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. 297
spices, cotton, madder, and suet, cheese, flax, and oil, honey, and the like, sell by the great pound.
Silk, saffron, amber wrought in rosaries and the like, and all small spices sell by the little pound.
Vair-skins by the 1000 ; and 1020 go to the 1000. Ermines by the 1000 ; 1.000 to the 1000.
Foxes, sables, fitches and martens, wolfskins, deerskins, and all cloths of silk or gold, by the piece.
Common stuffs, and canvasses of every kind sell by the picco.
Tails are sold by the bundle at twenty to the bundle. Oxhides by the hundred in tale, giving a hundred and no more.
Horse and pony hides by the piece.
Gold and pearls are sold by the saggio.l Wheat and all other corn and pulse is sold at Tana by a measure which they call cascito.2 Greek wine and all Latin wines are sold by the cask as they come. Malmsey and wines of Triglia and Candia are sold by the measure.
Caviar is sold by the fusco, and a fusco is the tail-half of the fish's skin, full of fish's roe.3
1 The saggio in Italy was A of a pound, i. e., of an ounce (Pegol. p. 31). Here it was a little more, as may be deduced from its relation to the sommo opposite.
2 Cascito must have been miswritten for cafiço. There is a measure called kafiz in Arabic, and specified as cafizium in some of the treaties (Not. et Ext., xi, 30). Hammer-Purgstall mentions kofeiz as a standard measure at Tabriz, which is doubtless the same (Gesch. der Golden Horde, etc., p. 225). And Pegolotti himself has cafisso as a Moorish measure. Indeed, I need not have sought this word so far away. It is still used in Sicily as Cafisu for an oil measure, the fifth part of a Cantaro. It also exists in Spanish as Cahiz, and will be found in Ducange in a variety of forms, Cafflum, Caficium, Cafisa, Cappitius, etc.
3 Caviare is now exported in small kegs. Fusco is perhaps just fish. In the dialect of the Goths of the Crimea that word was fisct according to Busbeck. The sturgeon of the Borysthenes are already mentioned by Herodotus as large fish without prickly bones, called antaccgii, good for pickling, and according to Professor Rawlinson caviare also was known to the Greeks as Tâpixos AvTarcaîov.
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