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| Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
108. CAMBALUC 141
wrong in thinking it to be Mongol; it has not even been borrowed by the Mongols, and no text in the Mongol language gives it; in Turkish, baliq is already known in the runic inscriptions, and is listed for « town » in Kasyari (BROCKELMANN, 29) ; it has survived to the present day. Ragidu-'d-Din's mss. hesitate between .11> ;.,1;. Han-baiiq and &.Jl, 3l>- Han-balïy (Bl, Ii, 456) ; Wassâf (Ha2, 45) writes Jl. 3 - Jan-baliy. We find « Cambaliech » in Montecorvino (Wy, 347) as well as in the much-debated letter attributed to Peregrinus de Castello (Wy, 367). Odoric's form is « Cambalec » ( Icy, 471, 475, 478), which also appears in the Emperor's and the Alans' letters of 1336 (cf. Y', III, 181, 183), and in Marignolli (Wy, 526, 529) ; hence
« Chambalech » on the Catalan Map ( Y', i, 301). Andrea da Perugia writes in Latin
« Cambaliensis civitas » (Wy, 374). Pegolotti's very bad transcriptions provide us with a « Gamalec » (Y1, III, 149). The name has long survived among Turkish- and Persian-speaking
peoples. In 1419-1421, Sah-Rub's envoys always speak of Liti Han-baiïq, but the Zafär-
namäh has «Han-baiïq» (cf. Not. et Extr. XIV, i, 395, 401, 500). The ms. Sino-Uighur Vocabulary of the Ming dynasty in the School of Oriental Studies (« Kö Kwô ï yü ») writes ?j 4E1 Han-pa-li = Han-baiïq, with its Chinese equivalent, Pei-ching, Peking. Cf. also the «Kambaluk» and «Chaan balug » in WITSEN (1785), I, 277, 495. For other Mussulman writers who, from the middle of the 13th cent. down to the end of the 17th, have named Han-baiïq or Han-baliy, see Fe, 711. In the first years of the 17 th cent., Matteo Ricci was able to satisfy himself that the Mussulmans from the West still called Peking by the very name Polo had used (cf. TACCHI-VENTURI, Opere stor. del P. M. Ricci, i, 296-297, 377; II, 352). The name has now been forgotten for more than a century; the itinerary copied in 1812 by Mir 'Izzet Ullah has
already Bäjin, the only form known to-day in Chinese Turkestan (JRAS, No. xiv, 308,
where the name is miswritten and misread « Pebin » ; LE STRANGE [ Nuzhat al-Qulûb,
transi., 235, 250] is mistaken when he thinks that the name of Peking could already have existed in the first half of the 14th cent.). In the transcriptions of Han-baiïq, the variations between °baluc and °balec are due to the peculiar nature of Turk. i (see «Achbaluch »).
It would most probably be wrong to suppose that the name of Han-baiïq, as applied to Peking, originated when Qubilai moved the capital there in 1260. The Syriac work on Mar Yahbalaha III speaks of Bar Çauma's father who lived «in the town called Han-baiïq, that is to say the Royal town of the land of the East »; and the time when that father could have lived in Han-baiiq is 1240-1250 at the latest. Of course, it might be suspected that the author, writing at the beginning of the 14th cent., used the name current in his own age; but there are no traces in the work of a modernized nomenclature (see CHABOT, Hist. Mar Jabalaha III, 9, and Mo, 94). The name of Han-baliq appears also in the Tables of Nasiru-'d-Din At-Tûsi (cf. Fe, 358), who is said by FERRAND to have died in 1261; but FERRAND is wrong; the death of Nasiru-'d-Din occurred in June 1274 (cf. BROWNE, Lit. Hist. of Persia, II, 485). In fact, I think that the name of Han-balk' was given in Central Asia to Peking while it was still the capital of the Chin, that is prior to 1215, and had perhaps then been in use already for a whole century. It is met with even earlier, but as an epithet for another capital (= Ch. ti-ch'êng, « Imperial City ») : in the Uighur translation of Hsüan-tsang's biography, Han-baligï is the designation of the then capital Ch'ang-an (Hsianfu) ; cf. A. VON GABAIN, Die uig. Uebersetzung
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