CDS (II) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 94 of 120

Correct — B, Vijayanagara. Domingo Paes was a Portuguese who travelled inland from Goa with traders around 1520 and left the fullest European description we have of the Vijayanagara capital, in the chronicle of the kings of Bisnaga. He saw the city in the reign of Krishnadeva Raya, at the height of its power, and what struck him was its size and its greenery — his account says that from a hill he could see only part of it, that what he saw seemed to him as large as Rome and very beautiful to the sight, and that there were many groves of trees within it, many conduits of water flowing into the middle of it, and lakes. He also described the huge tank Krishnadeva Raya built, fed by water brought from more than three leagues away through pipes. Paes belongs to a small group of foreign visitors whose accounts historians lean on for this city, alongside Abdur Razzaq of Persia and Nicolo de' Conti and Afanasii Nikitin in the previous century, and his fellow Portuguese Duarte Barbosa and Fernao Nuniz.

• (a)Madurai — Madurai has its own long line of descriptions, from Sangam poetry to the Nayaka period, but Paes never wrote about it. The Madurai Nayaka state emerged out of Vijayanagara's own governorship system rather than being the city Paes visited.
• (c)Arikamedu — Arikamedu, near Puducherry, is an early historic coastal trading settlement excavated for its Roman contacts — it belongs to the first centuries of the common era and was long dead by the sixteenth century.
• (d)Gingee — Gingee in Tamil Nadu is a famous hill fort that came into prominence under Vijayanagara's Nayakas and later the Marathas and Mughals, but it is not the imperial capital and not the city of Paes's chronicle.

Vijayanagara, whose ruins stand at Hampi on the Tungabhadra in Karnataka, was founded in the fourteenth century and grew into the capital of the largest South Indian empire of the medieval centuries. Its rulers came from four successive dynasties, the Sangamas, Saluvas, Tuluvas and Aravidus, and Krishnadeva Raya of the Tuluva line, who ruled in the early sixteenth century, presided over its most expansive phase. The site's fortifications famously enclosed agricultural land as well as the built city.

Foreign accounts are asked about repeatedly because they are what the syllabus offers as source material, so the pairing of traveller to place is worth memorising as a set rather than one at a time. Paes, Barbosa and Nuniz are the Portuguese of the sixteenth century; Abdur Razzaq came from Herat in the fifteenth; Nicolo de' Conti and Afanasii Nikitin also belong to the fifteenth. All of them are read for Vijayanagara. The three wrong options here are chosen to sound plausible for a South Indian site — a temple city, an early port and a hill fort — and none of them carries a Paes account.

• Domingo Paes was Portuguese, travelled to Vijayanagara around 1520 with traders from Goa, and wrote the Chronica dos reis de Bisnaga.
• He visited during the reign of Krishnadeva Raya of the Tuluva dynasty.
• His account compares the city in size to Rome and dwells on its groves, water conduits and lakes.
• Abdur Razzaq, Nicolo de' Conti and Afanasii Nikitin visited in the fifteenth century; Duarte Barbosa, Domingo Paes and Fernao Nuniz in the sixteenth.
• The ruins of the city are at Hampi in Karnataka, on the Tungabhadra, a tributary of the Krishna.

• Mixing up which traveller belongs to which century — Razzaq is fifteenth-century, Paes sixteenth.
• Confusing the empire's name, its capital and the modern village: the empire is Vijayanagara, the capital was the city of that name, and the ruins are at Hampi.
• Assuming any famous South Indian site will do — Arikamedu is a thousand years too early and Gingee is a fort, not a capital.

As a traveller-to-place pairing, or as a statements item on what a named account says about the city's fortifications, tanks or markets.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following travellers visited Vijayanagara in the fifteenth century?

  • (a)Domingo Paes
  • (b)Fernao Nuniz
  • (c)Abdur Razzaq
  • (d)Duarte Barbosa

  Answer(c) Abdur Razzaq — the Persian envoy from Herat visited in the fifteenth century, while Paes, Nuniz and Barbosa were Portuguese visitors of the sixteenth.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The ruins of the city described by Domingo Paes are situated on the bank of which river?

  • (a)Kaveri
  • (b)Tungabhadra
  • (c)Krishna
  • (d)Godavari

  Answer(b) Tungabhadra — Hampi stands on the Tungabhadra, itself a tributary of the Krishna.