A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India c21.s3.t14.11

c21.s3.t14.11

¹ The Della Pontes are more than once mentioned in the history of the sixteenth century. They were probably an Italian family, or Italian in origin, and engineers by profession, the Rialto at Venice having been constructed by Antonio della Ponte in 1588. This, however, may be a fanciful connection. It is possible that both in Portugal and in Italy families may have received that surname in consequence of their skill in bridge-building, or of one of the family having in former days distinguished himself by the construction of a particular bridge. The engineer mentioned in the text is probably the individual who at the end of April 1520 was sent by the king of Portugal to examine into the possibility of building a fortress at Tetuan in Morocco. Dom Pedro de Mascarenhas (afterwards, in 1554, Viceroy at Goa) sailed on this mission from Ceuta, and "João Nunes del Pont" is mentioned as accompanying him. The king and the Emperor Charles V. were both at this time anxious to prevent the Moorish corsairs from using Tetuan in future, as they had done in the past, as a base for their piratical attacks on Spain and Portugal. (Damião de Goes, *Chronica de Dom Manuel*, edit. of Coimbra, 1790, vol. i. Part IV. p. 532 ; *Alguns documentos do Archivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo*, Lisbon, 1892, pp. 445-446.)