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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.2 |
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Citation Information
MOE
396 MARCO POLO 1300K III.
NOTE 1.—The town of THÁNA, on the landward side of the island of Salsette, still exists, about 20 miles from Bombay. The Great Peninsular Railroad here crosses
the strait which separates Salsette from the Continent. .
The Konkan is no doubt what was intended by the kingdom of Thána. Albiruni speaks of that city as the capital of Konkan ; Rashiduddin calls it Konkan- Tdna, Ibn Batuta Kúkin- Tána, the last a form which appears in the Carta Catalana as Cucintana. Tieffentaller writes Kokan, and this is said (Cunningham's zinc. Geog. 553) to be the local pronunciation. Abulfeda speaks of it as a very celebrated place of trade, producing a kind of cloth which was called Tanasi, bamboos, and Tabashír derived from the ashes of the bamboo.
As early as the 16th year of the Hijra (A.D. 637) an Arab fleet from Oman made a hostile descent on the Island of Thána, i.e. Salsette. The place (Sri Sthánaka) appears from inscriptions to have been the seat of a Hindu kingdom of the Konkan, in the Ilth century. In Polo's time Thána seems to have been still under a Hindu prince, but it soon afterwards became subject to the Delhi sovereigns ; and when visited by Jordanus and by Odoric some thirty years after Polo's voyage, a Mussulman governor was ruling there, who put to death four Franciscans, the companions of Jordanus. Barbosa gives it the compound name of TANA-MAIAMBU, the latter part being the first indication I know of the name of Bombay (Mambai). It was still a place of many mosques, temples, and gardens, but the trade was small. Pirates still did business from the port, but on a reduced scale. Botero says that there were the remains of an immense city to be seen, and that the town still contained 5000 velvet-weavers (p. 104). Till the Mahrattas took Salsette in 1737, the Portuguese had many fine villas about Thána.
Polo's dislocation of geographical order here has misled Fra Mauro into placing Tana to the west of Guzerat, though he has a duplicate Tana nearer the correct position.
NOTE 2.—It has often been erroneously supposed that the frankincense (olibanum) of commerce, for which Bombay and the ports which preceded it in Western India have for centuries afforded the chief mart, was an Indian product. But Marco is not making that mistake ; he calls the incense of Western India brown, evidently in contrast with the white incense or olibanum, which he afterwards assigns to its true locality (infra. ch. xxxvii., xxxviii. ). Nor is Marsden justified in assuming that the brown incense of Tana must needs have been Benzoin imported from Sumatra, though I observe Dr. Birdwood considers that the term Indian Frankincense which occurs in Dioscorides must have included Benzoin. Dioscorides describes the so-called Indian Frankincense as blackish ; and Garcia supposes the name merely to refer to the colour, as he says the Arabs often gave the name of Indian to things of a dark colour.
There seems to be no proof that Benzoin was known even to the older Arab writers. Western India supplies a variety of aromatic gum-resins, one of which was probably intended by our traveller :
BOSWELLIA THURIFERA of Colebrooke, whose description led to a general belief that this tree produced the Frankincense of commerce. The tree is found in Oudh and Rohilkhand, in Bahár, Central India, Khandesh, and Ka! tiawár, etc. The gum-resin is used and sold locally as an incense, but is soft and sticky, and is not the olibanum of commerce ; nor is it collected for exportation.
The Coromandel Boswellia glabra of Roxburgh is now included (see Dr. Bird-wood's Monograph) as a variety under the B. thurifera. Its gum-resin is a good deal used as incense, in the Tamul regions, under the name of Kundrikam, with which is apparently connected Kundur, one of the Arabic words for olibanum (see eh. xxxviii., note 2).
Vateria Indica (Roxb.), producing a gum-resin which when recent is known as Piney Varnish, and when hardened, is sold for export under the names of Indian Copal, White Dammar, and others. Its northern limit of growth is North
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