Abdul Razzaq, a Persian traveller visited Vijayanagar during the period of which of the following rulers ?

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Correct — option (4), Devrai II. Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi was sent to south India as the envoy of the Timurid ruler Shahrukh of Herat, reached Calicut and travelled on to the Vijayanagara capital, arriving in 1443, when Deva Raya II of the Sangama dynasty was on the throne. His narrative, the Matla-us-Sadain wa Majma-ul-Bahrain, is one of the most valuable outside descriptions of the city at its height: he wrote of a capital enclosed by successive fortified walls with cultivated land and habitation between them, of bazaars in which jewels and pearls were sold openly, of an enormous royal establishment, and of a city the like of which, he said, the eye had never seen and the ear never heard of. Deva Raya II is the right anchor for the visit on internal grounds too. He is generally regarded as the ablest of the Sangama rulers, remembered by the title Gajabetekara, the elephant hunter, and for strengthening his army by recruiting Muslim horsemen and archers into it and encouraging the use of mounted archery — a policy that shows a court in regular contact with the wider Persianate world, which is the context in which an ambassador from Herat would be received. The question is one of the standard traveller-and-ruler pairings of medieval Indian history, and it is answered by holding four such pairs apart: Nicolo de Conti with Deva Raya I in about 1420, Abdur Razzaq with Deva Raya II in 1443, and Domingo Paes and Duarte Barbosa with Krishnadeva Raya in the early sixteenth century, with Fernao Nuniz a little after him.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Harihara belongs to the very beginning of Vijayanagara's history: Harihara I and his brother Bukka founded the kingdom in 1336 and established the Sangama dynasty on the Tungabhadra. That is more than a century before Abdur Razzaq's embassy of 1443, and the city he would have seen was still being built rather than the vast fortified capital the Persian envoy described. Choosing this option generally reflects the habit of answering any Vijayanagara question with the founder's name because it is the one most securely remembered.  (b) Krishnadeva Raya of the Tuluva dynasty ruled from 1509 to 1529, some two generations after Abdur Razzaq's visit, and he is the ruler most students associate with foreign accounts of Vijayanagara — which is exactly the trap. But the visitors of his reign were Portuguese: Domingo Paes, whose description of the capital and of the Mahanavami festival is the most detailed we have, and Duarte Barbosa, with Fernao Nuniz writing a little later. Abdur Razzaq was a Persian envoy of the Timurid court who came seven decades earlier, and he never saw the Vijayanagara of Krishnadeva Raya.  (c) Deva Raya I ruled in the first quarter of the fifteenth century and is a genuinely well-chosen distractor, because his reign also produced a famous foreign account — that of the Italian traveller Nicolo de Conti, who visited Vijayanagara in about 1420 and left an admiring description of the city and its festivals. The two reigns are close enough to be confused and each has its own visitor, so the pairing has to be held precisely: Nicolo de Conti with Deva Raya I, Abdur Razzaq with Deva Raya II.

Concept: Almost everything known about the appearance and economy of Vijayanagara city comes from foreign visitors, because the empire's own records are inscriptions and literary works rather than descriptive chronicles. Each visitor arrived from a different world and noticed different things: Nicolo de Conti the festivals, Abdur Razzaq the fortifications, the bazaars and the court ceremonial that an envoy would be shown, Domingo Paes the scale of the city and the Mahanavami celebrations, Fernao Nuniz the history and the military organisation. Read together they establish the capital as one of the largest cities in the world of its day, sustained by an irrigation system in the Tungabhadra valley and by a long-distance trade in horses, gems and textiles. This is also why the traveller-ruler pairing is such a durable examination topic: the accounts are the primary evidence, so knowing which account belongs to which reign is knowing which decade a piece of evidence describes.

State PCS 2024 Q12 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q12 — History PYQ with Answer