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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
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CHAP. XVIII. THE CARAUNA ROBBERS
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correct, standing for the old Italian Scherani, bandits. (See Cathay, p. 287, note.)
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NOTE 4.—This is a knotty subject, and needs a long note.
The KARAUNAHS are mentioned often in the histories of the Mongol regime in Persia, first as a Mongol tribe forming a Tunzan, i.e. a division or corps of io,000 in the Mongol army (and I suspect it was the phrase the Tuman of the Karaunals in Marco's mind that suggested his repeated use of the number io,000 in speaking of them) ; and afterwards as daring and savage freebooters, scouring the Persian provinces, and having their headquarters on the Eastern frontiers of Persia. They are described as having had their original seats on the mountains north of the Chinese wall near Karaún jidun or Khidun; and their special accomplishment in war was the use of Naphtha Fire. Rashiduddin mentions the Karánut as a branch of the great Mongol tribe of the Kunguráts, who certainly had their seat in the vicinity named, so these may possibly be connected with the Karaunahs. The same author
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says that the Tuman of the Karaunahs formed the Injor peculium of Arghún Khan. Wassáf calls them " a kind of goblins rather than human beings, the most daring of all the Mongols " ; and Mirkhond speaks in like terms.
Dr. Bird of Bombay, in discussing some of the Indo-Scythic coins which bear the word Korano attached to the prince's name, asserts this to stand for the name of the Karaunah, " who were a Greco-Indo-Scythic tribe of robbers in the Punjab, who are mentioned by Marco Polo," a somewhat hasty conclusion which Pauthier adopts. There is, Quatremére observes, no mention of the Karaunahs before the Mongol invasion, and this he regards as the great obstacle to any supposition of their having been a people previously settled in Persia. Reiske, indeed, with no reference to the present subject, quotes a passage from Hamza of Ispahan, a writer of the loth century, in which mention is made of certain troops called Karáunalzs. But it seems certain that in this and other like cases the real reading was Kazáwinah, people of Kazvin. (See heiske's Constant. Porpizyrog. Bonn. ed. II. 674; Gottwaldt's Hanna Ispahanensis, p. 161 ; and Quatremèî e in/ A. sér. V. tom. xv. 173.) Ibn Batuta only once mentions the name, saying that Tughlak Sháh of Dehli was " one of those Turks called Karáunas who dwell in the mountains between Sind and Turkestan." Hammer has suggested the derivation of the word Carbine from Karáwinah (as he writes), and a link in such an etymology is perhaps furnished by the fact that in the 16th century the word Carbine was used for some kind of irregular horseman.
(Gold. Horde, 214 ; lick. I. 17, 344, etc. ; Erdmann, 168, 199, etc. ; f. A. S., B. X. 96 ; Q. R. 130 ; Not. et Ext. XI V. 282 ; I. B. III. 201 ; Ed. Webbe, his Travailes, p. 17, 159o. Reprinted 1868.)
As regards the account given by Marco of the origin of the Caraonas, it seems almost necessarily a mistaken one. As Khanikoff remarks, he might have confounded them with the Biluchis, whose Turanian aspect (at least as regards the Brahuis) shows a strong infusion of Turki blood, and who might be rudely described as a cross between Tartars and Indians. It is indeed an odd fact that the word Karáni (vulgo Cranny) is commonly applied in India at this day to the mixed race sprung from European fathers and Native mothers, and this might be cited in corroboration of Marsden's reference to the Sanskrit Karana, but I suspect the coincidence arises in another way. Karana is the name applied to a particular class of mixt blood, whose special occupation was writing and accounts. But the prior sense of the word seems to have been " clever, skilled," and hence a writer or scribe. In this sense we find Karáni applied in Ibn Batuta's day to a ship's clerk, and it is used in the same sense in the Ain Akbari. Clerkship is also the predominant occupation of the East-Indians, and hence the term Karáni is applied to them from their business, and not from their mixt blood. We shall see hereafter that there is a Tartar term Aîghzin, applied to fair children born of a Mongol mother and white father ; it is possible that there may have been a correlative word like Karáun (from Kard, black) applied to dark children born of Mongol father and black mother, and that this led Marco to a false theory.
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