Sachies
tout voiremant qe en ceste reingne se labore roiaus dereusse de cuir et
plus sotilment que ne fait en tout lo monde, e celz qe sunt de greingnors
vailance."
CHAPTER XXVII.
CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF TANA.
Tana is a great kingdom lying towards the west, a kingdom great both in
size and worth. The people are Idolaters, with a language of their own,
and a king of their own, and tributary to nobody.[NOTE 1] No pepper grows
there, nor other spices, but plenty of incense; not the white kind
however, but brown.[NOTE 2]
There is much traffic here, and many ships and merchants frequent the
place; for there is a great export of leather of various excellent kinds,
and also of good buckram and cotton. The merchants in their ships also
import various articles, such as gold, silver, copper, and other things in
demand.
With the King's connivance many corsairs launch from this port to plunder
merchants. These corsairs have a covenant with the King that he shall get
all the horses they capture, and all other plunder shall remain with them.
The King does this because he has no horses of his own, whilst many are
shipped from abroad towards India; for no ship ever goes thither without
horses in addition to other cargo. The practice is naughty and unworthy of
a king.
NOTE 1. - The town of THANA, on the landward side of the island of
Salsette, still exists, about 20 miles from Bombay. The Great Peninsular
Railroad here crosses the strait which separates Salsette from the
Continent.
The Konkan is no doubt what was intended by the kingdom of Thana.
Albiruni speaks of that city as the capital of Konkan; Rashiduddin calls
it Konkan-Tana, Ibn Batuta Kukin-Tana, the last a form which appears
in the Carta Catalana as Cucintana. Tieffentaller writes Kokan, and
this is said (Cunningham's Anc. Geog. 553) to be the local
pronunciation. Abulfeda speaks of it as a very celebrated place of trade,
producing a kind of cloth which was called Tanasi, bamboos, and
Tabashir derived from the ashes of the bamboo.
As early as the 16th year of the Hijra (A.D. 637) an Arab fleet from Oman
made a hostile descent on the Island of Thana, i.e. Salsette. The place
(Sri Sthanaka) appears from inscriptions to have been the seat of a
Hindu kingdom of the Konkan, in the 11th century. In Polo's time Thana
seems to have been still under a Hindu prince, but it soon afterwards
became subject to the Delhi sovereigns; and when visited by Jordanus and
by Odoric some thirty years after Polo's voyage, a Mussulman governor was
ruling there, who put to death four Franciscans, the companions of
Jordanus. Barbosa gives it the compound name of TANA-MAIAMBU, the latter
part being the first indication I know of the name of Bombay (Mambai).
It was still a place of many mosques, temples, and gardens, but the trade
was small. Pirates still did business from the port, but on a reduced
scale. Botero says that there were the remains of an immense city to be
seen, and that the town still contained 5000 velvet-weavers (p. 104). Till
the Mahrattas took Salsette in 1737, the Portuguese had many fine villas
about Thana.
Polo's dislocation of geographical order here has misled Fra Mauro into
placing Tana to the west of Guzerat, though he has a duplicate Tana nearer
the correct position.
NOTE 2. - It has often been erroneously supposed that the frankincense
(olibanum) of commerce, for which Bombay and the ports which preceded it
in Western India have for centuries afforded the chief mart, was an Indian
product. But Marco is not making that mistake; he calls the incense of
Western India brown, evidently in contrast with the white incense or
olibanum, which he afterwards assigns to its true locality (infra. ch.
xxxvii., xxxviii.). Nor is Marsden justified in assuming that the brown
incense of Tana must needs have been Benzoin imported from Sumatra,
though I observe Dr. Birdwood considers that the term Indian
Frankincense which occurs in Dioscorides must have included Benzoin.
Dioscorides describes the so-called Indian Frankincense as blackish; and
Garcia supposes the name merely to refer to the colour, as he says the
Arabs often gave the name of Indian to things of a dark colour.
There seems to be no proof that Benzoin was known even to the older Arab
writers. Western India supplies a variety of aromatic gum-resins, one of
which was probably intended by our traveller:
I. BOSWELLIA THURIFERA of Colebrooke, whose description led to a general
belief that this tree produced the Frankincense of commerce. The tree is
found in Oudh and Rohilkhand, in Bahar, Central India, Khandesh, and
Kattiawar, etc. The gum-resin is used and sold locally as an incense, but
is soft and sticky, and is not the olibanum of commerce; nor is it
collected for exportation.
The Coromandel Boswellia glabra of Roxburgh is now included (see Dr.
Birdwood's Monograph) as a variety under the B. thurifera. Its gum-resin
is a good deal used as incense, in the Tamul regions, under the name of
Kundrikam, with which is apparently connected Kundur, one of the
Arabic words for olibanum (see ch. xxxviii., note 2).
II. Vateria Indica (Roxb.), producing a gum-resin which when recent is
known as Piney Varnish, and when hardened, is sold for export under the
names of Indian Copal, White Dammar, and others. Its northern limit of
growth is North but the gum is exported from Bombay. The tree is the
Chloroxylon Dupada of Buchanan, and is, I imagine, the Dupu or Incense
Tree of Rheede. (Hort. Malab. IV.) The tree is a fine one, and forms
beautiful avenues in Malabar and Canara. The Hindus use the resin as an
incense, and in Malabar it is also made into candles which burn fragrantly
and with little smoke.
