Fernao Nunes

Fernao Nunes wrote the dynastic history of Vijayanagara that Indian sources do not supply, and like his contemporary Domingo Paes he is known only from the manuscript. He was a Portuguese horse trader who lived at the capital for some three years in the 1530s - the Portuguese at Goa held a near monopoly on the Arabian and Persian horses that southern Indian armies could not breed and had to buy - and his chronicle was written for a Portuguese readership and never printed in his lifetime. It sat in a Lisbon collection until the nineteenth century, when it was found alongside Paes's account and translated together with it. Where Paes describes the city as he saw it, Nunes narrates the kingdom's history from its founding through the reigns of the Sangama and Tuluva kings to Achyuta Deva Raya, whom he saw rule. He drew on local informants and on court tradition, and the result is neither a chronicle in the Indian sense nor a European history but something between: circumstantial about taxation, army sizes, court factions and the mechanics of succession, credulous about origins, and blunt about the violence of Vijayanagara politics in a way official inscriptions never are. His figures for revenue and troop numbers are still argued over by historians because there is nothing to check them against. Read with the ruins at Hampi and with Paes, his account is one of the three pillars of what is known about the empire before its destruction in 1565. Both chronicles were published together by Robert Sewell in 1900 in A Forgotten Empire, which is how they reached historians of India. Nunes says explicitly that he took part of his account from a chronicle kept at the court, now lost. His dates and regnal lists are the framework later scholarship has tested against inscriptions. Nothing is recorded of his life before or after India, including when or where he died.

• Nationality: Portuguese
• Roles: writer, other