1
The imagined lands
For the ancient European world, the east as seen (or imagined) and defined by Herodotus and the Greeks, was a land of wonder. In the 5th century BCE Herodotus had remarked that âof all the inhabitants of Asia, concerning whom anything is known, the Indians dwell the nearest to the east, and the rising of the sun. Beyond them the whole country is desert on account of the sand.â1 Given that access to this strange land in his time was only through Persia, he naturally attributed the discovery of these eastern lands to Darius, King of the Persians. Darius was amongst the richest of kings because he claimed tribute from India which was paid in gold. This, the earliest âauthorityâ to speak of India, already gives an indication of the trend of future writings â gold and distance.
Facts and fiction began to be intertwined from this time onwards. So, Herodotus remarked that the Thracians were only slightly less populous than the Indians â an early sign of the size of Indiaâs population â and was also the first to talk of cotton. He believed that cotton was an animal fibre, like wool, but later modified the statement to say âwool more beautiful and excellent than the wool of sheep [which] grows on wild trees; these trees supply the Indians with clothingâ.2 Interspersed with such statements were some slightly more factual details, as for example about the crocodiles in the Indus river and the speed (and the use) of camels in the desert of India; but a point to be noted is that the two things that constantly struck outside observers, the size of the population and the textiles, can be seen from the earliest mention. Herodotus was the creator (or at least the propagator) of one of the most long-lasting myths about the east, that of the gold-digging ants. âIn this desert, there live amid the sand great ants, in size somewhat less than dogs, but bigger than foxesâŚ. Those ants make their dwellings under the ground, and like the Greek ants, ⌠throw up sand-heaps as they burrow. Now the sand which they throw up is full of gold.â3
These stories began to be modified slightly after Alexanderâs conquests, for with the reports that he sent home, knowledge about these distant lands began to be gradually acquired and collated. First of all, these conquests made it clear that neither was India the end of the world, nor was India surrounded by desert. The Greek tradition was of the world being circular, and so they of course did not believe that beyond India one fell off the end of the world, but India was the âlast outpost of civilisationâ. More importantly, though, the conquests opened up a clear and recognisable route to Persia and India, which others could and did follow. Later Greek accounts, like those of Megasthenes, added to the existing information. Texts like the Milinda Panho (âThe Questions of Menanderâ) make it clear that more accurate information was being sought on a variety of things, for this, as is well known, was an effort at getting more knowledge about the Buddha and Buddhism. Among other things, Alexanderâs invasion and Megasthenesâ account confirmed the size of Indiaâs population: thus the Nanda kingâs army was reported to consist of 100,000 men, probably more than the population of the city of Sparta and about equal to that of the city of Athens. The most important dimension of these reports was to prove that India had a recognisable system of government with kings, ministers, taxes, and justice. These were therefore civilised lands.
From this time onwards, the âeastâ basically meant India. Alexanderâs reports did indicate that India was not the end of the world, but greater knowledge about Asia as a whole had to wait for a few centuries and for the expansion of Roman trade. Roman accounts, particularly Straboâs geography, provided cartographic details about the Indian coastline, but nothing about the interior: and this is despite the volume of Roman trade with India and the information from Roman accounts about the conflict between two rulers of India (the emerging Satavahana power in the Deccan and the Kushanas) over control of the port of Kalyan (near present-day Mumbai). Strabo, following earlier authorities like Megasthenes, pointed out for the first time that no Indian army had ever attacked any outside empire and ânor did any outside army ever invade their country.â4 He also provided additional details about the boundaries of India, as well as an estimate of its size, and clearly pointed to the immensity of the country and its products. He made specific mention of the spices of the south of India. Again following Megasthenes, he remarked on the seven castes into which Indiaâs population was divided. Thus, from a fairly early time, the idea of caste was added to the corpus of information about India. However, Strabo scoffed at some of the myths that Megasthenes had propounded, especially about people carrying on wars with cranes and people who slept in their own ears.
But unfortunately, it was these âfabulousâ stories that ended up having a longer lifespan than the more reasoned statements of Strabo. While it took approximately another six centuries before more information about the people of India began to trickle back into Europe, there remained a general and rather hazy knowledge about India, and the trade route across the Indian Ocean was not yet forgotten by European travellers â as can be seen in, for example, the narratives of the two Byzantine writers, the 6th-century CE narratives of Cosmas Indicopleustes about the Malabar Coast, or the early 7th-century CE writings of Theophylact Simocatta. It should be pointed out, here, that such accounts had a rather limited readership, and that they still concentrated on the coast (which of course meant peninsular India), and not the interior. So, while knowledge about the coastline and the ports was still available, nothing was known either about the people further inland from the coast, or about the people of north India. More importantly, there was still a total lack of knowledge about the rest of Asia, including China. Asia still essentially consisted of India, even though Chinese silk had been imported into the Roman Empire, and there was mention of âSeresâ, the place from which silk came. Theophylact was the first western writer to mention China, about which country he had received information from envoys to the Constantinople court. Once Islam spread across Asia, and as feudalism became more prevalent in Europe, access to, and knowledge of, these distant lands became far less circulated. Distance was both physical and mental, and both were equally difficult to bridge.
In the years after the decline of the Roman Empire, the decline of direct trade to the east and the rise of Islam began to create an increasing physical and mental distance between the âwestâ and the âeastâ. As the Mediterranean world became more and more part of the Islamic world, relations between the non-Mediterranean countries and the east became steadily more difficult. The old trade networks were taken over mainly by the Arabs, and while the smaller Italian states retained some point of contact, this too was often filtered through the Arab and Turkish networks. Thus, for example, Venetian and Genoese merchants went to Alexandria and Cairo, or overland up to Aleppo but no further.5 Trade relations between the newly established Islamic states and the Italian republics were resumed after a short break, but this trade was limited, on the European side, to the Mediterranean and Black Sea ports. The horizons of the European world shrank considerably, and when knowledge of other regions existed at all, it was limited and almost invariably âfantasticâ rather than âfactualâ. In the medieval world, it was believed that the earth consisted only of the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, and this belief continued to be held by some people till the 15th century. The Indian Ocean region soon became the unknown and therefore possibly dangerous region.6
Notions of difference, which had begun with the stories circulated during the early medieval period, added another layer to the understanding of the east. Early constructions of the east began in the early medieval ages itself when the Roman Empire began to move out of Europe. Byzantium was probably the first âeastâ. Over time, differences began to be identified between the Byzantium world and the rest of the former Roman Empire, with the first difference being rooted in religion. The western world came to be called Latin Christendom, while Byzantium was Orthodox.7 To this early construction was added the fact of the barbarian invasions, affecting the western areas far more than the eastern Empire. The re-conquest of parts of the western Empire under the leadership of Justinian in the 6th century CE, far from re-establishing the Roman Empire, only served to accentuate the changes that had already taken place. His death in 565 CE coincided with the appearance of yet another group of marauders, the Avars, a central Asian group like the Huns. Attacking the Empire from across the Danube, they also managed to get the Slav tribes in the area under their control, and pushed the Lombards, allies of Byzantium, further into Italy.8 The widening physical and mental gap increased the propensity to define the east as different, therefore mysterious, and often dangerous. Such difference was clear, even in the ânear eastâ, in terms of both religion and language. Both obviously made the mystery greater, and when to the aura of mystery was added lack of knowledge, the east became even farther away.
This kind of nebulous sense of the east being dangerous existed despite the fact that there were still individuals who travelled very comfortably between the western and eastern worlds â for example, Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela in Navarre, who visited Baghdad in the 12th century, and got information about Jews in China and other parts of Asia.9 But the problem in the western world through this period was that knowledge was restricted to a small group. Even when western scholars began to study Jewish and Arabic writings, they concentrated on physics, astronomy, and medicine, and ignored practical geography. This last had to wait till the Renaissance. Increasingly, barriers of language and culture began to separate not just Muslim and Christian, but also Christians in the east and those in the west. As âeastâ and âwestâ emerged as different worlds, Byzantium, which straddled both worlds, became perhaps the most problematic.
On the other hand, India, which also lay in the east, seems to have been accepted as different, but not particularly dangerous. India was âknownâ, in some sense, even if what was known was more fantasy than fact. The only indisputable âfactsâ were probably those concerning Indiaâs cloth and spices.
The mixture of fact and fantasy that began to colour the ideas of the east naturally gave rise to an amazing number of stories. The east was a great many things to a great many people. So, depending on oneâs point of view, this was the land where Jesus was born â the Holy Land â or the land of the Saracens (a little later), or the land of milk and honey, for its wealth, or the land of many wonders, not the least of which were its people and products. Given both the lack of knowledge and the consequent myths that emerged about the lands outside the (limited) known world, the number of stories that circulated about the wonders of the east is not surprising. One of the more consistent myths that circulated was that of Prester John.
It is difficult to determine exactly when the legend of Prester John began to circulate in Europe, but it seems to have been widely accepted from about the 12th century. At some time in the middle of the 12th century, a letter began to circulate in Europe, claiming to be from Pester John. There were over 100 different versions of the letter published over the following few centuries. Most often, the letter was addressed to Emanuel I, the Byzantine Emperor of Rome, though other versions were also addressed to the Pope or the King of France. One of the letters said that Prester Johnâs kingdom consisted of seventy-two provinces which included âthe Three Indias, and extends to Farther India where the body of St Thomas the Apostle restsâŚ. In our territories are found elephants, dromedaries, and camels, and almost every kind of beast that is under heaven.â10 By the 16th century, it was widely accepted that Prester John had written a letter to the Pope, inviting him to depute Christian men to trade in his kingdom.11
The âThree Indiasâ of the early letters that said that Prester John was the ruler of lands occupied by Christians portrayed a utopian existence, of a kingdom where there was no vice and no crime, despite (or perhaps because of) the abundance of wealth. It was, apparently, the earthly equivalent of the Biblical land of milk and honey, with the added benefit of the Fountain of Youth being located within it, but it was surrounded by barbarians. Prester John therefore wrote the letters to ask for help from other Christians. The letters were taken sufficiently seriously for Pope Alexander III to send someone to search for the land, which was, of course, never found. One problem was that no one knew where to look for it â it was generally believed that the kingdom lay in Asia, but there were also strong supporters for the idea of its being in Africa, in Abyssinia. What no one disputed was that it lay to the east of Europe, for wealth lay in that direction.
More importantly, part of the accumulated knowledge of the east that was still available was of the existence of Christian communities in the east. Thirty years after the preaching of the First Crusade, in 1095, the English historian William of Malmesbury had written
The world is not evenly divided. Of its three parts, our enemies hold Asia as their hereditary home â a part of the world which our forefathers rightly considered equal to the other two put together. Yet here formerly our Faith put out its branches; here all the Apostles save two met their deaths. But now the Christians of those parts, if there are any left, squeeze a bare subsistence from the soil and pay tribute to their enemies, looking to us with silent longing for the liberty they have lost. Africa, too, the second part of the world, has been held by our enemies by force of arms for 200 years and more, a danger to Christendom all the greater because it formerly sustained the brightest spirits â men whose works will keep the r...
