India in the Fifteenth Century
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India in the Fifteenth Century

Being a Collection of Narratives of Voyages to India in the Century preceding the Portuguese Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope; from Latin, Persian, Russian, and Italian Sources, now first Translated into English

R.H. Major, R.H. Major

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eBook - ePub

India in the Fifteenth Century

Being a Collection of Narratives of Voyages to India in the Century preceding the Portuguese Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope; from Latin, Persian, Russian, and Italian Sources, now first Translated into English

R.H. Major, R.H. Major

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The volume contains the following accounts, edited, with an introduction: Narrative of the voyage of Abd-er-Razzak, Ambassador from Shah Rukh, A.H. 845, A.D. 1442.; The travels of NicolĂČ Conti in the East in the early part of the fifteenth century; The travels of Athanasius Nikitin, a native of Twer; The journey of Hieronimo di Santo Stefano, a Genoese. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1857.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781317117513
Topic
Storia
Edition
1

Introduction.

BEFORE the days when Alexander of Macedon sought to add to his triumphs the conquest of the Eastern world, India had been pronounced by Herodotus to be the wealthiest and most populous country on the face of the earth. The subsequent history of commerce has proved the correctness of his assertion. Yet, though endowed with a soil and climate on which nature has poured forth her choicest gifts with the most partial profusion, and at the same time boasting a civilisation even far beyond the limits of authentic history, it is remarkable that India has never been thoroughly explored till within the last century. No era in the history of the exploration of such a country can be without its interest, but the period treated of in the collection of documents which are here for the first time laid before the English reader, claims a peculiarly honourable place in the chain of our information respecting it. It is true that it was no longer possible at that period to speak, as Horace poetically did of old, of the “intacti thesauri divitis Indié”, yet the time had not yet come when Vasco de Gama, by rounding the Cape of Good Hope, had opened up a readier track to that more active commerce, by which these riches should become the property of the whole western world. The interest which attaches to these documents, however, will be best appreciated by our taking a brief retrospect of the intercourse of the West with India, and bringing under review the earlier voyages made to that country ; it being premised that the word India is here used in its most extended sense, comprising India within and beyond the Ganges, with the East Indian Islands.
Although it is now well ascertained that India was the country from which the Phoenician pilots of King Solomon’s fleets “ brought gold and silver, ivory, apes and peacocks”, inasmuch as the original designations of these various importations are not Hebrew but Sanscrit, yet even so late as the days of Herodotus the knowledge of that country was extremely limited. The earliest fact which he has recorded respecting the intercourse of Indians with other nations, is the conquest of the western part of Hindostan by Darius I. He also states that Indians served in the Persian armies. The sway of the Persians over that country was, however, but of brief duration. With the conquest of Darius III by Alexander, and the death of that prince in the year 330, A.C., the Persian empire ceased.
Alexander, in his famous expedition, when he had reached the Hyphasis, or Gharra, one of the five great affluents of the Indus constituting the Punjab, was compelled, by the discontent of his troops, to relinquish the design of advancing any further. To this expedition, nevertheless, apparently so unsuccessful, was due the commencement of that Indian trade, which has subsequently proved of such vast importance to Europe. The Macedonian conqueror, by founding several cities on the branches of the Indus, and by commissioning Nearchus to survey the coasts from the mouth of the Indus to that of the Tigris, laid open the means of a communication with India both by land and by sea. It was evidently his plan that the treasures of that country might thus be carried through the Persian Gulf into the interior of his Asiatic dominions, while by the Red Sea they might be conveyed to Alexandria. The untimely death of this great monarch, however, suddenly arrested the prosecution of these grand conceptions.
The narratives which we have had handed down to us respecting India, through a long series of ages, have been mixed up largely with the fabulous. The earliest dealer in these fictions was Megasthenes, who was sent by Seleucus, one of the immediate successors of Alexander, to negociate a peace with Sandracottus [Chandra-gupta], an Indian prince ; Seleucus himself being compelled to withdraw from India to encounter Antigonus, his rival for the throne. Megasthenes was, perhaps, the first European who had ever beheld the Ganges. He dwelt for several years in Palibothra, on the banks of that river,—a city supposed to have occupied the site of the modern Patna,—and afterwards wrote an account of the country, which, though now lost, has probably been transmitted to us pretty closely in the narratives of Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, and Arrian. Yet though his minuter details seem—nay, in many respects, are—totally undeserving of credit, his geographical description of India may, curiously enough, be commended for its accuracy. Moreover, it is to Onesicritus, one of the companions of Megasthenes, that we are indebted for the earliest account of Ceylon or Taprobane. From him we first hear of its trained elephants, its pearls, and its gold.
The development of the plans of Alexander was not lost sight of under the enlightened government of the Ptolemies. By the establishment of the port of Berenice, on the Red Sea, goods brought from the East were conveyed by caravans to Coptus on the Nile, and hence to Alexandria. Thus Egypt became the principal point of communication between India and Europe.
Meanwhile the Persians, notoriously addicted to refined and effeminate luxuries, could by no means dispense with the costly productions and elegant manufactures of India. These people, however, seem to have had an unconquerable aversion to the sea,—a ludicrous example of which we have in the singular instance of the voyage, now first rendered into English in the following pages, of Abderrazzak, the ambassador of Shah Rokh to the Court of Bijnagar. The droll pathos with which he bemoans his sad lot in having to undergo so many hardships, loses nothing from the florid exaggeration of oriental hyperbole. But of this hereafter. The supply of Indian commodities to the various provinces of Persia was effected by camels, from the banks of the Indus to those of the Oxus, down which river they were conveyed to the Caspian, and thence circulated either by land-carriage, or by the navigable rivers, through the various parts of the country.
It was the opinion of Major Rennell, an authority always deserving to be listened to with deference, that “ under the Ptolemies the Egyptians extended their navigations to the extreme points of the Indian continent, and even sailed up the Ganges to Palibothra”; and it is certain that Strabo, who wrote a little before the commencement of the Christian éra, states that some, though few, of the traders from the Red Sea had reached the Ganges.
By this time, however, Rome had become the mistress of Egypt,—the great highway of Indian maritime commerce to the west,—and the luxurious and costly articles which that distant country alone could furnish, became necessary to feed the pleasures and maintain the grandeur of an empire glutted to satiety with the successes of conquest. It was about eighty years after Egypt had been annexed to the Roman empire,—that is, about the year A.D. 50,—that a discovery was made of the greatest importance both to geography and commerce. During the many voyages made by the navigators of Egypt and Syria, it was scarcely possible that the regular shiftings of the periodical winds, or monsoons, blowing during one part of the year from the east, and during the other from the west, could have failed to be observed. It is by the author of the Periplus of the Erythrcan Sea (supposed to be Arrian, to whom we are indebted for the earliest mention of the peninsula of the Deccan, and whose details are remarkable for their correctness), that we are informed that Hippalus, the commander of a vessel in the Indian trade, had the hardihood to stretch out to sea from the mouth of the Arabian Gulf, and practically tested the more theoretical observations of his predecessors. His experiment was successful, and he found himself carried by the southwestern monsoon to Musiris, a port on the coast of Malabar, in all probability Mangalore. This bold adventure gained for him the honour of having his name attached to the wind by which he was enabled to perform this novel voyage.
Pliny has very fully described to us the shortened route thus gained. He says : “ The subject is well worthy of our notice, inasmuch as in no year does India drain our empire of less than five hundred and fifty millions of sesterces, giving back her own wares in exchange, which are sold at fully one hundred times their prime cost.” The sum here mentioned may be computed at about £1,400,000 of our money. The first point he mentions, from Alexandria, is Julio-polis, which Mannert considers to be that suburb of Alexandria called by Strabo Eleusis. From Julio-polis to Coptos, on the Nile, is three hundred miles. From Coptos to Berenice are noted various
images
, or watering places, at which the travellers rested during the day time, the greater part of the distance being travelled by night, on account of the extreme heat. The entire distance from Coptos to Berenice occupied twelve days. The traces of several of these
images
were found by Belzoni, and the site of Berenice, whose ruins still exist, was ascertained by Moresby and Carless, at the bottom of the inlet known as the Sinus Immundus, or Foul Bay. The distance from Coptos was two hundred and fifty-seven miles. The voyage from Berenice was generally commenced before or immediately after the rising of the Dog-Star, and thirty days brought them to Ocelis, now called Gehla, a harbour at the south-western point of Arabia Felix, or else to Cave, which D’Anville identifies with Cava Canim Bay, near Mount Hissan Ghorib, at the foot of which ruins are still to be seen. Pliny states that Ocelis was the best place for embarkation, and if Hippalus, or the west wind, were blowing, it was possible to reach Musiris, to which we have already referred, in forty days. He describes this place, however, as dangerous for disembarcation, on account of the pirates which frequent the neighbourhood, and as the roadstead was at a considerable distance from the shore, cargoes had to be conveyed thither in boats. A much more convenient port was Barace, to which pepper was conveyed, in boats hollowed out of a single tree, from Cottonara, the Cottiara of Ptolemy, supposed to be either Calicut or Cochin.
In the present advanced stage of our acquaintance with India, we are accustomed to receive from that country, in large supply, a vast variety of important articles, such as cotton, silk, wool, gums, spices, indigo, and coffee. In the days of which we write, commerce was confined to commodities more immediately meeting the requirements of the most luxurious subjects of a very luxurious kingdom. The importations at that time consisted mainly of precious stones and pearls, spices and silk. Diamonds and pearls, which history tells us were so much in demand amongst the Romans, were principally supplied from India. Spices, such as frankincense, cassia, and cinnamon, were largely used, not only in their religious worship, but in burning the bodies of the dead; and silk, at that time derived alone from India, was sought for eagerly by the wealthiest Roman ladies, and so late as the time of Aurelian, in the later half of the third century of our era, was valued at its weight in gold.
The great geographer Ptolemy, who wrote at the commencement of the second century, describes the peninsula of India with far less accuracy than Arrian, who wrote but shortly after him and in the same century, and who correctly represented it as extending from north to south, while Ptolemy commits the egregious error of making the coast line run nearly west and east, the mouths of the Ganges being removed sufficiently eastward to allow room for the insertion of the numerous names of places of which he had gained information. The abundance of topographical information, for which his writings are remarkable, was due to the great extension which commercial intercourse had received in the century immediately preceding, and to the facility which his residence in Alexandria, the centre of a large proportion of the commerce of the day, afforded him of consulting the itineraries of various merchants. He was, in short, the Hakluyt of that day. He first acquaints us with the names of six different mouths of the Ganges, and describes their positions. He delineates, with great inaccuracy as to its general form, but with wonderful copiousness of detail as to the names of towns, rivers, and headlands, that part of India which lies beyond the Ganges. His Aurea Chersonesus has been shown by D’Anville to be the Malay Peninsula, and his Sin-hoa, the western part of the kingdom of Cochin China.
We have already spoken of the trade which had long before been opened into the interior of Persia, and to the countries bordering on the Caspian and Black Sea by land carriage through the provinces that stretch along the northern frontier of India. Of the distant inland regions thus traversed Ptolemy was enabled to gain some general information, though the inaccuracy of his geographical delineations throws great obscurity over the identification of most of the points he lays down.
From the age of Ptolemy until the reign of the Emperor Justinian but small addition was made to geographical knowledge concerning India. That the communication between the east and west in the fourth century was tolerably frequent and regular, may be gathered from the language of Ammianus Marcellinus, who, wishing to pay homage to the memory of the Emperor Julian, says that on the first rumour of his accession to the throne, deputations came from the farthest east to congratulate him. His words are: “Inde nationibus Indicis certatim cum donis optimates mittentibus ante tempus abusque Divis et Serendivis. (Lib. 22, cap. vii.)
After the partition of the Roman empire, the intercourse between Rome and India by way of the Red Sea began to decline; but while the Greek empire flourished, Constantinople was the centre of commerce between Asia and Europe. The caravans came by Candahar into Persia, but through Egypt especially the Greeks received an enormous quantity of the costly products of the East. This latter channel of commerce, however, was doomed to receive an almost fatal blow under the following circumstances. The Persians, who, as we have already said, had in earlier times manifested an extreme dislike to maritime commerce, began, after the subversion of the Parthian empire, to entertain a more reasonable notion of its importance and value. Having learned from the small Indian traders who frequented the various ports in the Persian Gulf, with what safety and rapidity the voyage from thence to Malabar and Ceylon might be performed, they fitted out vessels which made this voyage annually, and thus, in exchange for specie and some of the commodities of their own country, they brought home not only the costly products of India, but also those of China, which they were enabled to procure at Ceylon. By this channel the luxurious inhabitants of Constantinople were furnished in large abundance with the manufactures of HindustĂĄn ; an...

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