He recounted the scenes of daily life in India, even describing how women arranged their hair, sometimes using false locks, ‘but none paint their faces, with the exception of those who dwell near Cathay’. In Calicut there was fondness for polyandry, with one woman having as many as ten husbands; the men contributed among themselves to the upkeep of the shared wife, and she would allocate her children to the husbands as she thought fit.3
Nicolo’s years of living and travelling in the Indian Ocean lands corresponded precisely with the visits by Zheng He’s fleets, and several of his accounts of local customs closely match those of Ma Huan, the Chinese interpreter. The two describe, almost word for word, the Indian test for guilt or innocence, by which an accused person’s finger was dipped in boiling oil. Like Ma, the Venetian could not refrain from telling how men in Thailand had pellets inserted in their penises; unlike Ma he even dared to explain how this was intended to gratify their womenfolk. The Pope’s secretary dutifully wrote it all down.
Nicolo never referred directly to the Chinese, but his knowledge of them appears in the memoirs of a Spaniard named Pero Tafur, who had encountered him in Egypt. There is a familiar ring of truth when Tafur quotes what Nicolo had told him about vessels in the Red Sea: ‘He described their ships as like great houses, and not fashioned at all like ours. They have ten or twelve sails, and great cisterns of water within, for there the winds are not very strong; and when at sea they have no dread of islands or rocks.’ This is, unmistakably, a description of an ocean-going Chinese junk. When questioned by Poggio the Venetian explained how these giants of the Indian Ocean were made: ‘The lower part is constructed with triple planks. But some ships are built in compartments, so that should one part be shattered, the other part remaining entire they may accomplish the voyage.’
While Nicolo was making his way back to Europe he had dared to join a pilgrimage to Mecca. He seems also to have visited Ethiopia, since he tells of seeing ‘Christians eating the raw flesh of animals’ – a distinctively Ethiopian habit. The last stage of Nicolo’s long journey home was marred by tragedy: in Egypt his Indian wife and their children died, probably from the plague, and he lingered in Cairo for two years, working for the sultan as an interpreter.
As an informant, Nicolo was both practical and entertaining. Being a merchant he could tell Poggio a lot about the cities and trading practices of the Indian Ocean; he also had an eye for local customs. He might even have matched his compatriot Marco Polo as a story-teller, if only fate had given him an amanuensis on a par with Rustichello of Pisa and all the leisure granted by a spell in prison. However, within the constraints imposed by his other duties, Poggio drew out of the Venetian a lively, coherent account of life in the East.
It was two or three years before the papal secretary found time to complete his encyclopaedia, which was written in Latin: what Nicolo had told him was included in Book IV. Copies in both Latin and Italian soon reached Lisbon, where they were closely scrutinized. Soon the Venetian’s memoirs were extracted and distributed separately, under the title India Rediscovered. Some years later, after the invention of printing, they would be published in Portuguese.
The Portuguese went on hunting for every source of information about the Indian Ocean.4 One highly-placed friend, and a keen collector of geographical news, was a Florentine banker, Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli, whose ideas would later influence Christopher Columbus. Since Italy led the way in cartography, it was to there that Lisbon turned for a visual compilation of all that was now known about the East. They wanted to see their own discoveries embodied in this work (without revealing too much to potential rivals), and because their ambitions were boundless they wanted a map not merely of the Indian Ocean and its environs, but of the entire known world: a mappa mundi.
The result of Portuguese curiosity was the making of one of the most intricately ornate maps in existence. The artist was a monk, Brother Mauro, at S. Michele di Murano, a monastery outside Venice. He had been renowned for many years as a physician, mathematician and ‘cosmographer’, but only towards the end of his life did he concentrate upon his masterpiece, the detailed mappa mundi, almost two metres across. Adorned in colour with fanciful paintings of towns and sprinkled with finely-scripted explanatory legends, it is as much a work of art as a piece of cartography, a mélange of true research and medieval imaginings. In some ways, Mauro’s ideas were decidedly old-fashioned: his world, which he portrayed ‘upside down’, with north at the bottom, is depicted as flat and nearly circular, with the sides of the continents following its circumference, yet always enclosed by an outer seas.
The Portuguese paid Brother Mauro’s monastery to hasten the mappa mundi. When the map was finished the original was sent to Lisbon and the monastery kept a copy. (Their intermediary with the papal secretary Poggio had probably been a certain Dom Gomez, head of the Camaldolite Order in Portugal, the very order to which Brother Mauro belonged.)
Naturally, the Portuguese were anxious for any clues as to whether ships might be able round the furthest extremity of Africa, wherever that was. Brother Mauro did not fail them. In the Indian Ocean a junk is depicted, and the legend says: ‘About the year 1420 an Indian vessel, or junk, which was on her way across the Indian Ocean to the Islands of Men and Women, was caught by a storm and carried for 40 days, 2,000 miles, beyond Cavo de Diab to the west and southwest, and when the stress of the weather had subsided, was seventy days in returning to the Cape.’ The source of this vignette, written in a monastery close to Venice in 1459, must surely have been that lately-returned Venetian traveller, Nicolo de’ Conti. In his conversations with Poggio Bracciolini, the Venetian had even talked of the mythical ‘Islands of Men and Women’; following the lead of Marco Polo he said they were near the island of Socotra, off the Hom of Africa.
Mauro’s masterpiece inevitably owes much to Marco Polo. ‘Cathay’ is crowded with exquisitely executed miniature paintings of walled cities, each different from the next, and all conceived as being like cities in Italy. But the map also paid particular attention to Africa. One legend says that he had access to the ‘charts of Portuguese navigators’ (which could only have defined, at the time when he was working, the African coast as far as the Gulf of Guinea). The shape of Africa was almost total guesswork, with the whole continent being inscribed as Ethiopia, except for some western and central parts. Along the east of Africa is a large island called Diab; although this might be taken for Madagascar, the name is never found anywhere else and is possibly a confusion with Dib, the Arab word for the Maldives.
One region was even given over to the Bnichilebs, the ‘dog-faced people’ of classical mythology. On the Nile were the so-called ‘Gates of Iron’, which the Ethiopians were said to open once a year out of the goodness of their hearts, allowing the waters to flood down to Egypt.
Apart from such confusions and remnants of ancient legends, the map was a great advance in thinking about Africa. Foremost was the faith it showed in the possibility of sailing round the end of the continent into the Indian Ocean. Most significant of all, several towns are marked along the eastern seaboard of Africa, including Kilwa and Sofala; never before had a European map borne these names, and as far as is known no European had ever set eyes on them. Who had been Mauro’s source? Most probably Nicolo de’ Conti once again, for those great Indian ports he had lived in, such as Calicut, faced the coast of East Africa.
The Portuguese had every reason to be pleased with their purchase from the monastery of San Michele di Murano. They struck a medal in honour of ‘Frater Mauro, Cosmographus incomparabilis’.5 In years to come, simplified copies of his map would be handed to the caravel captains, to check against their discoveries.
The Lust for Pepper, the Hunt for Prester John
I gave to this subject six or seven years of great anxiety, explaining, to the best of my ability, how great service might be done to our Lord, by this undertaking, in promulgating his sacred name