South India and her Muhammadan Invaders c13.s1.95

c13.s1.95

30. *Moṭupalli*.—This is one of the many ports at the mouth of the Krishna and was a port of great importance under the Kākatīyas, whose king Gaṇapati gave the charter embodied in the Moṭupalli inscription to the sea-going merchants of the place. This charter was renewed by the Reddi chief Anna Vema on another occasion. The so-called kingdom of Moṭupalli at the time of Marco Polo must have been the Kākatīya kingdom. It is marked on the Gazetteer Atlas of India some distance south of the mouth of the river Krishna. The ruler of the so-called kingdom of Moṭupalli, at the time that Marco Polo visited the coast must have been the Kākatīya king Paratāparudra. His grandmother Rudramba, the daughter of king Gaṇapati, not wife, as Marco Polo says, had retired in his favour just a year or two before. This Pratāpa Rudra, the second of the name, ruled from 1292, or a little earlier, to 1328 when he died on his way to Delhi as prisoner of Muhammad bin Tughlak at Mantenna (Mantrakūṭa) on the Godaveri. It was his Brahman minister Kāṭama or Kāṭayya (Kattu of the Muhammadan historians) that became a convert to Islam, and was the chief minister under Sultan Firuz Tughlak (for authority see note above on p. 180). There seems to be little authority for regarding Moṭupalli as the same as Masulipatam, as Mr. Marsden gives Mosul as an alternative name, though it is just possible according to the inscription that Moṭupalli was itself on an island or near an island at the mouth of the Krishna.