by Cliff, Nigel
216 “Why,” he and his colleague had asked: Journal, 48–49.
216 “They all then joined in humble and hearty thanks”: Castanheda, in Kerr, General History, 2:357.
217 “all the spices, drugs, nutmegs”: Ibid., 346–47. In the 1330s, when Ibn Battuta arrived in Calicut, it was already a busy port thronged with international merchants. In 1421 and 1431 the Chinese traveler Ma Huan visited Calicut and Cochin with Zheng He’s fleets and described the hubbub of trade in his widely read Ying-yai Sheng-lan (“The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores”); an English translation by J. V. G. Mills was published by the Hakluyt Society in 1970.
218 “The officers of the custom-house”: “Narrative of the Journey of Abd-er-Razzak,” 14.
218 “You mistook one thing for another”: K. V. Krishna Ayyar, The Zamorins of Calicut (Calicut: University of Calicut, 1999), 86.
219 “The city of Calicut is inhabited by Christians”: Journal, 49–50.
219 elegant, pagoda-like mosques: The striking mosques still stand around the Kuttichira pool in central Kozhikode, although the Mishkal mosque, which was built by a Yemeni trader and ship owner in the fourteenth century, was reconstructed after the Portuguese torched it in 1510. With louvers painted in fresh turquoises and blues, carved floral designs, and multitiered tiled roofs, they bear more than a passing resemblance to the city’s ancient Hindu temples.
219 “commonly very hayrie”: The Voyage of J. H. van Linschoten to the East Indies, ed. Arthur Coke Burnell and P. A. Tiele (London: Hakluyt Society, 1885), 1:278. The Indians, Linschoten pruriently added, were “the most leacherous and unchast nation in all the Orient, so that there are verie few women children among them of seven or eight yeares old, that have their maiden-heades.”
220 “We did not”: Journal, 51.
222 “This reception was friendly”: Ibid., 51.
222 “They can keep nothing free”: Jean Mocquet, Travels and Voyages into Africa, Asia, and America, the East and West Indies; Syria, Jerusalem, and the Holy Land, trans. Nathaniel Pullen (London, 1696), 241–41v.
224 “the Christians of this country”: Journal, 54.
224 “teeth protruding an inch from the mouth”: Ibid., 55.
224 another ancient church: Though it would have meant taking a circular route to the palace, this may have been the Tali Temple, the most important Hindu shrine in Calicut and the focal point from which the city grid was laid out in the fourteenth century. A large porch opens into a courtyard that leads to a hall lined with burnished copper; in the inner shrine is a two-foot-high shivalinga, the phallic symbol of Shiva, made of gold and encrusted with gems.
224 five thousand people: See the letter of the Florentine merchant Girolamo Sernigi, quoted in Journal, 126. Sernigi also passed on the news, brought home by Gama’s sailors, that eighty years earlier huge fleets of four-masted vessels crewed by “white Christians, who wore their hair long like Germans, and had no beards except around the mouth,” had regularly visited Calicut. “If they were Germans,” he reasoned, “it seems to me that we should have had some notice about them” (131). They were, in fact, Chinese. Memories of Zheng He’s treasure fleets, which had paid their last visit sixty-seven years before Gama arrived, were clearly still alive in Calicut; the Indians who gave the Portuguese such a rapturous welcome may at first have thought the Chinese had returned.
225 “more than is shown in Spain to a king”: Journal, 55.
225 “They little think in Portugal”: Castanheda, in Kerr, General History, 2:364.
225 Inside was a vast, leafy courtyard: As well as the Journal and the chronicles, my description of the palace and of Calicut in general draws on the accounts of earlier and later travelers including Abd al-Razzaq, Duarte Barbosa, François Pyrard, Ludovico de Varthema, and Pietro della Valle; the last gives a particularly full picture of the palace, complete with diagrams. The site of the palace is now a public park called Mananchira Square; the Zamorins’ vast bathing tanks can still be seen.
225 “giving many blows to the people”: Journal, 56.
225 King of the Hills and the Waves: The Portuguese Zamorin was a corruption of Samuri, the common abbreviation of the fuller title Samutiri Tirumulpad. Beyond that, the derivation is unclear. Samutiri may be a corruption of Svami (Sanskrit for “master”) and the honorific Sri, or tiri may itself be a contraction of the honorific Tirumulpad. Alternatively, Samutiri may be a condensed form of Samu-dratiri, which without the honorific tiri means “he who has the sea for his border,” though another of the Zamorin’s titles, Kunnala-konatiri, means (again without the honorific) “king of the hills and the waves.” K. V Krishna Ayyar delves into the matter in Zamorins of Calicut, 24–26.
226 “very white, delicate and sumptuous”: Letter of Girolamo Sernigi, quoted in Journal, 126.
226 expensive simplicity: So say most of the sources, though a few indulge in lavish Orientalist fantasies. “He wore so many ornaments,” wrote the Portuguese chronicler Diogo do Couto, “and on his arm such a quantity of jeweled bracelets, that they extended from the bend of his elbows down to his thumbs, wherewith he was so weighted that he was obliged to have two pages each sustaining one arm. From his neck hung a collar of inestimable value. In his ears, earrings of the same assay, set with beautiful rubies and diamonds, whose weight extended the ears down to the shoulders, so that the value of what he carried upon him was indeed great. He was naked from the waist to the head, while round the waist was bound a cloth of gold and silk in many folds, the ends reaching half-way down the leg, and round the head a jeweled coronet of four fingers’ width, very richly set and of great value.” Quoted in The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil, trans. and ed. Albert Gray and H. C. P. Bell (London: Hakluyt Society, 1887–1890), 1:415.
226 bitter betel leaves: The Persian ambassador Abd al-Razzaq was an enthusiastic convert to the ancient habit of chewing betel. “This substance,” he wrote, “gives a colour to and brightens the countenance, causes an intoxication similar to that produced by wine, appeases hunger, and excites appetite in those who are satiated; it removes the disagreeable smell from the mouth, and strengthens the teeth. It is impossible to express how strengthening it is, and how much it excites to pleasure.” Major, India in the Fifteenth Century, 32.
Chapter 11: Kidnap
232 Vijayanagar: The name derives from the Sanskrit for “City of Victory.” The village of Hampi in northern Karnataka now sits within its spectacular ruins; Muslim armies sacked it after they defeated the empire in 1565, and it was never repopulated. Robert Sewell, A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar (London: Sonnenschein, 1900), includes vivid accounts of the city by two sixteenth-century Portuguese travelers.
232 “is by far more distinguished”: Quoted in Travelers in Disguise: Narratives of Eastern Travel by Poggio Bracciolini and Ludovico de Varthema, trans. John Winter Jones, rev. Lincoln Davis Hammond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 9–10. Suttee, Conti explained, was performed “in order to add to the pomp of the funeral.” Outside the prostitutes’ bazaars and the royal household, Vijayanagar’s women were also civil servants, merchants, poets, and artists.
233 Islamic empires: One, the Delhi Sultanate, founded in 1206 and ruled by Turkish and Afghan dynasties, became a new Indian powerhouse and shielded India from the Mongol apocalypse. After surviving endless bloody intrigues that saw nineteen of its thirty-five sultans assassinated, its nemesis appeared in 1398 in the unstoppable form of Tamerlane. On his whirlwind campaign to restore the Mongol Empire—or, as he proclaimed in words that would have had a familiar ring to the Portuguese, to plunder the wealth of the infidel Hindus, convert them to the true faith, and strengthen Islam—he swept through the Khyber Pass and sacked Delhi, killing a hundred thousand prisoners in one day and leaving the city in ruins. He stormed on to China, where he died during a deadly cold winter, but the sultanate was fatally weakened and much of India fell back into the hands of independent rajas.
/> 235 “And when the king”: The Book of Duarte Barbosa, trans. Mansel Longworth Dames (London: Hakluyt Society, 1921), 2:26.
236 “It is strictly forbidden”: The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil, trans. and ed. Albert Gray and H. C. P. Bell (London: Hakluyt Society, 1887–1890), 1:404–5. According to the Dutch traveler Jan Huygen van Linschoten, India’s Muslims were equally convinced that there was little difference between Hindus and Christians.
237 “As to us others”: Journal, 19.
238 “I expected you yesterday”: Ibid., 62–63.
239 unable to read it: One wonders why Gama could not have had Martins translate the Portuguese letter aloud into Arabic; presumably his Arabic was not up to the task. In any case, the Arabic letter had to be left and needed checking.
241 “When they saw the dark looks of the captain”: Journal, 64.
244 “At this we rejoiced greatly”: Ibid., 67.
Chapter 12: Dangers and Delights
247 “were made welcome by the Christians”: Journal, 69.
248 “The men,” Conti explained: Travelers in Disguise: Narratives of Eastern Travel by Poggio Bracciolini and Ludovico de Varthema, trans. John Winter Jones, rev. Lincoln Davis Hammond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 13–14.
248 “freely thrust him through”: The Voyage of J. H. van Linschoten to the East Indies, ed. Arthur Coke Burnell and P. A. Tiele (London: Hakluyt Society, 1885), 1:281. The rules of pollution were utterly perplexing to Europeans. If a non-Hindu touched a high-caste Hindu’s servant while he was bringing them food or drink, the food was thrown on the ground. If he entered his house and touched anything, no one would eat there again until it was ritually cleansed. If a Christian came to sit next to a Brahmin or Nair, he would immediately get up; if the Christian sat down unnoticed, the Hindu would wash his whole body. Fear of pollution also accounted for the practice of tossing items to those of other religions rather than passing them by hand and pouring liquids into their mouths rather than letting them drink directly from vessels.
249 “These have on their neck”: Travelers in Disguise, 32–33. The witness was Niccolò de’ Conti; he also reported the deadly festival, which he saw at Vijayanagar. Linschoten mentions a similar temple festival during which the faithful hacked out lumps of their flesh and threw them before the wagon; Pietro della Valle has the martyrs insert hooks in their backs and suspend themselves from a beam that whirls them around when a lever is pulled. Less violent acts of devotion also spooked Europeans: Jean Mocquet reported seeing a naked Hindu “squat up on his Tail before a Fire of Cow Dung, and with Ashes thereof all bepowdered his Body, having long Hair like a Woman, which he held on the top of his Shoulders: This was the most hideous and monstrous Spectacle that ever was seen: For he remained still looking on the Fire, without so much as turning his Head.” Travels and Voyages into Africa, Asia, and America, the East and West Indies; Syria, Jerusalem, and the Holy Land, trans. Nathaniel Pullen (London, 1696), 244.
250 “under the express agreement”: Niccolò de’ Conti, in Travelers in Disguise, 28. Conti was one of the first Europeans to describe suttee, which was banned in Muslim areas of India.
250 “ ’Tis remarkable”: Mocquet, Travels and Voyages, 242. Mocquet goes on to tell the tale of a prostitute whose client “heated himself so with her, that he Died upon the spot, at which she was so afflicted, that when they Burnt his Body, she Burnt her self with him, seeing he had Died for Love of her, tho’ she was no other than a good Friend.”
251 “for the sake of establishing relations of peace and amity”: Journal, 69.
252 “This news made us sad”: Ibid., 71.
253 “If the captains went ashore”: Ibid., 72.
255 “Are you unaware”: Ibid., 74–5.
257 “Inasmuch that we had discovered”: Ibid., 76.
259 “They said,” recorded the Chronicler: Ibid., 80.
259 five more islands ahead: The Journal incorrectly says there were six. The Panchdiva Islands are forty miles south of Goa; the largest, off which the Portuguese anchored, was named Anjediva by the Portuguese and is now known as Anjadip. In Canto Nine of the Lusiads, the Portuguese epic of the discoveries, Luís Vas de Camões calls it the Isle of Love and describes it in lush detail as a miniature paradise; Venus, he says, put it in the voyagers’ path as a sanctuary from their weary toils.
259 smelled somewhat of cinnamon: The branches were from cassia trees; the dried bark produces a spice similar but inferior to cinnamon.
260 A notorious pirate named Timoja: The Hindu privateer Thi-mayya, known to the Portuguese as Timoja, would later serve them as an informant and supplier; he was instrumental in the capture of Goa and was briefly installed as the governor of its Indian population.
265 “Great numbers Died every day”: Mocquet, Travels and Voyages, 205–6.
266 A toxic fungus infected the bread: The disease was known as St. Anthony’s fire after the monks of the Order of St. Anthony, who were renowned for their prowess in curing it; the modern term is ergotism. It results from eating the Claviceps purpurea fungus, which grows on cereals, particularly rye. Episodes of mass convulsions blamed on witchcraft have been controversially ascribed to the disease; the psychotic effects are similar to those of LSD.
266 “breaks out at the Fundament like an Ulcer”: Mocquet, Travels and Voyages, 231–32.
267 “It pleased God in his mercy”: Journal, 87.
267 “so as to find out whither the Lord had taken us”: Ibid., 88.
267 some islands off Mozambique: The Seychelles are some 300 leagues or 900 miles from Mozambique; Madagascar is more plausibly “off” the coast, but by only 60 leagues or 180 miles.
268 a nearby island: The town was Pate; the island of the same name is the largest of the Lamu Archipelago and is located off the north Kenyan coast.
269 a pillar and cross: A pillar surmounted by a cross still stands on a small rocky promontory almost eaten away by the tide, a little south of the town of Malindi in the middle of the bay. It is not the original, which offended the local population and was soon removed—owing to “odium,” says the sign—though the sultan carefully stored it in his palace and the cross may have survived.
269 “and reposing”: Journal, 91.
269 six leagues from the mainland: The Journal incorrectly gives the distance as “quite ten leagues.”
270 “those who had come so far”: Ibid., 92–93.
Chapter 13: A Venetian in Lisbon
272 ambassador extraordinary of the Republic of Venice: For the story of the Venetian envoy I am indebted to Donald Weinstein’s Ambassador from Venice: Pietro Pasqualigo in Lisbon, 1501 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960). See also George Modelski, “Enduring Rivalry in the Democratic Lineage: The Venice-Portugal Case,” in Great Power Rivalries, ed. William R. Thompson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999).
272 “Letters of June”: Quoted in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 20.
273 “found all the treasure”: See Paul Teyssier and Paul Valentin, trans. and eds., Voyages de Vasco de Gama: Relations des expeditions de 1497–1499 et 1502–3, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chandeigne, 1998), 186–88.
274 “People, islands, and shores unknown”: Quoted in Weinstein, Ambassador from Venice, 45–46.
274 the fierce and powerful Turkish sultan: For some decades, while Europe remained under dire threat of an Ottoman conquest, there were plenty who agreed with Pasqualigo that the new obsession with discovering distant lands had left the homeland dangerously unguarded. Many Christians, wrote Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Austria’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the mid-sixteenth century, had abandoned the medieval valor that sought honor in defending the faith on the battlefield in favor of a predilection for “seeking the Indies and the Antipodes across vast fields of ocean, in search of gold.” Only with time would the impact of the voy
ages on the global balance of power become clear. Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 15.
275 “This is more important to the Venetian State”: Quoted in Weinstein, Ambassador from Venice, 29–30.
277 “returning many thanks to Our Lord”: Letter of Manuel I to the Cardinal Protector, dated August 28, 1499, quoted in Journal, 115.
277 “Most high and excellent Prince and Princess”: Ibid., 113–114.
279 the old prophecies: Columbus staked his place in the eschatological scheme that would lead to the end of the world in his Book of Prophecies; he started work on it in 1501 and was still revising it in the year before his death.
279 the settlers he had promised untold riches: Columbus turned their argument back on them: the colonists, he complained, had come “in the belief that the gold and spices could be gathered in by the shovelful, and they did not reflect that, though there was gold, it would be buried in mines, and the spices would be on the treetops, and that the gold would have to be mined and the spices harvested and cured.” Quoted in Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Columbus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 134.
279 rub his in-laws’ noses in it: At the time Manuel was in fact briefly unmarried to one of the Catholic Monarchs’ daughters. Isabella had died in 1498; in 1501 Manuel married her younger sister Maria, who bore him his son and heir, John III.
280 “very fully the sovereignty and dominion”: Quoted in Journal, 115–16. Manuel also wrote to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I.
280 “from the damage to the Infidels that is expected”: Grant letter of January 1500 (?), quoted in Subrahmanyam, Career and Legend, 171.
280 “for the king has decreed the death penalty”: Angelo Trevisan, secretary to Domenico Pisani, to the chronicler Domenico Malipiero; quoted in Henry H. Hart, Sea Road to the Indies (London: William Hodge, 1952), 28. Guido Detti made a similar point: Manuel, he said, had ordered Gama and his men to hand over their navigational charts on pain of death and the confiscation of their goods, from fear that their route and intelligence would be leaked to foreign powers. “But I believe that, whatever they do, everyone will know, and other ships will start to go there,” he added. See Teyssier and Valentin, Voyages de Vasco de Gama, 188.
