国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

BY JOHN DES MARIGNOLLI.   377

That king also gave St. Thomas a perpetual grant of the public steelyard for pepper and all aromatic spices, and no

Apostles, ascribed to Abdias, Bishop of Babylonia, relate that before he visited that part of India where he was killed, he had in another region of India converted a king called Gundopharus, a king's name nearly identical with this (Gondophares), has in recent times become known from the Indo-Scythian coins discovered in N. W. India. The strange

legend ran that this king Gundaphorus sent to the West a certain merchant named Abban to seek a skilled architect to build him a palace.

Whereupon the Lord sold Thomas to him as a slave of His who was

expert in such work. After leaving Gundopharus Thomas went to the country of a certain King Meodeus (Mahadeva ?), where he was eventually

put to death by lances. The story which Marignolli tells of the great log

survived for many generations, and is related in much the same way by Maffei and by Linschoten towards the end of the sixteenth century, and

again by the Carmelite Padre Vincenzo late in the seventeenth. It wag

supposed to be alluded to among other things in the mystic inscription which surrounded the miraculous cross on St. Thomas's Mount. And

strange to say Gasparo Baldi relates something like a duplicate of the miracle which he declares he witnessed, and which occurred for the benefit of the Jesuits when in sore need of long beams for a new church at San Thomé.

The spot where Thomas is believed to have been slain is, according to Heber, at the " Little Mount," a small rocky knoll with a Roman

Catholic church upon it (now Church of the Resurrection"), and where

a footmark of the Apostle in the rock is I believe still exhibited, close to Marmalong Bridge, on the Sydrapetta river, adjoining the suburb still

called Mailapor. The " Great Mount" is an insulated hill of granite some

two miles further up on the south side of the river, with an old church on its summit, built by the Portuguese in 1651, but now the property of the

Catholic Armenians. I believe it is or was under the altar of a church on

the latter site that the miraculous cross existed which was believed to have been cut in the rock by Thomas himself, and to exhibit various

annual phenomena, sometimes sweating blood, which betokened grievous calamities. " These wonders began," says P. Vincenzo, with sancta sinaplicitas, " some years after the arrival of the Portuguese in India." Alexander Hamilton however says that tradition assigned the Great Mount as the scene of the martyrdom.

The Padre Vincenzo would not wonder if that were true" which John, Patriarch of the Indies, was said to have declared to Pope Calixtus, viz.,

that St. Thomas every year appeared visibly and administered the sacrament to his Indian Christians. John of Hese has got a story of this kind too.

In the beginning of the sixteenth century Barbosa found the church of St. Thomas half in ruins and grown round with jungle. A Mahomedan fakir kept it and maintained a lamp, Yet in 1504, which is several