Krishnadevaraya Beat the Sultan of Bijapur at Raichur in May 1520, and the Portuguese Chronicler Who Told It Put the Date Two Years Late

On 12 September, in a year Robert Sewell worked out to be 1520, the nine-day festival of Mahanavami began at Vijayanagara. Domingo Paes, a Portuguese who had come inland from Goa in a party led by Christovao de Figueiredo, stood on an upper platform close to the king. Krishnadevaraya had ordered that Figueiredo be put “in such a place as best to see the feasts and magnificence.”

Every morning of the nine days, Paes wrote, the king took three handfuls of white roses from a Brahman’s basket and threw them to eleven horses. He then sat before the idol and watched twenty-four buffaloes and a hundred and fifty sheep killed. A man with a large sickle took off each head “at one blow,” and “they are so sure of hand that no blow misses.”

tuput’s earlier piece on Krishnadevaraya is the shorter life. This one goes deeper on three things: what Paes and his fellow Portuguese chronicler Fernao Nuniz wrote in their own words, the Raichur campaign, and the Telugu poem the king composed himself.

Two Portuguese and a manuscript in Paris

In the preface to A Forgotten Empire (1900), Sewell explained that both chronicles survive in a single vellum volume in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The volume holds copies, not originals, sent from Goa to someone in Europe. His was the first English translation.

Around 1520 Paes wrote about “things which I saw and came to know.” Nuniz lived in Vijayanagara from 1535 to 1537, according to Srinivas Reddy, and collected the kingdom’s history from people there. His account of Raichur, Sewell wrote, is the only detailed one that survives.

Reddy, in his 2020 biography Raya, calls both men “Portuguese horse merchants” and says their texts have to be read with “context and pretext” in mind. Sewell shows the king’s side of the trade: what Krishnadevaraya wanted from Goa was “horses, and again horses,” and in 1514 he offered Albuquerque, the Portuguese governor, what Sewell gives as £20,000 for the exclusive right to trade in them. Albuquerque, “with a keen eye to business,” refused. Goa’s whole trade, Sewell added, “depended on Hindu support.” The town was young: Albuquerque took it from the Adil Shah in 1510, twelve years after Vasco da Gama reached Calicut.

The king who drank oil before dawn

Paes gives the king a face. In his portrait the king is “of medium height, and of fair complexion and good figure, rather fat than thin, he has on his face signs of small-pox,” and also “the most feared and perfect king that could possibly be, cheerful of disposition and very merry,” a man “of much justice, but subject to sudden fits of rage.”

Every day before light the king drank a quartilho, three-quarters of a pint, of gingelly (sesame) oil and rubbed more of it over his body. Earthenware weights came next, then a sword, swung “till he has sweated out all the oil,” then a bout with one of his wrestlers. A gallop about the plain “till dawn, for he does all this before daybreak” ended it.

The Persian historian Firishta never names the king, so without Paes, Sewell wrote, “the world would have remained justly in doubt as to whether this king really reigned at all.” With Paes’s portrait in hand Sewell concluded that Krishnadevaraya “was in very practical fact an absolute sovereign.”

Nuniz, who never saw the king, tells how he got the throne. When his brother Viranarasimha (Nuniz calls him Busbalrao) lay dying, he told the minister Saluva Timma to put out Krishnadevaraya’s eyes so that his own eight-year-old son would inherit. Timma took the prince aside to a stable and told him. Krishnadevaraya answered that he did not want to be king and wished “to pass through this world as a JOGI,” an ascetic. Timma had the eyes of a she-goat put out instead and showed them to the dying king.

”The best provided city in the world”

The size of Vijayanagara Paes would not give, because it “cannot all be seen from any one spot.” From a hill he saw a great part of it. “What I saw from thence seemed to me as large as Rome, and very beautiful to the sight,” he wrote, with groves of trees and water conduits inside the walls. On the population he wrote: “The people in this city are countless in number, so much so that I do not wish to write it down for fear it should be thought fabulous,” and gave no figure.

The famous line comes with a shopping list. “This is the best provided city in the world, and is stocked with provisions such as rice, wheat, grains, Indian-corn,” with “large store of these and very cheap.” Three fowls cost one vintem, a coin Sewell’s footnote values at a little over a penny. In the broad street of merchants lived dealers in “rubies, and diamonds, and emeralds, and pearls, and seed-pearls, and cloths.” Paes also noted “men belonging to every nation and people,” and a Moorish quarter where many residents were natives paid by the king and belonging to his guard.

A prince who would not fence

One long war of the reign was in the east, against the Gajapati kings of Odisha. Sewell, working from Nuniz and inscriptions, dates the fall of the hill fortress of Udayagiri to 1513. Kondavidu fell in 1515 “after a two months’ siege,” and Kondapalle after three months. Peace came with a marriage: “Krishna Deva married a daughter of the Orissan king.” The History of Odisha site, which draws on the standard Odisha histories, dates the first attack on Udayagiri to 1512 and the fall to 1513, a year earlier than Sewell’s start.

In Paes’s version the king took the Odisha ruler’s son captive and kept him “for a long time in this city of Bisnaga, where he died.” Nuniz has a different story. According to him the king asked the captive prince to fence, and sent for a swordsman of humble birth to face him. The prince cried, “God forbid that I should soil my hands by touching a man not of the blood royal,” and killed himself.

In Reddy’s argument the king’s chief enemy was Prataparudra of Odisha, with the Deccan sultans second. Prataparudra, he writes, called the new king a dasi-putra, the son of a servant girl. The House of Victory where Paes watched Mahanavami was built, Paes says, “when the king came back from the war against Orya.” Nuniz also reports an inscription the king had cut on a temple at a city he calls Symamdary: “If the King of Orya erases them, his wife shall be given to the smiths who shoe the horses of the King of Bisnaga.”

Forty thousand pardaos and a march

In Nuniz’s telling, Raichur follows straight after the eastern wars. Sewell, using inscriptions, shows those wars ended in 1515 and places Raichur at least five years later. Portuguese records, he found, also show that after 1514 the king had told Albuquerque he meant to make war on the Adil Shah of Bijapur.

Nuniz gives the trigger. The king wanted Raichur, a fortress in the doab, the land between the Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers, though the two states had been at peace for forty years. Cide Mercar, a Muslim the king trusted, was then sent to Goa with forty thousand pardaos (the round gold coin Paes says was struck only in this kingdom) to buy horses, and ran off with the money to the Adil Shah. The Adil Shah’s council refused to hand him back. The king’s own councillors told him that for “such a small sum of money as this it was not well so to act,” and advised going for Raichur instead.

Adding up the marching order in Nuniz’s pages, Sewell got 703,000 foot, 32,600 horse and 551 elephants, besides camp followers. “It certainly demands a large strain on our credulity,” he wrote, and left readers to make up their own minds. Reddy calls the count “no doubt an exaggeration.”

At Raichur the fort had three lines of walls, and the besiegers who reached the ditches suffered heavily. To get men to the foot of the wall under fire, Nuniz says, the captains bought stones from the soldiers at ten to fifty fanams each (Paes prices ten pomegranates at one fanam). They also paid “for dragging away a dead man from the foot of the wall.”

Saturday, 19 May 1520

After about three months the Adil Shah arrived and crossed the river. His muster, Nuniz says, was 120,000 on foot, 18,000 horse and 150 elephants. The king’s councillors told him Friday was unlucky, so he waited for Saturday.

At dawn the drums and trumpets made it seem “as if the sky would fall to the earth.” The king sent forward two divisions. The sultan held his artillery in reserve, then opened fire, and the royal troops broke and ran, with the Muslim cavalry cutting them down for half a league. The king, Nuniz says, cried out that they were traitors and called “Who ranges himself with me?” He took a ring from his finger and gave it to a page to carry to his queens, “in token of his death, that they might burn themselves according to custom.” Then he rode forward with his remaining divisions and ordered the runaways killed. They turned, and the sultan’s army, caught in disorder, leaped into the river.

At the river bank the king “out of compassion” stopped the killing, saying “numbers had died who did not deserve death.” His own dead were “sixteen thousand and odd,” and the spoil included four hundred heavy guns. Christovao de Figueiredo, with twenty musketeers, shot defenders off the walls of Raichur, and the city surrendered “twenty days since the battle.” The king, looking at him, told the people to see “what great things could be effected by one good man.”

Firishta tells it very differently, as Sewell quotes him: a sultan warm with wine who crossed the Krishna on a fancy and lost heavily. Sewell preferred Nuniz, who wrote fifteen years after the event, to a historian who wrote sixty years after it.

Nuniz dated the battle to the new-moon day of May 1522. Sewell argued from Paes’s festival dates that the year was 1520. In the year Paes saw them, Mahanavami began on 12 September and the New Year on 12 October. Working through every year of the reign, he found those two dates together only in 1520. Since Paes described Raichur as already taken, the battle had to fall before September 1520. Portuguese records also put the governor Sequeira at the Red Sea from February 1520 to February 1521, and the Portuguese took over the mainland near Goa during that absence, after the king’s victory. By his computation the new moon fell on 17 May and the first crescent was seen on Saturday 19 May, which he took to be the day.

The foot he wanted kissed

The other Deccan sultans wrote to say he should be satisfied. The king replied that he would come and find them himself. The Adil Shah’s envoy waited a month for an audience, and the king’s terms were that Salabat Khan would be released and all restored if the Adil Shah came and kissed his foot. By Nuniz’s account the king marched all the way to Bijapur. His troops pulled down houses for cooking fires, until only the sultan’s palaces were left standing. Asada Khan, a courtier of the Adil Shah, tricked the king into beheading Salabat Khan. At Kulbarga the king took three sons of the old Bahmani line, the Deccan’s former sovereign dynasty, and made the eldest king.

In Sewell’s judgement the king’s turn to being “haughty and insolent in his demands” after the victory was “the only blot on his scutcheon.” Arrogance of that kind, he argued, “beyond all doubt” brought down the empire forty years later. The opening chapter of his book is summarised as “A Hindu bulwark against Muhammadan conquest,” which is a Hindu-against-Muslim scheme of the kind James Mill’s three periods built into colonial histories.

Nuniz has the king send “the Moors in the royal service” to lead the van at Raichur, and Paes found Muslims in the royal guard. Ukkalam, summarising Reddy, says the king took the title Yavanarajyasthapanacharya, meaning founder of the kingdom of the Yavanas, which here stands for Muslims.

Sixty heads for a tank, and whose temple is whose

Beside Nagalapur, now Hospet, Paes saw a reservoir under construction. “I saw so many people at work that there must have been fifteen or twenty thousand men, looking like ants,” he wrote, and the tank “has the width of a falcon-shot.” The dam burst two or three times. The Brahmans said the idol wanted blood, and the king “forthwith commanded that at the gate of the pagoda the heads of sixty men should be cut off.” A Portuguese stonemason, Joao della Ponte, lent by Goa’s governor, built the dam, Nuniz says, and prisoners condemned to death were beheaded at the site. Both writers, Sewell says, describe the same tank.

Nagalapur was a new town, built in two years, according to Paes, and named for the king’s wife. Paes leaves her unnamed, but Nuniz calls her Chinnadevi, a courtesan the king had loved before he took the throne.

Credit for two temples at Hampi needs sorting. At the Vitthala temple, the Karnataka Itihasa Academy counts twenty-three inscriptions from 1513 to 1564, and says Krishnadevaraya gave many silver and gold dishes while his two queens built raya gopuras, or royal gateway towers. It also says the bhoga mantapa, a pillared hall, was built by Prolugante Tippa, a commander of Devaraya II, who reigned from 1422 to 1446.

The Hazara Rama temple needs a correction. In 1900 Sewell wrote that in 1513 the king “commenced the temple of Hazara Ramasvami at the palace.” The Ministry of Tourism and Karnataka Tourism now both say it was built in the early fifteenth century under Devaraya II.

The poem in Telugu

Reddy opens Raya with the dream behind the Amuktamalyada, the poem the king wrote. In the winter of 1515, he writes, the king’s army camped on the Krishna. That night the king slept in a temple of Vishnu, and the god, as Andhra Mahavishnu, told him he had written in Sanskrit but must now compose an epic in Telugu on the wedding of the poet-saint Andal and Ranganatha, a form of Vishnu, at Srirangam. “That fateful dream of 1515 was no mere fiction,” Reddy writes. Penguin published his translation in December 2010 as The Giver of the Worn Garland.

Ukkalam, reviewing Reddy, quotes a passage that justifies the choice of language: Telugu is “one of a kind,” and “Amongst all the regional languages, Telugu is the best.” The last words in Telugu, deshabhashalandu Telugu lessa, have become a slogan of Telugu pride.

The poem also holds about eighty verses on statecraft. One, in Reddy’s translation, tells a king to “listen to the cries of the destitute.” Another says that when drought, sickness and calamity force foreigners to flee, the king should “give them shelter in your own country.” Ukkalam quotes the poem picturing the Gajapati disguised as a cowherd and fleeing to the Vindhyas.

1529 or 1530

After these campaigns, Nuniz says, the king gave the throne to his son, aged six, and served him as minister. The boy died during eight months of festivals. The king concluded that Saluva Timma’s son had poisoned him. He arrested Timma, with his son and brother, and after one son escaped and was recaptured he had their eyes put out. Timma was the minister who, years earlier, had blinded a goat in the king’s place. The king then fell sick “of the same illness of which all his ancestors had died,” Nuniz says, with pains in the groin. In his will he named his brother Achyuta, because his only other son was eighteen months old.

The year of death is disputed. For Sewell it is 1530, with the king between forty-two and forty-five. UNESCO’s description of Hampi, as CPREEC reproduces it, gives the reign as 1509 to 1530. Reddy’s dates for the reign are 1509 to 1529, and Ukkalam’s are the same. Sewell’s own dated inscriptions bracket it: the last inscription of the reign is dated Friday, 23 April 1529, in front of the great Narasimha statue, and the earliest of Achyuta’s is dated Monday, 15 August 1530.

At the start of Achyuta’s reign, Sewell records, Mudkal and Raichur were lost, and Firishta, in the translation Sewell quotes, says the Adil Shah took them “after a siege of three months, by capitulation.”