From Some Circumstances In The Text, But Which Do Not Agree With The Commencement, It Would Appear That Verthema Had Been Taken Prisoner By The Mamelukes, When Fifteen Years Of Age, And Was Admitted Into That Celebrated Military Band At Cairo, After Making Profession Of The Mahometan Religion.

He went afterwards on pilgrimage to Mecca, from Damascus in Syria, then under the dominion of the Mameluke Soldan of Egypt, and contrived to escape or desert from Mecca.

By some unexplained means, he appears to have become the servant or slave of a Persian merchant, though he calls himself his companion, and along with whom he made various extensive peregrinations in India. At length he contrived, when at Cananore, to desert again to the Portuguese, through whose means he was enabled to return to Europe.

In this itinerary, as in all the ancient voyages and travels, the names of persons, places, and things, are generally given in an extremely vicious orthography, often almost utterly unintelligible, as taken down orally, according to the vernacular modes of the respective writers, without any intimate knowledge of the native language, or the employment of any fixed general standard. To avoid the multiplication of notes, we have endeavoured to supply this defect, by subjoining those names which are now almost universally adopted by Europeans, founded upon a more intimate acquaintance with the eastern languages. Thus the author, or his translator Eden, constantly uses _Cayrus_ and _Alcayr_, for the modern capital of Egypt, now known either by the Arabic denomination Al Cahira, or the European designation Cairo, probably formed by the Venetians from the Arabic. The names used in this itinerary have probably been farther disguised and vitiated, by a prevalent fancy or fashion of giving _latin_ terminations to all names of persons and places in latin translations. Thus, even the author of this itinerary has had his modern _Roman_ name, _Verthema_, latinized into _Vertomannus_, and probably the _Cairo_, or _Cayro_ of the Italian original, was corrupted by Eden into _Cayrus_, by way of giving it a latin sound. Yet, while we have endeavoured to give, often conjecturally, the better, or at least more intelligible and now customary names, it seemed proper to retain those of the original translation, which we believe may be found useful to our readers, as a kind of _geographical glossary_ of middle-age terms.

Of _Verthema_ or _Vertomannus_, we only know, from the title of the translation of his work by Eden, that he was a _gentleman of Rome;_ and we learn, at the close of his itinerary, that he was knighted by the Portuguese viceroy of India, and that his patent of knighthood was confirmed at Lisbon, by the king of Portugal. The full title of this journal or itinerary, as given by the original translator, is as follows; by which, and the preface of the author, both left unaltered, the language and orthography of England towards the end of the sixteenth century, or in 1576, when Eden published his translation, will be sufficiently illustrated.

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