Venadu kingdom

Venadu, romanised as Venad, also known as Quilon, was a medieval state located between the Western Ghat Mountains and the Arabian Sea, at the south-western tip of India, with its traditional capital at the port city of Kollam (Quilon). The Kingdom of Quilon included the present-day Kerala districts of Kollam, Pathanamthitta, southern parts of Alappuzha, and Thiruvananthapuram, as well as the Kanyakumari district of present-day Tamil Nadu. Kanyakumari and Thiruvananthapuram are located to the south of capital town Quilon (Kollam). It was one of the major principalities of present-day Kerala, along with the states of Kannur (Kolathunadu), Kozhikode (ruled by the Samoothiris), and Kochi (Perumpadappu), during the medieval and early modern periods.

Venadu, originally a chiefly territory within the medieval Chera state of Kerala, emerged as an independent principality — often referred to as the Chera kingdom — ruled by the Kulasekhara dynasty in the early 12th century CE. In the following period, Venadu came under the suzerainty of the expanding Pandya Empire and functioned as its tributary state. In the early 14th century CE, as the Pandya polity collapsed, Ravi Varma Kulasekhara, the most ambitious ruler of Venadu, notably led a successful military expedition into the Tamil country.

Records state that the 16th-century rulers of Venadu acknowledged the supremacy of the Vijayanagara rulers. In the 17th century, the rulers of Venadu paid an annual tribute to the Nayaks of Madurai. By this time, the old state of Venadu had fragmented into several collateral branches. The English East India Company established a factory at Vizhinjam in 1664, and a fort was built at Anjengo in 1695. Venadu later evolved into the modern state of Travancore in the 18th century CE, as feudal relations and medieval political authority were dismantled under Marthanda Varma (1729–1758), who is often credited as "the Maker of Travancore".