"E qe voz en diroi? 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.
