stacked on each other.
• Image versus description shows how power built its own picture. The Chidambaram gopuram statue of Krishnadeva Raya and Paes's pockmarked, plump king cannot both be literal. This is a ready-made example for any GS-I question on the reliability of historical sources, or on how rulers used temple patronage and royal portraiture to make political claims.
• Vijayanagara's fame was international, and that is itself a fact about the Deccan. Visitors from Italy, Persia, Russia and Portugal across two centuries show the Deccan sitting on live routes of trade and diplomacy linking the Indian Ocean, Central Asia and, later, Atlantic Europe. The city's survival as a living heritage landscape — 29 villages still inside the protected area [2] — links this static history to present-day conservation and tourism policy.