Domingo Paes
Domingo Paes wrote the fullest surviving eyewitness description of Vijayanagara, and almost nothing is known about him beyond it. He was a Portuguese traveller, probably a horse trader - the Portuguese at Goa sold Arabian and Persian horses to the southern Indian kingdoms, which could not breed them, and it was the single most valuable commodity in that trade - and he visited the capital around 1520, during the reign of Krishnadevaraya, at the height of the empire's power. His account, the Chronica dos reis de Bisnaga, was written for a Portuguese readership and sat unpublished in a Lisbon library for three centuries before being found and translated in the nineteenth. What it records is a city he estimated as the size of Rome, with a population perhaps in the hundreds of thousands, seven circuits of walls, irrigated fields and orchards inside them, a water tank built by forced labour that he watched under construction, bazaars selling diamonds and pearls openly by the street, and the nine-day Mahanavami festival with its elephants, wrestlers and massed troops. He described the king in physical detail, including his smallpox scars and his exercise regime before dawn. Read against the ruins at Hampi, which is all that survived the sack of 1565, the account is the principal reason it is possible to say what the place actually looked like while it was alive. He is not known to have written anything else, and the date of his death is unrecorded. His companion Fernao Nunes wrote a separate chronicle of the dynasty's history, and the two texts are usually printed together. Neither was known in India until the translations reached scholars there. Paes wrote as a merchant rather than a diplomat or a missionary, which is part of why the account notices prices, crowds and building work rather than doctrine.
- Nationality: Portuguese
- Roles: writer, other
