IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Cathay and the Way Thither : vol.2 |
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Citation Information
NOTICES OF THE LAND ROUTE TO CATHAY, ETC. 295
duced to Genoese weight, and that the sommo should weigh eight and a half ounces of Genoa, and should be of the alloy of eleven ounces and seventeen deniers to the pound.'
You may reckon also that in Cathay you should get three or three and a half pieces of damasked silk2 for a sommo ; and from three and a half to five pieces of nacchetti3 of silk and gold, likewise for a sommo of silver.
1 I.e., 7 pennyweights of alloy to 11 oz. 17 dwts. of pure silver. Giov. da Uzzano in the next century speaks of the sommi from Caffa as being of both gold and silver, the alloy of the latter being 11 oz. 13 to 15 dwt. (p. 188).
2 The word is cammocca. This the dictionaries generally are good enough to tell us means " a kind of cloth." Mr. Wright on Mandeville says it is " a rich cloth of silk mentioned not unfrequently in medieval writers," but this is still very unprecise. I had arrived at the conclusion that it must be damasked silk, and I now find this confirmed by Ducange (Gloss. Grcecitatis, etc.) : "rcaj.wu âs, Pannus sericus more damasceno con-
fectus." Moreover the word is almost certainly the Arabic kimkhwcc,
" Vestis scutulata Damascena" (Freytag). I suppose that the kinkhwdb of Hindustan, now applied to a gold brocade, is the same word or a derivative.
3 In a later chapter describing the trade at Constantinople, our author details " silk velvets, cammucca, maramati, gold cloth of every kind, nacchetti and nacchi of every kind, and likewise all cloths of gold and silk except zendadi (gauzes)." The nacchi and nacchetti appear to have been cloths of silk and gold. The former (nakh) is so explained by Ibn Batuta, who names it several times. It was made, he tells us, at Nisabur in Khorassan, and in describing the dress of the princess of Constantinople he says she had on " a mantle of the stuff called nakh, and also nasij." These two, however, were apparently not identical, but corresponded probably to the nacchi and nacchetti of Pegolotti. For Polo in the Ramusian version has " panni d'oro nasiti (nasici?) fin, e nach, e panni di seta." And in the old version printed in Baldelli Boni's first volume this runs "rcasicci, drappi dorati ;" whilst Rubruquis mentions nasic as a present given him by Mangu Khan. I know not what maramati is, unless it should rather be maramali for makhmal, velvet. (Ibn Batuta, ii, 309, 388, 422; iii, 81; Polo in Rarnus., pt. i, c. 53; Il .31ilione, i, 57; Rub., p. 317.)
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