In 1520 a Portuguese Visitor Climbed a Hill and Wrote That Vijayanagara Looked "As Large as Rome." Forty-Five Years Later It Was Looted

Vijayanagara, 12 September 1520

The festival begins, Domingos Paes writes, "on the 12th of September," and lasts nine days. He is a Portuguese visitor who has come up from the coast with an envoy named Cristóvão de Figueiredo. "On the upper platform, close to the king, was Christovao de Figueiredo, with all of us who came with him," Paes records, "for the king commanded that he should be put in such a place as best to see the feasts and magnificence." (Sewell 1900, pp. 263–264)

Below him is an arena inside the palace walls. Facing it is a great building on pillars shaped like elephants, "the House of Victory, as it was made when the king came back from the war against Orya" — Orissa. (p. 263) Eleven horses and four elephants wait in their trappings. (p. 266)

The king comes out in the morning, takes three handfuls of white roses from a basket, and throws them to the horses. Paes is watching Krishnadevaraya, and he is writing everything down.

Robert Sewell, the retired Madras civil servant who translated him, later checked the calendar. In Krishnadevaraya's reign, only in 1520 did the festival begin on 12 September and the New Year fall on 12 October, as Paes says. (Sewell, p. 141) So we know the day. Forty-five years later, the city around that arena would be looted and abandoned.

At a glance

• 12 September 1520. The day Paes says the nine-day festival began; Sewell shows 1520 is the only year of the reign that fits. (Sewell, A Forgotten Empire, 1900, pp. 140–141, 263)
• "As large as Rome." Paes's impression from one hill. He saw "a great part" of the city, not all, and would not write its population "for fear it should be thought fabulous." (pp. 256–257)
• 24 buffaloes and 150 sheep sacrificed each festival morning; 250 buffaloes and 4,500 sheep on the last day. (pp. 266, 274–275)
• 15,000 to 20,000 men at work on a reservoir. When it kept bursting, Paes says, the king had sixty men beheaded. (pp. 244–245)
• Tuesday, 23 January 1565. Sewell's date for the battle. Firishta says Hussain Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar ordered the regent Rama Raya's head struck off. (Sewell, p. 202; Briggs, Firishta, vol. III, 1829, p. 130)
• 1567. Cesare Federici found the houses standing, "but emptie." (Purchas 1625, quoted in Sewell, p. 208)
• 4,187.24 hectares. The UNESCO World Heritage property at Hampi, inscribed in 1986. (UNESCO, property 241)

First, the words a beginner needs

Vijayanagara (విజయనగరం, ವಿಜಯನಗರ). "City of Victory." Capital of a South Indian kingdom on the Tungabhadra river, in what UNESCO lists as Bellary District, Karnataka. Sewell dates its founding to 1336. (p. 1) The Portuguese wrote "Bisnaga."

Hampi. The village beside the ruins. In 1900 they were "known only as the ruins lying near the little village of Hampe." (Sewell, p. 2)

Krishnadevaraya (కృష్ణదేవరాయలు, Kṛṣṇadevarāya). The king Paes met; Paes spells him "Crisnarao." UNESCO dates his reign 1509–1530.

Domingos Paes. Portuguese visitor; his account was written probably in 1520–22. (p. 236)

Fernão Nunes. Sewell spells him "Nuniz." A horse trader who spent three years at the capital and wrote a chronicle of its kings, probably in 1535–37. (pp. 235, 291)

Mahanavami (mahānavamī). "The great ninth": the nine-day autumn festival Paes saw. (p. 140)

Pardao. Vijayanagara's gold coin, worth 360 Portuguese reis, Paes says. (p. 282)

Tank. A reservoir made by throwing an earth bank across a valley to catch rain.

Firishta. A Persian-born historian at the Deccan courts who wrote near the end of the 1500s. (Sewell, p. viii n. 2; p. 212 n. 4) John Briggs translated him in 1829.

Deccan sultanates. The Muslim-ruled kingdoms north of Vijayanagara. Four of them — Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda and Bidar — fought in 1565.

Talikota. The town that named the 1565 battle, though it "was fought on the south bank of the Krishna, nearly twenty miles off." (Briggs III, p. 126 n.)

The claim we are testing

As it circulates: "Vijayanagara was bigger than Rome; travellers called it the best city in the world; Krishnadevaraya was a great king and a Telugu poet; then Muslim armies destroyed it in 1565."

1. An eyewitness compared it to Rome. True, within his own limits. From one hill it "seemed" as large as Rome; he gave no population.
2. "The best provided city in the world." True as a quotation — about its food supply.
3. Krishnadevaraya wrote Telugu poetry. True. The Āmuktamālyada bears his name. Its famous line on Telugu is spoken in the poem by a god.
4. The city was destroyed in 1565. Largely true. Firishta and Couto describe a sack; Federici found it "not altogether destroyed" but empty.
5. "Muslim armies destroyed it." Too loose. The record names the armies of four sultans — Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur, Hussain Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar, Ibrahim Qutb Shah of Golconda, Ali Barid of Bidar — plus local raiders who struck first. The same record shows Bijapur allied with Vijayanagara in 1558 and Muslim soldiers in Krishnadevaraya's guard.

Two notebooks in a Paris library

Paes's account survives by luck. It is in "a vellum-bound folio volume in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris," catalogued "Port. No. 65." (Sewell, Preface, p. v) The volume holds copies, in one hand, of accounts sent from Goa with a covering letter. Sewell argues the recipient was the historian João de Barros, who copied passages of Nunes "almost verbatim." (pp. v–vii)

The letter explains the method: "no one goes there without bringing away his quire of paper written about its affairs." One account came from Paes, "who was at Bisnaga in the time of Crisnarao"; the other from Nunes, "who was there three years trading in horses (which did not prove remunerative)." (p. 235)

David Lopes printed the Portuguese text at Lisbon in 1897; Sewell's English followed in 1900. (Preface, pp. viii–ix) The two men are different witnesses. Paes reports what he saw. Nunes, fifteen years later, retells what he was told about the kings.

"As large as Rome": what Paes saw from the hill

Paes came up from the west coast. Near the city the hills are "the strangest ever seen... of a white stone piled one block over another" — Hampi's granite boulders. (pp. 242–243)

Inside the walls he walked through markets. "In this street live many merchants, and there you will find all sorts of rubies, and diamonds, and emeralds, and pearls, and seed-pearls, and cloths, and every other sort of thing there is on earth." There was an evening fair for horses and fruit, and a Friday fair with pigs, fowls and dried fish from the sea. (pp. 255–256) At the end lay "the Moorish quarter" — Paes's word for Muslims — many of whom "are natives of the country and who are paid by the king and belong to his guard." "In this city," he adds, "you will find men belonging to every nation and people." (p. 256)

Then the famous sentence. He will not give the size, "because it cannot all be seen from any one spot, but I climbed a hill whence I could see a great part of it... What I saw from thence seemed to me as large as Rome, and very beautiful to the sight." (p. 256)

He did not measure the city. He compared what he saw from one hill with a city he knew. He refused a population outright: "The people in this city are countless in number, so much so that I do not wish to write it down for fear it should be thought fabulous." (p. 257)

The praise everyone quotes follows, and it is about food: "This is the best provided city in the world, and is stocked with provisions such as rice, wheat, grains, Indian-corn..." (p. 257) He gives prices: three fowls for one vintem, a small Portuguese coin, in the city, four outside; pomegranates ten for a fanam. (pp. 257, 259) On the river, people crossed "by boats which are round like baskets... covered with leather; they are able to carry fifteen or twenty persons." (p. 259)

One number needs a warning. The account ends with "more than a hundred thousand dwelling-houses," but Sewell thinks that paragraph and the three after it may be later additions, since one mentions an event of 1535–36. (p. 290 and n. 3) It is not safe to quote as Paes's own count.

The king who drank oil before dawn

Paes first met Krishnadevaraya at a new town a league from the capital, which Sewell identifies as today's Hospet. (pp. 244 n. 1, 251–252)

"This king is of medium height, and of fair complexion and good figure, rather fat than thin; he has on his face signs of small-pox. He is the most feared and perfect king that could possibly be, cheerful of disposition and very merry; he is one that seeks to honour foreigners, and receives them kindly, asking about all their affairs whatever their condition may be. He is a great ruler and a man of much justice, but subject to sudden fits of rage." (pp. 246–247)

His routine was precise. Before daylight he drank "a quartilho (three-quarter pint) of oil of gingelly" — sesame oil — rubbed it over his body, swung "great weights made of earthenware," exercised with a sword "till he has sweated out all the oil," wrestled, and rode the plain, "for he does all this before daybreak." (pp. 249–250)

He was openly curious about the visitors. "We were so close to the king that he touched us all and could not have enough of looking at us." He was barefoot, "for no one ever enters where the king is unless he has bare feet." (pp. 251–252)

Paes names the minister Sewell identifies as Saluva Timma, who "brought up the king and made him king, and so the king looks on him like a father." (p. 268; p. 250 n. 1) Nunes, writing after the king's death, adds that he later had Saluva Timma and his sons blinded, "for in this country they do not put Brahmans to death." (p. 361) Both portraits are in the record.

Nunes also tells how the young prince loved a courtesan, "Chinadevidy," promised to marry her if he became king, kept the promise, and built a town for her with a main street "four thousand and seven hundred paces" long. (pp. 362–363)

Nine days, counted in buffaloes

Paes counted the festival.

Morning. The king prays in the House of Victory, throws roses to the horses and elephants, and watches "the slaughter of twenty-four buffaloes and a hundred and fifty sheep," each beheaded "at one blow." (pp. 266–267)

Three in the afternoon. "At three o'clock in the afternoon every one comes to the palace." Wrestlers, dancing women and elephants with armed riders enter. (p. 268) The wrestling has "blows (given), so severe as to break teeth, and put out eyes, and disfigure faces." (p. 271)

After sunset. Torches make the arena "as light as day." There are mock battles, fireworks, the captains' triumphal cars and the king's horses. (pp. 271–272) About sixty young women, "from sixteen to twenty years of age," carry lamps in gold vessels, so loaded with jewels that "many of them cannot support them." (pp. 273–274)

Night. More sacrifices. The king "fasts all these nine days," and "their hour for food is midnight." (p. 274)

The last day. "On the last day there are slaughtered two hundred and fifty buffaloes and four thousand five hundred sheep." (pp. 274–275)

Then came a review of the army. Paes rode in it with his head "so often turned from one side to the other that I was almost falling backwards off my horse." He ends: "Truly, I was so carried out with myself that it seemed as if what I saw was a vision, and that I was in a dream." (pp. 278–279)

His figure for the army — "a million fighting troops, in which are included 35,000 cavalry in armour" — is not one he could have counted. (p. 279) Sewell said "every one is at liberty to form his own opinion" and thought the men "probably not all well armed." (pp. 147–150)

A lake built by twenty thousand men, and the price paid for it

The country, Paes says, "wants water because it is very great and has few streams; they make lakes in which water collects when it rains." (p. 238) The capital's water "comes from the two tanks" outside its first wall, through conduits. (pp. 256–257)

Near the new town he watched a reservoir being made "at the mouth of two hills, so that all the water which comes from either one side or the other collects there," fed also "from more than three leagues by pipes." To make it "the said king broke down a hill." (pp. 244–245) "In the tank I saw so many people at work that there must have been fifteen or twenty thousand men, looking like ants." (p. 245)

Then the price. "The tank burst two or three times," the Brahman priests called for a sacrifice, and the king "forthwith commanded that at the gate of the pagoda the heads of sixty men should be cut off, and of certain horses and buffaloes." (p. 245)

Nunes tells the same story independently. The king borrowed a Portuguese mason from Goa, "Joao della Ponte, a great worker in stone"; when the work kept collapsing he had prisoners "who deserved death" beheaded. (pp. 364–365) Nunes also records the policy that followed: "he gave the people the lands which are irrigated by this water free for nine years, until they had made their improvements, so that the revenue already amounts to 20,000 pardaos." (p. 365)

Nine tax-free years in return for bringing land under water is real statecraft. From the mason's movements Sewell argued, tentatively, that the work began no earlier than autumn 1521, so Paes wrote around 1522. (p. 364 n.) He identified it with a large dry lake south-west of Hospet, by 1900 "entirely useless," and noted that the king's Korragal dam and Basavanna channel of 1521 were "still in use." (p. 162)

The king who chose Telugu, in a Kannada capital

Paes never mentions it, but the king throwing roses was also a poet. The Telugu poem Āmuktamālyada (ఆముక్తమాల్యద, "she who gave the garland she had worn") bears his name. It tells of a girl who first wore the garland meant for the god, and of her wedding to him at Rangam.

The poem opens with its own origin story. In the 1966 printed text on Telugu Wikisource, the poet says he set out to conquer Kalinga, stayed some days at Vijayawada, and went to worship the Vishnu of Srikakulam, "the Andhra Madhumathana." He fasted, and in the last watch of the night the god came to him in a dream. (Āmuktamālyada 1.11)

The god lists the king's Sanskrit works — among them Madālasa-caritra and Rasamañjarī — and asks: is the Andhra language beyond you? (1.13) He tells him to write the girl's story, and names them both: "I am the Telugu king (teluṅgu rāyaḍa); you, Kannada king (kannaḍa rāya)." (1.14) Then the verse every Telugu schoolchild knows:

తెలుఁ గ దేల యన్న, దేశంబు దెలుఁ గేను దెలుఁగు వల్లభుండఁ దెలుఁగొకండ యెల్ల నృపులు గొలువ నెఱుఁగవే బాసాడి దేశభాషలందుఁ దెలుఁగు లెస్స. (1.15)

In plain English: "If you ask why Telugu: the land is Telugu, I am the lord of Telugu, and Telugu is matchless. You have spoken with all the kings who serve you — do you not know? Of all the languages of the land, Telugu is the best." (Our rendering; translations differ.)

Two things are easy to miss. The famous line is the god's, spoken in a dream. And the god calls Krishnadevaraya the "Kannada king," presumably because his capital stood in Kannada country. The next verse dedicates the poem to Venkatapati, the god of Tirumala — the temple where the bronzes of the king and his queens stand. (1.16)

The fourth canto gives a long lesson in kingship, spoken by a king handing his throne to his son. It opens: never slacken; protect the people; when those in distress cry out, hear them and settle it; do not leave affairs to unworthy men. (4.204, our rendering)

23 January 1565: the record changes hands

By the 1560s King Sadashiva was a figurehead; the regent Rama Raya and his brothers ruled. (Sewell, pp. 109, 200) There is no Paes for 1565. The main account is Firishta's, written for the winning side decades later, with what the Portuguese chronicler Diogo do Couto heard.

Firishta gives background that is often left out. In 1558 Rama Raya and Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur, then allies, invaded Ahmadnagar and "laid it waste so thoroughly, that from Purenda to Joonere, and from Ahmudnuggur to Dowlutabad, not a vestige of population was left." (Briggs III, p. 120) On a campaign soon after, he says, "the Hindoos of Beejanuggur committed the most outrageous devastations, burning and rasing the buildings, putting up their horses in the mosques." (p. 121) That is one side's telling, but 1565 did not come from nowhere.

The four sultans then combined. Their march south began, Sewell calculates, "on Monday, December 25, a.d. 1564." (p. 199) They camped near Talikota; Sewell put the battlefield near the village of Bayapur, on the road to Mudkal. (p. 200 n.) He dates the battle to Tuesday, 23 January 1565. (p. 202) Couto put Vijayanagara's army at 600,000 foot and 100,000 horse; Firishta, in one place, at 900,000 infantry, 45,000 cavalry and 2,000 elephants, though Sewell warns that Firishta "varies so greatly in the numbers he gives" that they need not be accepted. (pp. 201–203)

Firishta says Rama Raya, "although seventy years of age," directed it from a litter, and at one point sat on "a rich throne set with jewels" with heaps of money for rewards. (Briggs III, p. 129) Couto made him ninety-six. (Sewell, p. 203) When his bearers fled from an elephant of Hussain Nizam Shah's, he was captured and brought to that sultan, "who ordered his head to be instantly struck off, and caused it to be placed on the point of a long spear." (Briggs III, p. 130)

The army broke. Firishta says it was "computed" that "above one hundred thousand infidels were slain." (p. 130) Briggs adds a note: Federici "states, that the Hindoos lost the battle owing to the treachery of two Mahomedan chiefs in Ramraj's army," which Firishta omits. (p. 130 n.)

The sack: what each witness says, and who did it

Firishta, for the victors: the sultans "marched onwards into the country of Ramraj, as far as Anagoondy; and the advanced troops penetrated to Beejanuggur, which they plundered, rased the chief buildings to the ground, and committed every species of excess." In his own day "the city itself was so destroyed, that it is now totally in ruins and uninhabited." (Briggs III, pp. 130–131)

Sewell, following Couto: the royal family fled south to Penukonda with the treasure. Next day, before any army came, the city "became a prey to the robber tribes and jungle people of the neighbourhood," with "six concerted attacks." On the third day the victors arrived, and, in Sewell's words, "for a space of five months Vijayanagar knew no rest." (Sewell, pp. 206–207 and n. 2) A Golconda historian quoted by Briggs says the armies first halted ten days; Sewell thinks both may be right. (p. 207 n. 2)

Federici, the Italian merchant, in 1567: "The Citie of Bezeneger is not altogether destroyed, yet the houses stand still, but emptie, and there is dwelling in them nothing, as is reported, but Tygres and other wild beasts." (Purchas 1625, in Sewell, p. 208)

Sewell adds a translator's verdict, not a witness's: "Never perhaps in the history of the world has such havoc been wrought, and wrought so suddenly, on so splendid a city." (p. 208) He says the Vitthala temple was burned and the Narasimha monolith's limbs broken (pp. 207–208), but elsewhere hedges that the statue was "grievously injured, probably" by the invaders "in or after the year 1565." (p. 164)

So who did it? The record names the actors: the armies of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda and Bidar under their sultans, Hussain Nizam Shah's order to execute Rama Raya, and the raiders who came first. It does not support blaming a religion or a whole community. The same pages show Bijapur as Vijayanagara's ally in 1558, Muslims in Krishnadevaraya's guard, and, in Couto, Ali Adil Shah "greatly distressed" at Rama Raya's death. (Sewell, p. 205) The motives the record shows are territory, revenge for 1558 and plunder, though Firishta frames the league as war on "the common enemy of Islam." (Briggs III, p. 126) Every soldier, he says, "became rich in gold, jewels, tents, arms, horses, and slaves." (Briggs III, p. 130)

From a forgotten ruin to 36,000 mapped features

Sewell called it "forgotten" because its existence "is hardly remembered in India." (p. 2) That has changed. UNESCO inscribed the Group of Monuments at Hampi in 1986, under criteria (i), (iii) and (iv); the property covers 4,187.24 hectares, with a buffer zone of 19,453.62. UNESCO counts "more than 1600 surviving remains" and says "the Battle of Talikota (1565 CE) led to a massive destruction of its physical fabric." (UNESCO, property 241)

The site was on the List of World Heritage in Danger from 1999 to 2006, "in part because of the construction of two bridges," one at Anegundi. On 22 January 2009 that unfinished bridge collapsed, killing eight workers. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, 13 February 2009)

The mapping is the Vijayanagara Research Project. The American Institute of Indian Studies, which hosts its atlas, says George Michell launched it in 1980 and John M. Fritz joined in 1981; their teams "mapped and measured cultural features spread across nearly 25 square kilometres," producing 275 maps at 1:400 and a database of "over 36,000 features." (AIIS, Vijayanagara Archaeological Atlas) The Penn Museum's page gives the core as "some 20 sq. km," with "more than 1000 standing or partly ruined structures," inside fortifications enclosing 650 square kilometres. (Penn Museum) The two figures differ; we give both. Neither gives a population.

Read the actual document

"The size of this city I do not write here, because it cannot all be seen from any one spot, but I climbed a hill whence I could see a great part of it; I could not see it all because it lies between several ranges of hills. What I saw from thence seemed to me as large as Rome, and very beautiful to the sight; there are many groves of trees within it, in the gardens of the houses, and many conduits of water which flow into the midst of it, and in places there are lakes." — Domingos Paes, in Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (1900), p. 256

Read it as an honest report. Paes says what he could not do: see or measure the whole city. He says how he formed his view: from one hill. "As large as Rome" means it felt as big as the greatest city he knew. That is weaker than "bigger than Rome," and far more believable.

The strongest case for the other side

The strongest objection to the "golden city" comes from Paes himself. The notebook that praises the king records sixty men beheaded at a temple gate for a bursting reservoir, and festival wrestling that put out eyes. (Sewell, pp. 245, 271) Nunes adds the blinding of the minister who made the king. (p. 361) Quote Paes on the markets, and quote him on the sixty men.

The witnesses had reasons to flatter. Paes was a guest given the best seat. Sewell shows the king had just taken Raichur with help from Portuguese gunmen under Figueiredo, and that Goa's trade depended on selling him horses. (pp. 140, 210) Paes gives no source for the "million."

And the frame is too simple. Sewell's first chapter calls Vijayanagara "a Hindu bulwark against Muhammadan conquest." (p. 1, summary) The record he translated shows Muslim soldiers in the royal guard, a Bijapur sultan allied with Rama Raya in 1558, Vijayanagara's own armies devastating Ahmadnagar, and a report that two Muslim commanders in Rama Raya's army changed sides.

What we could not prove

• The population. No document we opened gives one; the "100,000 houses" may be a later addition. (Sewell, p. 290 n. 3)
• Couto's "five months." The words are Sewell's; we did not open Couto's Décadas (Dec. VIII, c. 15). UNESCO's English summary says "six months," citing no source.
• Who broke the Narasimha monolith, and when. Sewell says "probably"; no eyewitness we opened describes it.
• That the Mahanavami Dibba is Paes's "House of Victory." Sewell links the platform to the festival (pp. 207, 284 n. 2); we opened no excavation report that settles it.
• Which reservoir Paes saw built. Sewell's 1900 identification is his own judgement. (p. 162)
• When the Āmuktamālyada was written, and where its Srikakulam temple stands. We read the 1966 text, not a scholarly study.
• Rama Raya's age. Firishta says seventy, Couto ninety-six.

Why it still matters today

Method: the best record of this capital at its height was kept by an outsider honest about his limits. He would not write a population "for fear it should be thought fabulous." Modern claims should meet his standard.

Water: Paes and Nunes describe a king who moved a hill, piped water from three leagues away, and gave farmers nine tax-free years to bring land under it. Some of his channels still ran in 1900.

Language: a "Kannada king," by his own god's naming, wrote the Telugu poem Telugu speakers still quote.

Verdict

Paes's notebook proves more than the slogans and less than the boasts. A foreign visitor in 1520 found Vijayanagara as large to the eye as Rome, its markets full of jewels and grain and "men belonging to every nation and people," and its king curious, energetic, generous to guests and capable of sudden cruelty. It counts the festival's blood as carefully as its gold. It does not prove the city was bigger than Rome or held a million people.

On 1565, the winning side's historian, the Portuguese chronicler and the Italian traveller agree on the outcome: a lost battle, an executed regent, a looted city and, two years later, empty houses. They name the actors — four sultans and their armies, Hussain Nizam Shah's order, and the raiders who came first — and they do not support blaming a faith. In our reading, the fall was a war between neighbours who had been allies seven years earlier, settled in one battle and paid for by a city. Read now, the notebooks show that city with its splendour and its cruelty both on the record.