| The aim of the article is to study how trade was used as a tool to bolster the relations between the Vijayanagara and Portuguese Empire. The Portuguese and the Vijayanagara rulers realized that the vitality of their power edifices depended very much upon their ability in pumping wealth from various regions to the core heart of their power through a circulatory process. The arteries of trade happened to be the blood vessels of their economies and the nodal centers of such circulation process evolved as supportive markets emitting forces to sustain their political activities in differing degrees. The Portuguese developed a chain of trading bases along the western coast of Vijayanagara kingdom for the purpose of facilitating their trade, particularly for procuring rice and food materials that their settlements were in dire need of. On the other hand the Vijayanagara rulers and their power-sharers happily conceded these commercial bases, as the Portuguese supplied horses to them through these trade bases. |