Place · port & inscription site
Motupalli
Also known as Mutfili, Desi Ayyavole, Motupalli — Kakatiya port
The Kakatiya outlet on the Andhra coast, and the site of the Abhaya Sasana of Ganapatideva — a thirteenth-century charter cut in stone that promises foreign merchants their goods will not be seized if their ships are wrecked. It is one of the earliest explicit guarantees of merchant property anywhere in the Indian Ocean.
- Date
- 1244–None
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 15.762, 80.496
Connections (3)
- Traveller routeMarco Polo
Polo's book describes a kingdom he calls Mutfili, reached on the homeward coasting of 1292–93, which is the Kakatiya port of Motupalli on the Andhra coast. He reports it as ruled by a widowed queen of some thirty or forty years' standing, greatly loved by her people, and he devotes an unusual amount of space to the diamond workings of the interior — the first European notice of the fields that later produced the Koh-i-Noor. The port's own Sanskrit and Telugu charter confirms the merchant traffic he saw.
- Imperial administration ofRudrama Devī
Motupalli was the Kakatiya state's access to the sea, and the Abhaya Sasana cut there under Ganapatideva — Rudrama's father and predecessor — guaranteed foreign merchants that a wrecked ship would not be plundered and that duties would be fixed and published. The charter is one of the earliest clear statements of merchant security in the Indian Ocean, and it was still governing the traffic Marco Polo saw when he touched this coast in the 1290s.
- Trade routeKollur / Golconda diamond fields
The diamonds Polo heard of at Mutfili came from the Krishna valley gravels around Kollur, a few days inland, which were the only significant source of large diamonds anywhere in the world before Brazil in the 1720s. The stones moved down to this coast and out through Coromandel shipping; four centuries later Tavernier took the same route inland to see the workings, and the Koh-i-Noor, the Hope, the Regent and the Orlov all came out of these same gravels.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Motupalli”. The Abhaya Śāsana of Gaṇapatideva at Motupalli, South Indian Inscriptions; Cynthia Talbot, Precolonial India in Practice.
Open Motupalli in the repository →