This Was In 1292, Or By The
Other Account 1295, When She Transferred The Royal Authority To This
Grandson Pratapa Vira Rudra Deva, The "Luddur Deo" Of Firishta, And The
Last Ganapati Of Any Political Moment.
He was taken prisoner by the Delhi
forces about 1323.
We have evidently in Rudrama Devi the just and beloved
Queen of our Traveller, who thus enables us to attach colour and character
to what was an empty name in a dynastic list. (Compare Wilson's
Mackenzie, I. cxxx.; Taylor's Or. Hist. MSS. I. 18; Do.'s Catalogue
Raisonne, III. 483.)
Mutfili appears in the Carta Catalana as Butiflis, and is there by
some mistake made the site of St. Thomas's Shrine. The distance from
Maabar is in Ramusio only 500 miles - a preferable reading.
NOTE 2. - Some of the Diamond Mines once so famous under the name of
Golconda are in the alluvium of the Kistna River, some distance above the
Delta, and others in the vicinity of Kadapa and Karnul, both localities
being in the territory of the kingdom we have been speaking of.
The strange legend related here is very ancient and widely diffused. Its
earliest known occurrence is in the Treatise of St. Epiphanius, Bishop of
Salamis in Cyprus, concerning the twelve Jewels in the Rationale or
Breastplate of the Hebrew High Priest, a work written before the end of
the 4th century, wherein the tale is told of the Jacinth. It is
distinctly referred to by Edrisi, who assigns its locality to the land of
the Kirkhir (probably Khirghiz) in Upper Asia. It appears in Kazwini's
Wonders of Creation, and is assigned by him to the Valley of the Moon
among the mountains of Serendib. Sindbad the Sailor relates the story, as
is well known, and his version is the closest of all to our author's. [So
Les Merveilles de l'Inde, pp. 128-129. - H.C.] It is found in the
Chinese Narrative of the Campaigns of Hulaku, translated by both Remusat
and Pauthier. [We read in the Si Shi Ki, of Ch'ang Te, Chinese Envoy to
Hulaku (1259), translated by Dr. Bretschneider (Med. Res. I. p. 151):
"The kinkang tsuan (diamonds) come from Yin-du (Hindustan). The people
take flesh and throw it into the great valleys (of the mountains). Then
birds come and eat this flesh, after which diamonds are found in their
excrements." - H.C.] It is told in two different versions, once of the
Diamond, and again of the Jacinth of Serendib, in the work on precious
stones by Ahmed Taifashi. It is one of the many stories in the scrap-book
of Tzetzes. Nicolo Conti relates it of a mountain called Albenigaras,
fifteen days' journey in a northerly Direction from Vijayanagar; and it
is told again, apparently after Conti, by Julius Caesar Scaliger. It is
related of diamonds and Balasses in the old Genoese MS., called that of
Usodimare. A feeble form of the tale is quoted contemptuously by Garcias
from one Francisco de Tamarra.
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