A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c6.55

c6.55

The Russian trader Athanasius Nikitin spent some years in the Deccan round about 1470 and travelled in the Bāhmanī kingdom which he entered by way of Chaul. His observations give details of the court, the army, and the condition of the people under Bāhmanī rule. Ludovico di Varthema of Bologna, an Italian gentleman and soldier who was eventually knighted by the Portuguese, travelled in India during the years 1502-8 and has left behind a vivid record of his experiences. His credibility was doubted for a long time, but wrongly. His account of Goa and Calicut and other ports of the west coast and of the effects on them of the advent of the Portuguese, and his description of the city and empire of Vijayanagar, contain much that is interesting and valuable. The Portuguese Duarte Barbosa served the government of his country in India from 1500 to about 1516; he knew the Malayalam language very well and 'spoke it better than the natives of his country'. He was feitor (factor) in Cannanore in 1502, and acted as interpreter between Francisco Albuquerque and the king of Cannanore in 1503. He was valued as a writer by Gaspar Correa, and was employed by Alfonso D'Albuquerque for his ability, though he did not support the policy of developing Goa at the expense of Cochin and Cannanore. Barbosa returned to Portugal between 1517 and 1518 and then gave the final touches to his narrative which covers much wider ground than the sphere of his official activities and includes a full description of Vijayanagar. The value of other Portuguese writers for the history of the sixteenth century has been sufficiently recognized since Sewell emphasized it generally in *A Forgotten Empire* (1900) which included translations of the chronicles of Domingos Paes (c. 1520-2) and of Fernao Nuniz, a horse-dealer who spent three years in Vijayanagar (1535-7), besides part of a letter written from Cochin by Manuel Barradas (12 December 1616) giving an account of the origin and course of the civil war then in progress in the kingdom of Vijayanagar. Caesar Frederick, who visited Vijayanagar a couple of years after the battle of Talikota (Rakshasi-Tangadi), Ralph Fitch who spent the years 1583-91 in India, Nicolas Pimenta, Visitor of the Jesuits in India at the close of the sixteenth century, the Dutch traveller John Huighen van Linschoten (1583) are other writers who have their own contribution to make to our knowledge of South India in their day. The contemporary Jesuit letters from South India often embody passing, but vivid, references to political events of the early seventeenth century. The affairs and trade of the kingdom of Golconda and the port of Masulipatam at that time receive much elucidation from the writings of the Dutch factor Schorer (1615) and the English factor William Methwold (1618-22), which have been edited by Moreland together with another Dutch account, anonymous, dating from about the same time.