National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

432

MARCO POLO   BOOK III.

the use of it to have been of European origin and current at most among Oriental Christians and Frank merchants. The European confusion of India and Ethiopia comes down from Virgil's time, who brings the Nile from India. And Servius (4th century) commenting on a more ambiguous passage-

" Sola India nib ruin

Fert ebenum,"

says explicitly "India;;, onznem plagazzz /Ethiopia accipimzcs." Procopius brings the Nile into Egypt ËS 'Ivôwv ; and the Ecclesiastical Historians Sozomen and Socrates (I take these citations, like the last, from Ludolf), in relating the conversion of the Abyssinians by Frumentius, speak of them only as of the 'Iv.Mv TWV &vôor€pw, " Interior Indians," a phrase intended to imply remoter, but which might perhaps give rise to the term Middle India. Thus Cosmas says of China : " js evôor€pco, there is no other country " ; and Nicolo Conti calls the Chinese lizteriores Indi, which Mr. Winter Jones misrenders " natives of Central India." * St. Epiphanius (end of 4th century) says India was formerly divided into nine kingdoms, viz., those of the (1) Alabastri, (2) Homeritae, (3) Azuzniti, and Dulites, (4) Bugaei, (5) Taiani, (6) Isabeni, and so on, several of which are manifestly provinces subject to Abyssinia.t Roger Bacon speaks of the " Ethiopes de Nubiâ et ultimi illi qui vocantur Indi, proper approxiznationezn ad Indian." The term India Minor is applied to some Ethiopic region in a letter which Matthew Paris gives under 1237. And this confusion which prevailed more or less till the 16th century was at the bottom of that other confusion, whatever be its exact history, between Prester John in remote Asia, and Prester John in Abyssinia. In fact the narrative by Damian de Goës of the Embassy from the hing of Abyssinia to Portugal in 1513, which was printed at Antwerp in 1532, bears the title " Leeatio Magni Indorum Iznperatoîis," etc. (Ludolf, Comment. p. 2 and 75-76 ; Epiph. de Geminis, etc., p. 15 ; R. Bacon, Opus Majus, p. 148 ; 11lcztt. Paris, p. 372.)

Wadding gives a letter from the Pope (Alex. II.) under date 3rd Sept. 1329, addressed to the Emperor of Ethiopia, to inform him of the appointment of a Bishop of Diagorgan. As this place is the capital of a district near Tabriz (Dehi-Khorkhán) the papal geography looks a little hazy.

NOTE 2.—The allegation against the Abyssinian Christians, sometimes extended to the whole Jacobite Church, that they accompanied the rite of Baptism by branding with a hot iron on the face, is pretty old and persistent.

The letter quoted from Matt. Paris in the preceding note relates of the Jacobite Christians " who occupy the kingdoms between Nubia and India," that some of them brand the foreheads of their children before Baptism with a hot iron;' (p. 302). A quaint Low-German account of the East, in a MS. of the 14th century, tells of the Christians of India that when a Bishop ordains a priest he fires him with a sharp and hot iron from the forehead down the nose, and the scar of this wound abides till the day of his death. And this they do for a token that the Holy Ghost came on the Apostles with fire. Frescobaldi says those called the Christians of the Girdle were the sect which baptized by branding on the head and temples. Clavijo says there is such a sect among the Christians of India, but they are despised by the rest. Barbosa, speaking of the Abyssinians, has this passage : ` ` According to what is said, their baptism is threefold, viz., by blood, by fire, and by water. For they use circumcision like the Jews, they brand on the forehead with a hot iron, and they baptize with water like Catholic Christians." The respectable Pierre Belon speaks of the Christians of Prester John, called Abyssinians, as baptized with fire and branded in three places,

* Reinaud (Abulf. I. 8i) says the word Interior applied by the Arabs to a country, is the equivalent of citerior, whilst by exterior they mean ulterior. But the truth is just the reverse, even in the case before him, where Bolglzár-al-Daklzila, ` Bulgari Interiores,' are the Volga Bulgars. So also the Arabs called Armenia on the Arases Interior, Armenia on Lake Van Exterior (St. Martin, I. 3i).

t Thus (2) the Homeritae of Yemen, (31 the people of Axum, and Adulis or Zulla, (S) the Bugaei or Bejahs of the Red Sea coait, (6) Taiani or Tiamo, appear in Salt's Axum Inscription as subject to the King of Axum in the middle of the 4th century.