So leave
we him and his wife and all their concerns, and let us return to our
story, and go on regularly with our account of the great province of Manzi
and of the manners and customs of its people. And, to begin at the
beginning, we must go back to the city of Coiganju, from which we
digressed to tell you about the conquest of Manzi.
NOTE 1. - Faghfur or Baghbur was a title applied by old Persian and
Arabic writers to the Emperor of China, much in the way that we used to
speak of the Great Mogul, and our fathers of the Sophy. It is, as
Neumann points out, an old Persian translation of the Chinese title
Tien-tzu, "Son of Heaven"; Bagh-Pur = "The Son of the Divinity," as
Sapor or Shah-Pur = "The Son of the King." Faghfur seems to have been
used as a proper name in Turkestan. (See Baber, 423.)
There is a word, Takfur, applied similarly by the Mahomedans to the
Greek emperors of both Byzantium and Trebizond (and also to the Kings of
Cilician Armenia), which was perhaps adopted as a jingling match to the
former term; Faghfur, the great infidel king in the East; Takfur, the
great infidel king in the West.
