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
BY JOHN DE' MARIGNOLLI. 343
pepper is produced. Now this pepper grows on a kind of vines, which are planted just like in our vineyards. These vines produce clusters which at first are like those of the wild vine, of a green colour, and afterwards are almost like bunches of our grapes, and they have a red wine in them which I have squeezed out on my plate as a condiment. When they have ripened, they are left to dry upon the tree, and when shrivelled by the excessive heat the dry clusters are knocked off with a stick and caught upon linen cloths, and so the harvest is gathered.
These are things that I have seen with mine eyes and handled with my hands during the fourteen months that I
stayed there.' And there is no roasting of the pepper, as authors have falsely asserted, nor does it grow in forests, but
in regular gardens ; not are the Saracens the proprietors but the Christians of St. Thomas. And these latter are the masters of the public steel-yard, from which I derived, as a perquisite of my office as Pope's legate, every month a hundred gold fan, and a thousand when I left.2
can only say with Friar Jordanus, Wonderful!" For further remarks on Columbum, see note to Odoric, p. 71.
Probably the name should be rendered Columbus as in the only nominative I can find, viz. in Jordanus's letter at p. 227. But I have followed the French editor of Jordanus's Mirabilia in calling it Columbumu, and it is not worth while to alter what may have authority which I have overlooked.
1 Our author afterwards calls this time a year and four months.
As to the pepper, Fr. Jordanus, p. 27, and Ibn Batuta, iv, 77. Marignolli's denial of its growing in forests is probably a slap at the Beato Odorico (see p. 74 ante); yet up to the present century there was a tract on the Malabar coast called the Pepper Jungle" Buchanan's Christ. Resear., p. 111). Father Vincenzo Maria (Rome, 1672) still speaks of the Christians of St. Thomas as having the pepper chiefly in their hands. Dobner, Meinert, and Kunstmann all strangely misunderstand
qui habent stateram ponderis totius mundi," as if it meant something about the Christians having a right to an export tax on the pepper. Yet in this very Chronicle (Dobner, p. 164-5) they might have found a passage in which statera can mean nothing but a steelyard. It is in fact used for the Italian stadera. So in a correspondence quoted further on, one of the Florentine demands on the Sultan of Egypt is "che possino tenere stadere
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