From the Portuguese merchant Domingo Paes’ description of Krishnadevaraya’s reign, assess the socio-economic and cultural uniqueness of the Vijayanagara Empire.

The source. Domingo Paes was a Portuguese horse trader who visited Vijayanagara around 1520, during the reign of Krishnadevaraya, and left an account in his Chronica. His interest was commercial, and he wrote as an outsider without a court commission, which makes his description unusually direct.

Socio-economic uniqueness.

• Scale of urbanism. He judged the city as large as Rome and the best-provided city in the world, with a population he could not count. Nothing in contemporary South India compared.
• Commercial life. He describes bazaars trading in diamonds, rubies, pearls and cloth, and the horse trade with Arabia and Persia on which Vijayanagara's cavalry — and his own business — depended.
• Water engineering. His account of the construction of a great tank, with tens of thousands of labourers and elephants employed, records the state's investment in irrigation as the basis of the agrarian surplus.
• Abundance and administration. He notes cheap and plentiful grain, rice, and provisions, and the collection of revenue from the nayakas who held land in return for maintaining troops.

Cultural uniqueness.

• The Mahanavami festival, described at length — nine days of processions, wrestling, dance, the review of armies and the display of treasure. It was the central ritual of kingship, integrating nayakas and subjects in a public performance of loyalty.
• Women at court trained in wrestling, music, writing and accountancy — a detail he found remarkable and which is corroborated nowhere else so vividly.
• The king himself, whom he presents as physically active, personally involved in administration and generous, and who was also the author of the Telugu Amuktamalyada and patron of the poets of his court.

What the account cannot do. Paes saw the capital at its height and from above; he tells us little about the countryside, about caste, or about the condition of ordinary cultivators, and he records sati and temple dedication without much explanation. He must be read alongside Nuniz, inscriptions and the archaeology of Hampi.