Text of: Supriya Chaudhuri, ‘India Recognita: The Travels of Nicolò de’ Conti’

in Oriente e Occidente nel Rinascimento, ed. Luisa Secchi Tarugi (Milan: Istituto
Francesco Petrarca, 2009)

INDIA RECOGNITA: THE TRAVELS OF NICOLÒ DE’ CONTI

Supriya Chaudhuri

Jadavpur University

The Dominican preaching friar, Jordanus Catalani, who visited South India in the early

14th century and later became Bishop of Columbum (Quilon), wrote of it in traditional

terms as a place of marvels: <<Mirabilia sunt omnia in ista Yndia, est enim vere unus

alter mundus.>>1 Jordanus’ editor, Christine Gadrat, notes that this sense, not of a new

world (as in the later case of the Americas) but of another world, its existence attested

from antiquity, but challenging the precarious certainties of faith and experience in

Europe, is strongly present in the deepening European acquaintance with India and the

far east from the thirteenth century onwards. Gadrat emphasizes both this experience of

alterity and the use of verbs of entering or penetrating an unknown interior, the sense of

crossing not just one, but a succession of internal boundaries.2 For Jordanus the first

visible mark of this alterity is the darkness and relative nakedness of the population:

<<Et incipit in hac prima Yndia quasi alter mundus. Nam homines et mulieres nigri sunt

omnes, nec habent pro indumento nisi pannum unum bombacinum circumcirca renes

1
JORDANUS CATALANI de Sévérac, Mirabilia descripta, composed c. 1329, ed. Christine GADRAT,
Une image de l’orient au XIVe siècle. Les Mirabilia Descripta de Jordan Catala de Sévérac (Paris,
École de Chartes, 2005), p. 257. [Everything is marvellous in this India; it is in truth another world.]
Translations mine unless otherwise indicated. The text, which exists in a unique manuscript in the
British Library (BL Additional 19513, fol. 3-12) was published in the Recueil de Voyages et de
Mémoires, publié par la Société de Géographie, t. IV (Paris, Arthus-Bertrand, Libraire de la Société,
1839) which served as the basis of the edition with translation by Henry YULE (London: Hakluyt
Society, 1863). For Jordanus, see also Jacques QUÉTIF, ed. Scriptores ordinis praedicatorum (Paris,
1719), I. 549f.
2
GADRAT, pp. 11-12: <<Jordan l’écrit tout à fait clairement: en pénétrant en Inde mineure, il entre dans
un autre monde..>>
ligatum, et residuum super nudum dorsum extensum.>>3 Though there is a fair amount

of precise natural and ethnographic observation in his account, the rhetorical imperatives

of Jordanus’ text, with its iteration of the exclamation <<Mirabile!>> prompts him

towards a catalogue of marvels, in the spirit of Vincent of Beauvais’ entry <<De India et

eius mirabilibus>> in his Speculum Maius.4 The <<marvellous>> becomes a discursive

means whereby real and imagined phenomena can be assimilated into the same universe.

For early European visitors, thus, India was a heterotopic space whose extent was

unknown, locally describable in terms of people, customs, religion, forms of government,

trade practices, commodities, flora and fauna, but appearing to offer a limitless

hinterland to the determined journeyer, as the accounts of Marco Polo served to prove.

The problem was that this space, one of indeterminate geographical extent and extreme

cultural diversity, was not classifiable under any one set of rules. So long as it could be

treated simply as a space of alterity, it could remain an assemblage of strange facts and

curious customs: but the pressures of missionary and mercantile activity from the

fourteenth century onwards increasingly required the <<space>> of India to be

intellectually ordered or managed. Travel itself involved some form of mental mapping

and psychological preparation. For early humanist scholars, the task of organizing this

space in the imagination required that it be compared to the accounts of the ancients,

Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus or Pliny, as their texts became available; that it

should meet the traditional demand for marvels and curiosities; but most of all, that it

should satisfy a rational and empiricist curiosity. The India that is thus created for the

3
JORDANUS ed. GADRAT, p. 247. [And in this first India there begins, as it were, another world. For the
men and women are all black, and have for covering nothing but a strip of cotton tied around the loins,
with the rest of it thrown over the naked torso.]
4
See VINCENT OF BEAUVAIS, Speculum Maius (Douai, 1624: repr. Graz, Akademische Druck, 1964-68,
4 vols) vol I, Speculum naturale, Lib. XXXII cap. 3.
European imagination is both strange to sense and accessible to reason, both marvellous

and knowable, both distant and reachable.

Much of this tension between opposites, I would suggest, is conveyed in the title

given to the first printed version of the fifteenth-century merchant Nicolò de' Conti's

account of his travels in India, India Recognita. This act of naming, emphasizing

something that is known again, rather than known for the first time, was itself

retrospective. Conti’s text had been produced at the height of the Florentine Renaissance,

through an act of co-operation between a Venetian merchant with long experience of

eastern trade routes, and a humanist scholar as interested in the variety of human

behaviour and the vicissitudes of human fortunes as he was convinced of the importance

of textual records. Compelled to <<turn Turk>>, or convert to Islam, while passing

through Mecca during his return from the East, Conti had applied for absolution to Pope

Eugenius IV when he returned to Italy in 1441, and was questioned regarding his travels

by the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini. Conti appears to have accompanied the group

of representatives of eastern Churches to the Council of Florence, which had reached an

agreement with the Armenians in 1439 and followed up this success with other meetings

in the early 1440s. His account came to form most of the fourth book of Poggio’s De

varietate fortunae, completed by 1448. The interview with Conti is there supplemented

by two more accounts; the report of the visit of a Nestorian envoy to Pope Eugenius,

briefly describing a kingdom near Cathay, and other grand cities; and a conversation with

certain Ethiopians, whom Poggio questioned closely regarding the source of the Nile.

The fourth book of De varietate fortunae enjoyed an independent popularity.

Poggio mentions it separately in a letter to Richard Petworth dated 12 July 1448: ‘Liber
de rebus Indie a me editus est quartus eorum, quos conscripsi De varietate fortunae’.5 Of

the 59 manuscript copies of Poggio’s dialogue examined by Ouiti Merisalo for his

critical edition of 1993,6 24 are of Book IV alone (including four late manuscripts which

Merisalo excludes from consideration), and there were at least two manuscript

translations of Book IV into Tuscan and Venetian in the 15th century. It was also

translated into Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English. In 1492, the humanist Cristoforo

da Bollate, senator to the Duke of Milan, ordered a separate printing of Book IV under

the title India Recognita, as a guidebook for one Pietro Cara, senator to the Duke of

Savoy, who was preparing to travel from Turin to India.7 Two copies of this edition are

preserved, one in the British Library and the other in the Harvard University Library.

Whether Pietro Cara made his journey, and whether he took the slender quarto volume

with him, recommended to him by its editor as the testimony of an earlier Italian

traveller, remains unknown. The loving care with which this little book was printed, by

Ulrich Scinzenzeler in Milan, and presented, suggests the desire both to draw upon a

<<history of travel>>, and to textualise its products in the new space of the easily

transportable printed book. But it was clearly designed for limited circulation, and when

Giovanni Battista Ramusio came to edit Conti’s travels for the first volume of his great

mid-sixteenth century anthology Delle navigationi et viaggi in 1550, he had to base his

Italian text on a Portuguese translation of 1502. The introduction to this translation

appears to have put into circulation the tale that Conti had to recount his travels to

5
See Poggio BRACCIOLINI, Lettere, ed. H. HARTH, 3 vols (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1984-87),
vol. III, p. 71.
6
Poggio BRACCIOLINI, De uarietate fortunae, ed. O. MERISALO (Helsinki: Annales Academiae Scientarum
Fennicae (ser. B, t. 265), 1993), pp. 25-73. See also M. LONGHENA, <<I manoscritti del IV libro del De
Varietate Fortunae di Poggio Bracciolini>>, Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana (1925), pp. 191-
215.
7
India Recognita. Christoforus bullatus ducis isubrium senator Petro Carae ducis alobrogum
Senatori.s.[…] Poggii Florentini de uarietate Fortunae (Milan: Uldericus Scinzenzeler, 1492). See sig.
a ii r-v for da Bollate’s introduction.
Poggio as a penance imposed by the Pope. Ramusio repeats it uncritically in his own

preface:

<<& perciò che per scapolar la vita fu costretto à rinegar la fede

Christiana, però poi ch’ei fu tornato, bisognò ch’egli andasse al sommo

Pontefice per farsi assoluere, che allhora era in Firenze, & si chiamaua

Papa Eugenio IIII. che fu dell’anno 1444. il qual dopo la benedittione, gli

dette per penitenza, che con ogni verità douesse narrar tutta la sua

peregrinatione ad un valent’huomo suo segretario detto messer Poggio

Fiorentino, il quale la scrisse con diligenza in lingua latina.>>8

The Englishman John Frampton, who included Conti’s travels as an appendix to

his late 16th century translation of Marco Polo (1579), used the Castilian translation of

1503.9 Moreover, another, rather different version of Conti’s experiences is recounted in

the Andanças e Viajes of the Andalusian knight and crusader-pilgrim Pero Tafur, who

met Conti at Mount Sinai in 1437 during his return to Europe from Asia, and whose

travel-account remained in manuscript until the 19th century.10 Nicolò de’ Conti has also

achieved an unfortunate notoriety through Gavin Menzies’ sensational and ill-founded

8
See Giovanni Battista RAMUSIO, ed. Primo volume, & Terza editione, delle Navigationi et Viaggi
raccolto gia da M. Gio. Battista Ramusio (Venetia: Nella Stamperia de Giunti, 1563), fol.338r, in
Ramusio’s preface to Poggio’s account (fols. 338v-345r).
9
John FRAMPTON, The Most Noble and Famous Travels of Marcus Paulus, one of the Nobilitie of the
State of Venice, unto the East Partes of the World, as Armenia, Persia, Arabia, Tartary, with many
other Kingdomes and Provinces (London: R. Newbery, 1579). Frampton’s translation of Conti, tucked
away at the back of this volume, appears also to have passed largely unnoticed; the 1625 Purchas uses a
very abridged translation from the Italian. On Frampton’s career (he was a trader who was arrested by
the Inquisition in Spain and tortured by being thrice stretched on the rack, but ultimately escaped to
England to begin a new career as a translator of Spanish texts), see Donald BEECHER, <<The legacy of
John Frampton: Elizabethan trader and translator>>, Renaissance Studies, 20 (2006), pp. 320-39.
10
Pero TAFUR, Andanças e viajes de un hidalgo español, ed. M. Jiménez de la Espada, rev. F. López
Estrada (Barcelona: Ediciones El Albir, S. A., 1982)
claims for his role as the principal disseminator of Chinese navigational discoveries to

the West, in 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (2002).11

The title India Recognita suggests a version of the modern tourist guide, on the

lines of medieval itineraries for pilgrims to the Holy Land. Petrarch, we may recall,

composed one such itinerary, an exhaustive, detailed description of a pilgrimage route

that, fearful of shipwreck and seasickness, he never actually undertook.12 Whether or not

Pietro Cara actually referred to Conti for his travels, we may suppose that for him as for

Petrarch in the Itinerarium, the journey was conceived as a prolonged act of recognition,

as <<familiar>> landmarks and signposts appeared before the traveller’s gaze. Indeed,

Poggio’s transcription of his conversation with Conti was also intended as a confirmation

of knowledge already gained from the ancients, or as a correction of tales circulated by

unreliable witnesses. In this respect it appears to be distinct from the literature of

discovery, the news from the new, rather than the other, world that became available

shortly after, at the close of the fifteenth century. Yet a close examination of the

rhetorical strategies of both types of text reveals more similarities than differences, and

we must remember that Columbus certainly expected to recognize the lands he hoped to

reach, carrying with him on his voyage a copy of the <<book>> of Marco Polo (that is,

the Liber diversorum, a Latin translation of the Divisament dou monde) as well as the

1477 edition of the Historia rerum ubique gestarum of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (later

the humanist Pope Pius II), which directly incorporates information taken from Conti’s

account in Poggio’s fourth book. Both works, closely annotated throughout in the

11
Gavin MENZIES, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (London: Bantam Books, 2002). The
American edition, 2003 (New York: Harper Collins) is called 1421: The Year China Discovered
America.
12
See Theodore J. CACHEY, Jr. ed. Francesco PETRARCA, Petrarch’s Guide to the Holy Land.
Itinerarium ad sepulchrum domini nostri Yehsu Christi. Itinerary to the Sepulcher of our Lord Jesus
Christ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). Facsimile edition of Cremona, Bibl.
Statale, Dep. Libr. Civica ms. BB.1.2.5.
admiral’s own hand in an attempt to persuade himself that his voyages had indeed

opened up the sea-route to India, are preserved in the Colombina at Seville, and it was on

the promises of these texts that Columbus founded his profoundly material ‘expectation

of plenty’: that is, the gold, silk and spices of Cathay. It is well known that he mistook

the Cariba or Caniba for the servants of the Great Khan.13

Indeed, Columbus’ copy of the Historia rerum contains a transcription,

apparently in Columbus’ own hand, of the Florentine mathematician Paolo Toscanelli’s

Latin letter of 25 June, 1474 to a Portuguese canon, Fernam Martins of Lisbon, advising

him on a western sea-route to the spice islands and Cathay, and providing a navigational

chart which unfortunately miscalculates their distance from Europe. More than a century

ago, Henry Vignaud argued that the letter was a forgery, but Italian and Spanish versions

of it were circulated quite early in Columbian literature, and Vignaud’s scepticism may

be excessive.14 The letter (preserved only through Columbus’ copy, if genuine) cited not

only the embassy sent by Kublai Khan in 1267 with Nicolò and Maffeo Polo (father and

uncle of Marco), but also a later ambassador to Pope Eugenius IV, with whom Toscanelli

had conversed at length regarding the greatness of the cities, rivers, and bridges of

Cathay:

<<Etiam tempore Eugenii venit unus ad Eugenium, qui de benevolentia

magna erga Christianos affirmabat. Et ego cum eo longo sermone locutus

13
See The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492-1493, abstracted by Fray
Bartolome de LAS CASAS, transcribed and trans. O. DUNN & J. E. KELLEY (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1989), p. 216.
14
See H. VIGNAUD, Toscanelli and Columbus: The Letter and Chart of Toscanelli on the Route to the
Indies by Way of the West, Sent in 1474 to the Portuguese, Fernam Martins, and Later on to
Christopher Columbus. A Critical Study on the Authenticity and Value of these documents and the
sources of the cosmographical ideas of Columbus, followed by the various texts of the letter, with
translations (First French ed., 1901; Revised Eng. ed. London: Sands & Co., 1902), pp. 147-68, 269-
73.
 sum de multis, de magnitudine aedificiorum regalium et de magnitudine

fluviorum, latitudine et longitudine mirabili, et de multitudine civitatum in

ripis fluviorum, ut in uno flumine 200 circiter civitates sint constitutae, et

pontes marmorei, magnae latitudinis et longitudinis undique columnis

ornati.

Haec patria digna est ut a Latinis quaeratur non solum quia lucra

ingentia ex ea capi possunt auri et argenti, gemmarum omnis generis et

aromatum quae nunquam ad nos deferuntur, verum propter doctos viros,

philosophos et astrologos peritos, et quorum ingeniis et artibus illa potens

et magnifica prouincia gubernatur ac etiam bella conducuntur.>>15

Toscanelli knew Poggio well, and he could indeed have met Nicolò Conti in Florence,

but the reference here may be, not to Conti, but to the Nestorian envoy also mentioned by

Poggio in the fourth book of his De varietate fortunae. There is no evidence for any

further role played by Conti in New World adventures, despite Gavin Menzies’ claims.

The fourth book of Poggio’s De varietate fortunae is a document of humanist

inquisitiveness on the one hand, and of what would today be called ‘travel knowledge’

on the other. It presents an image of India which, going beyond medieval catalogues of

‘mirabilia’, mediates between classical authority, late medieval travel, and the more

extensive engagement with the subcontinent soon to be provided by Portuguese

15
From corrected Latin text of letter in VIGNAUD, pp. 299-301. [Vignaud’s translation, pp. 284-87: In
the time of (Pope) Eugenius, also, one came to Eugenius and spoke of (their) great goodwill towards
Christians. And I held speech with him for a long time on many things, on the greatness of the royal
buildings, and on the greatness of the rivers of wondrous breadth and length, and on the multitude of
cities on the banks of the rivers; and how on one river there are established about two hundred cities,
and marble bridges of great breadth and length adorned with columns on every side. This country is
worthy of being sought by the Latins, not only because from thence may be obtained vast gains of gold
and silver and gems of every kind, and of spices that are never brought to us; but also because of the
wise men, learned philosophers and astrologers, by whose genius and arts that mighty and magnificent
province is governed, and wars are also waged.]
navigational adventures and Jesuit missions to the east. While it initiates a Renaissance

discourse concerning cultural diversity, it also represents, to some extent, a missed

opportunity. Despite the significance of early encounters with other worlds lying to the

east and to the west of Europe, the cultural material thus gained is not immediately

absorbed into the phenomenon that we call the <<renaissance>>, and a couple of

centuries must elapse before colonial, imperial and philological ambitions transform

what had presented itself more neutrally to humanist curiosity.

It is this curiosity, eager and extensive, that sets the fourth book of De varietate

fortunae apart from its predecessors. There is only the most cursory of explanations for

the inclusion of Conti’s story (followed by the report of the Nestorian envoy and the

Ethiopians from whom Poggio seeks confirmation of Ptolemy’s account of the sources of

the Nile), in a work about the vicissitudes of fortune. Poggio was not a proto-Orientalist,

certainly not a fifteenth-century Athanasius Kircher, and was not animated by a special

interest in the orient. His first three books use the form of the humanist dialogue. The

first is about the destructive power of time, reflecting on the ruins of Rome. The second

and third books are devoted to contemporary political misfortunes (such as those of

Richard II of England and Joanna of Naples) as well as the troubled incumbency of the

Colonna Pope Martin V. Poggio was well-qualified to comment: he had himself entered

the Papal Curia in 1403 and was quickly named apostolic scriptor under Boniface IX,

remaining in that post for fifty years, except for a period of five years (1418-23) spent in

England in the service of Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester. At the age of seventy-

three he became chancellor of the republic of Florence. As a humanist scholar, his career

was that of a historian, antiquarian, polemicist (especially against Valla and Filefo), and

he is perhaps best-known for his Facetiae (1451). Encouraged by Coluccio Salutati at an

early age to pursue the quest for lost texts, Poggio spent his life as an assiduous hunter-

out and copyist of forgotten manuscripts, to the extent that he was accused in the 19th

century of having forged the Annals of Tacitus.16 He wrote nearly six hundred letters to

friends and contemporaries, the largest group, and the first to be made into a collection,

being addressed to his close friend, Niccolò de’ Niccoli of Florence. Many of these,

written to Niccolò from England, speak of frustrating searches for texts and manuscripts

in the monastic libraries, and of his antiquarian love of ancient sculpture and exact

images of the classical gods. In 1430, for example, he writes of his excitement at having

acquired, through an intermediary, three marble heads of Juno, Minerva and Bacchus,

apparently by Polycleitus and Praxiteles.17

At the same time, Poggio appears to have shared the geographical interests of his

contemporaries in Florence,18 writing in the first few pages of his De infelicitate

principium (1440) of examining the Geography of Ptolemy (i.e. the Byzantine geography

derived from Ptolemy that was brought to Italy by Manuel Chrysoloras after 1397 and

later translated into Latin), in the library of Niccolò de’ Niccoli.19 In his letter to Henry

the Navigator he congratulates the Portuguese prince on extending the frontiers of

contemporary knowledge of distant lands and peoples.20 A pragmatic, empiricist

curiosity does therefore seem to drive his scholarship, and in a significant essay,
16
By John Wilson ROSS, in Tacitus and Bracciolini: The Annals Forged in the XVth Century (London,
1878)
17
BRACCIOLINI, Lettere, ed. HARTH, vol. I, p. 195 (23 September 1430): ‘tria capita marmorea Policleti
et Praxitelis, Iunonis scilicet, Minerve, et Bacchi’.
18
See the catalogue prepared by S. GENTILE, Firenze e la scoperta dell’America. Umanesimo e
geografia nel ’400 Fiorentino (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1992), and M. MILANESI, ‘La rinascita della
geografia dell’Europa’, in S. GENSINI, ed. Europa e Mediterraneo tra Medioevo e prima età moderna:
l’osservatorio italiano (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1992).
19
Poggio BRACCIOLINI, De infelicitate principium, ed. D. Canfora (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e
Letteratura, 1998), pp.7-8. The passage is cited in Poggio BRACCIOLINI, De l’Inde: Les Voyages en
Asie de Nicolò de’ Conti. De varietate Fortunae, Livre IV, ed. with commentary and translation by M.
GUÉRET-LAFERTÉ (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 13-14. All citations of Poggio’s account of Conti are
from this edition.
20
See text of letter in GUÉRET-LAFERTÉ’s edition, pp. 182-87, extracted from BRACCIOLINI, Lettere, ed.
HARTH vol. III, pp. 88-90.
Frederick Krantz cites critical opinion regarding Poggio’s <<historical and social

realism>>, and his tendency to <<view reality, past and present, in terms of concrete

particulars>>, so that <<one major result is a kind of integration of all human experience,

an implicit assumption of the secular relatedness and comparability, indeed the

interchangeability, of that experience.>>21 But Krantz does not discuss the De varietate

fortunae at all; his observations are centrally tied to the Historia Florentina, though it

would have been interesting to examine his premises in terms of the possibilities of

cross-cultural comparison opened up by Conti’s account.

Using the terms of the title retrospectively given to Poggio’s fourth book, India

recognita, we might ask what kind of <<rediscovery>> of India is taking place here.

Poggio makes no use of the kinds of geographical knowledge circulating in the late

middle ages, and available in great medieval encyclopedias such as the Speculum maius

of Vincent of Beauvais. He does not mention 13th century accounts of India such as those

of Odoric of Pordenone and – above all – Marco Polo. It is ironic that in later centuries,

Conti’s account, as recorded by Poggio, is used principally as a sort of corroboration or

correction of Marco Polo, and is therefore tagged on to translations of the latter, as in the

Spanish translation and in Frampton’s English version. A drastically abridged text of

Conti appears in the 1625 Purchas, and the compiler is properly contemptuous both of

the inadequacy of the account and its mangling of place-names, a frequent criticism

levelled at Poggio. What Poggio would have been anxious to check against Conti’s

narrative would be the information obtained from classical writers such as Diodorus

Siculus, Strabo and Pliny, though the texts of the first two, who use Megasthenes’

account of India (and indeed Poggio was to translate Diodorus), may have come into his
21
Frederick KRANTZ, <<Between Bruni and Machiavelli: history, law and historicism in Poggio
Bracciolini>>, in P. MACK and M. JACOB, ed. Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 121-22.
hands only after the interview with Conti. Whether he was at all interested in more recent

travel accounts remains unknown, though the pains he appears to have taken in

interrogating other eastern delegates suggests that he had considerable empirical

curiosity.

In his brilliant and searching account of Conti’s travels, Joan-Pau Rubiés places

the classical accounts against Poggio’s treatment of Conti, arguing for the emergence in

Poggio of a comparatist ethnography far removed from classical universalism, the ‘single

process of civilization described by Diodorus’.22 What is particularly interesting is that,

compared with the account Conti apparently gave to the credulous Pero Tafur, where the

Prester John is repeatedly invoked, Poggio’s transcript is sober and discriminating, with

no references to the Prester John at all. Vives Gatell compared the two, even

considering, but dismissing, the possibility that Tafur had completely fabricated the

meeting with Conti at Mount Sinai in 1437.23 Rubiés too offers a close comparison of the

two accounts, concluding that there are abundant indications of Poggio’s editorial

<<control>> of the information he obtained from Conti.24 Moreover, the completely

different contexts of the two meetings, with the experienced Conti dominating the

exchange with Tafur, but presumably somewhat in awe of the Papal secretary, would

explain the altered nature of the communication itself.

As we have noted, Poggio used the form of the humanist dialogue in his first

three books, but this fails to serve him in Book IV, which falls into a different structure:

first the account itself, followed by the answers elicited from Conti in response to

22
Joan-Pau RUBIÉS, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes,
1250-1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 104.
23
See José VIVES GATELL, <<Estudio y descripción de roma>>, in TAFUR, Andanças e Viajes, pp. 57-
77.
24
See RUBIÉS, pp. 117-123.
Poggio’s interrogation. While Conti’s experiences may indeed, as Poggio points out,

illustrate the vagaries of fortune, it appears that he is more interested in a story of cultural

diversity. The story of the narrative as penance, moreover, finds no place in the text.

‘Turning Turk’, or embracing Islam from motives of expediency, was not unknown

amongst European merchants in Asia during this century or thereafter. Poggio has no

special criticism to make of Conti on this score. His text speaks not of penance but of

desire, of the eagerness of the humanist scholar to learn at first hand about the diversity

of peoples, and to prepare a textual record of this relation for posterity:

<<Hunc ego audiendi cupidus (multa enim ab eo iam dicta praesenseram

cognitione digna), et in doctissimorum uirorum coetu, et domi meae

percunctatus sum diligenter plurima, quae operae pretium uisum est, ut

memoriae et litteris traderentur.>>25

What drives this curiosity is to some extent also a humanist preoccupation with the

verification of sources: Poggio recognizes that by comparison with the detail and

presumed accuracy of Conti’s eyewitness account, the stories of the ancients about India

appear like fables:

25
BRACCIOLINI, ed GUÉRET-LAFERTÉ, De l’Inde, p. 78. [Being desirous of hearing him (having learnt
that he had already recounted many things worth knowing) I interrogated him carefully, not only in the
presence of an assembly of learned men, but also in my own house, on a great many subjects that were,
it seemed to me, worth the trouble of being transmitted to memory and writing.]
 <<Multa tum a ueteribus scriptoribus, tum communi fama de Indis

feruntur, quorum certa cognitio ad nos perlata arguit quaedam ex eis,

fabulis quam uero esse similiora.>>26

Faced with a record of travel spanning over twenty-five years, Poggio attempts to order it

within two broad sections, the first arranged in the form of a journey, a geographical line

extended through space, and the second arranged topically, as answers to specific

questions concerning ‘the life and customs of the Indians’. Given that the idea of India

included at a rough estimate everything from East Africa to China, it is worth noting how

individual travellers offer different divisions of this geographical extent into First,

Second and Third, Major and Minor Indias, no demarcation exactly tallying with

another. For Jordanus, India Minor extends along the western coast to Malabar, India

Major indefinitely from Malabar eastward to Cambodia and beyond, and India Tertia is

east Africa.27 Poggio records Conti’s India, like Gaul, as being divided into three parts,

arranged roughly from west to east: the first extending from Persia to the Indus, the

second from the Indus to the Ganges (i.e. modern India), and the third, all that lies

beyond. Civility increases the more one moves inward, the inhabitants of the further

India (i.e. Cathay or China) being, by repute, most polite, wealthy, humane and refined:

<<Indiam omnem in tres diuisam partes: unam a Persis ad Indum flumen;

ab eo ad Gangem alteram; tertiam ulteriorem, quae reliquis est opibus,

humanitate, lautitia longe praestantior, uita et ciuili consuetudine nobis

26
Ibid. p. 76. [Many things are reported of the inhabitants of India, whether by the ancient authors, or by
common repute, but the certain knowledge that we have since gained, shows that some of them resemble
fables more than truth.]
27
See Henry YULE, ed. and trans. Mirabilia Descripta. The Wonders of the East, by Friar Jordanus, of
the order of Preachers and Bishop of Columbum in India the Greater (London: Hakluyt Society,
1863), pp. 11-12n.
 aequalis. Nam et domos habent admodum sumptuosas, et perpolita

habitacula, et mundam supelectilem, et cultiori uitae indulgent, procul ab

omni barbarie et feritate; perhumani homines ac mercatores opulentissimi,

adeo ut aliquis quadraginta propriis nauibus quaestum faciat, quarum

quinquaginta milibus aureis extimatur.

Hi soli more nostro mensis et mappis argenteis insuper uasis in

edendo utuntur, cum reliqui Indi supra terram stratis tapetis edant.>>28

The association of civility with furniture and table manners has resonances for a different

cultural history, but it is likely that Conti’s high regard for China is the product of some

contact with Chinese merchants and explorers in these very same seas during the

fifteenth century, the voyages of Zheng He that are recorded by Ma Huan and Fei Xin,

for example.

But Conti probably never reached China. The journey described in Poggio,

presumably stitched together from a number of separate trips, approaches India from the

Persian Gulf, following the western coastline southwards from Cambay, turning inland

towards the great kingdom of Vijayanagara, arriving in Coromandel and setting sail for

Sri Lanka. From there Conti goes to Sumatra, later proceeding north to Tenasserim and

Bengal, from where he follows the Ganges northwards. Later he returns to the Bay of

Bengal, and travels to Arakan, reaching the Irawaddy river and Burma, from where he

28
BRACCIOLINI, ed GUÉRET-LAFERTÉ, De l’Inde, p. 134. [India as a whole is divided into three parts;
one from Persia to the river Indus, the second from there to the Ganges; and the third beyond, which far
surpasses the rest in wealth, humanity and magnificence, and is equal to us in mode of life and
governance. They have truly sumptuous houses, and polished residences, and household goods of great
refinement, and lead cultivated lives, far from all barbarity and savagery; for they are courteous people
and extremely rich merchants, to the extent that one of them has forty ships for his own trade, each
valued at 50,000 pieces of gold.
They are the only people of India who like us, eat off tables and tablecloths, on which they
place dishes of silver, for all the other Indians eat on a mat placed on the ground.]
again goes south to Pegu and Indonesia. Later, he returns to the Malabar coast, and

leaves India again by way of Cambay. During his return to Europe by way of Cairo, he

encounters Pero Tafur, in 1437, at Mount Sinai. On the whole the <<map>> of India

provided by this journey is reasonably accurate, except for Poggio’s notorious

identification of ancient Trapobana with Sumatra rather than Sri Lanka. Conti’s most

striking observations of Indian life and customs, laying the foundation for comparative

ethnography, are of the great kingdom of Vijayanagara in central southern India, studied

through its representations in European travel-writing by Joan-Pau Rubiés. It is in the

context of this description that we must place Conti’s accounts of Hindu idolatry, the

customs of the Brahmans, the place of priests whom he calls Bachales, widow-burning,

and the willing sacrifice of devotees especially under the wheels of a sacred chariot.

Many of these items are familiar from earlier travel-accounts as from classical sources,

and it seems likely that Conti felt obliged to mention them, and Poggio to record them.

The Brahmans and their philosophers are a favourite theme not only in the writings of

the ancients, but in medieval accounts of the meeting of Alexander and the sage

Dandamus; the gymnosophists and the Brahmans illustrate one version of the

contemplative life for Petrarch in De vita solitaria.29 In addition, there are specific

descriptions of flora and fauna, commodities and gems, clothes and ornaments, cities and

kingship.

Despite Poggio’s efforts at organization, the material remains obstinately diverse:

the total impression, however, is that of a succession of social forms and habitations

which demand individual, precise, and detailed consideration. It is this sense of an alien

but self-sufficient and logically ordered space that is the most remarkable aspect of

29
See Francesco PETRARCA, Prose, ed. G. Martellotti, P.G. Ricci, E. Carrara, and E. Bianchi (Milan-
Naples: Ricciardi, 1955), pp. 510-21.
Conti’s account of India. To some extent the description does become like a catalogue,

reminiscent of the list of marvels in Jordanus, though freed from the discursive impetus

to wonder. The need to compile and quantify, to identify each place with strange

creatures and stranger habits, becomes part of the logic of description, since this is not a

narrative of travel so much as it is a report on what India ‘contains’. Even where we find

extended descriptions, as in the accounts of widow-burning or the capture of elephants,

there is a strong sense of the description as a quantifiable unit, part of the traveller’s

inventory, as it were. In fact Conti’s account of how elephants are captured in Macinus

(Burma) is astonishingly similar to the description in Jordanus:

<<Elefantes autem capi hoc maxime modo asserit, in quo et cum Plinio

sentire uidetur. Feminae domitae in siluas abactae reliquuntur, quoad

siluestres cum his (solus autem solam appetit) consuescant elefanti. Tum

feminas paulatim pascendo in locum paruum moenibus septum deduci.

Duas ingentes esse portas dicit, altera ingressum, altera exitum patere. Ea

priorem ingressa, relicto elefante, ulteriore egreditur porta, quae et

anterior e uestigio exterius obserantur.>>30

Though Poggio mentions Pliny (who describes the capture of elephants rather

perfunctorily in the Natural History, VIII.8), Conti’s account is closer to (though shorter

than) Jordanus’ detailed description:

30
BRACCIOLINI, ed GUÉRET-LAFERTÉ, De l’Inde, p. 104. [He said that they captured the elephants in
the following manner, which agrees with Pliny. The tame female elephants are allowed to go into the
woods and left there until the wild elephants are acquainted with them; for the male consorts with only
one female. The females are gradually brought, grazing, into a narrow walled space. He said that it had
two great doors, one to enter by, and one to exit by. The female enters at the first gate, leaving the
male, and goes out by the second; both doors are then shut from the outside.]
 <<Capiuntur autem mirabili modo. Nam fiunt muri fortissimi quadrati,

ubi sunt porte multe, et de grossis lignis fortissimis fiunt porte elevate, et

habetur una elephanta femella et docta, que ducitur prope locum ubi

veniunt ad pascendum elephantes, et monstratur sibi ille quem volunt

capere, et dicitur sibi quod tantum faciat quod eum adducat ad dominum;

que vadit circumcirca illum. Et tantum facit eum fricando et lingendo,

quod ducit eum secum et intrat cum eo primam portam, quam custodes

immediate desuper dimittunt. Deinde, immediate cum elephas vertit se,

elephanta intrat aliam, que immediate clauditur sicut prima. Et sic elephas

remanet captus inter duas portas.>>31

Given the unlikelihood of textual transmission, it appears that both Jordanus (who

locates this practice in Champa, probably Cambodia) and Conti are drawing upon an

established local description, which Poggio characteristically compares to the classical

authority, Pliny.

Poggio’s account of Conti’s travels has been examined in a number of historical

and cultural contexts, notably by Joan-Pau Rubiés in his illuminating study, Travel and

Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250-1625. As he

points out, even <<as late as 1574 European observers, having had a long history of

contact with the subcontinent and its peoples, acknowledged the difficulty of providing a

31
JORDANUS ed. GADRAT, p. 258. [And the mode of taking them is wonderful. Enclosures are made,
very strong, and of four sides, wherein be many gateways, and raised gates, formed of very big and
strong timbers. And there is one trained female elephant which is taken near the place where the
elephants come to feed. The one which they desire to catch is pointed out to her, and she is told to
manage so as to bring him home. She goeth about him and about him, and so contriveth by stroking
him and licking him, as to induce him to follow her, and to enter along with her the outer gate, which
the keepers incontinently let fall. Then, when the wild elephant turneth about, the female entereth the
second gate, which is instantly shut like the first, and so the [wild] elephant remaineth caught between
the two gates.] Eng trans. from YULE, ed. and trans. Mirabilia Descripta, p. 38.
unified image of India that made sense of its diversity>>.32 This was so even for so

authoritative a representative of early Jesuit interest as Alessandro Valignano, in the

reports he compiled and sent back to the Jesuit General in Rome.33 Hindu customs,

languages and religion are studied by Jesuit missionaries from the 16th century onwards,

but even they see the wisdom of limiting their observations to specific regions, and in

fact are commonly inclined to prefer the more unified cultures of China and Japan.

Rubiés comments that <<there was no clear, coherent image of Indian civilization in

sixteenth-century Europe – not even a simple, easily recognizable stereotype>> and

speaks of the difficulty faced by Europeans in <<obtaining a focused image of Indian

civility in a world not of one but many ‘others’>>.34 The one exception that Rubies notes

is the kingdom of Vijayanagara, known as Bizenegalia, Bisnagar or Narsinga, and

featuring on European maps of India from an early period, and he therefore makes it his

chief study. Yet Rubiés is also generally interested in the process of formation of an

empirical geography based on eyewitness accounts as well as to the development of

Renaissance ethnology, or the understanding of non-Europeans by Europeans, and refers

to questions surrounding the <<place of India in this cultural process>>. Citing the 15th

century humanist Flavio Biondo’s reconstruction of Roman past as an example of the

<<picture of a distant world no longer accessible to direct observation and retrieved

through physical remains, texts and inscriptions>>, he notes that <<it was precisely

within accounts of human diversity that the Renaissance antiquarian and the Renaissance

historian more fully met>>, and observes:

32
See RUBIÉS, p. 6.
33
See Alessandro VALIGNANO, Historia del principio y progreso de la Compañia de Jesús en las
Indias Orientales, 1542-64 ed. J. Wicki (Rome: Insitutum Historicum S. I., 1944)
34
See RUBIÉS, p. 11.
 <<Renaissance cosmography was in fact a very flexible genre with a mixed

genealogy, combining ancient geography (dwelling on the diversity of places,

climates and peoples), medieval mirabilia (organizing strange natural phenomena

in a theological world-view), and the trader’s manual (with economic and

navigational information).>>35

In this context, it is important to note not just the manifest impossibility of

<<containing>> India within a single narrative account that Poggio transmits from Conti,

but the equally stringent efforts to impose some sort of plan or pattern upon this

fortuitous encounter. Conti’s voyage and land travel are structured as a succession of

cities, at the same time as India itself is divided into ‘partes tres’. Poggio fails to

recognize the continuity between Conti’s text and that of Marco Polo, but it is clear that

both may have drawn on a common storehouse of tales of the East disseminated by Arab

and Persian travellers.

But Poggio’s own interest in Conti’s travels requires to be understood in relation

to his humanist concerns, and the question we need to ask is related to the fate of the

<<India>> that was thus recognised. First of all, we may note the intense Renaissance

curiosity regarding the gods of the gentiles (as manifested for example in Petrarch’s

Africa, in Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, or L. G. Giraldi’s De Deis

Gentium) and the serious effort to recover the authentic forms of the Greek and Roman

gods. Despite the Church’s pious horror of idolatry, the physical appearances of the

pagan idols remains a subject of deep fascination in Renaissance iconology. The parallel

between ancient and contemporary gentilism, though not much developed until the

35
See RUBIÉS, pp. 27-28.
researches of Athanasius Kircher in the 17th century, is always present as an example.

There are numerous descriptions in Conti of idols in temples, and of the sacrifices and

feasts offered to them. Moreover, magic continues to be a source of enduring fascination,

and this may explain an otherwise pointless tale recounted by Conti about his sailors,

describing a ritual involving drinking blood from neck of a cock. Some details here

resemble the magical practices of contemporary Europe. If Conti demonstrates a

specifically mercantile mentality, it is through his quantification of facts: the thousands

of wives belonging to the king, the numbers that are to be burnt with him, and so on. But

he also seems to have possessed a degree of ethnographic curiosity, as shown in his

distinction between idolatrous priests, the bachali, who do not eat meat, especially that of

the ox, and have only one wife (who is burnt with her dead husband), and the wise

philosophers, the brahmans. Conti takes the claims of oriental sages seriously, saying

that he saw one who was 300 years old. His long experience of travel in the East, and his

acquaintance with Arab traders, perhaps induces an awareness that the European sense of

superiority is unjustified: Indians have the calendar, coinage, military technology, paper

and writing, languages, slavery, justice – and of course wealth. Nevertheless, he shows

no special admiration for the lands and peoples he has visited, allowing Poggio to edit his

narrative into a descriptive catalogue rather than the record of a journey, although its

formal structure is certainly based on spatial movement. Poggio’s curiosity is intense and

insatiable; it leads him on from Conti to the Nestorian envoy and the Ethiopians. But the

weariness he refers to at the end of his discourse (<<Plura etiam relata satietatis causa

omisi>>)36 does indeed threaten to overcome the reader, faced with an assemblage of

facts which are only very thinly associated with the imagined experience of travel.

36
BRACCIOLINI, ed GUÉRET-LAFERTÉ, De l’Inde, p. 178.
 The usefulness of Conti’s account, for early Renaissance Europe, was based on

the paradox described in Petrarch’s Itinerarium: << mirum dictu, nisi quia passim multa

que non vidimus scmus, multa que vidimus ignoramus>>.37 To know India – to

recognise India – in terms of a collection of surprising phenomena was not really to

know India at all. What Conti actually knew or experienced, with his wife and children

accompanying him on his long travels, remains unexplored in Poggio’s transcript. While

it certainly suggests the beginnings, as Rubiés so persuasively urges us to believe, of

comparative ethnography, as well as a genuine curiosity regarding customs and forms of

government in alien cultures, there is little development in the narrative itself. The hero

of Rubiés’ book is a much later, independent traveller of the seventeenth century, Pietro

della Valle. The fifteenth century encounter of merchant and humanist, at the height of

the Florentine Renaissance, an encounter that might indeed have produced something of

profound importance for humanist culture, leaves little by way of a humanist legacy.

Perhaps this was because Poggio, despite his curiosity, his diligence, and his labour, was

more interested in re-cognising India, seeing it as a collection of phenomena that could

be ticked off on a mental map, than as a civilization that might repay new enquiry – even

discovery. The encounter was, thus, a missed opportunity for humanist scholarship,

leaving the field open for more practical and material acquisitions.

The information that Conti brought home to Italy was quickly incorporated into

the Genoese ‘elliptical’ map of 1457, as well as the Historia rerum of Aeneas Sylvius

Piccolomini. Travel literature, soon to become a well-recognised (and practically useful)

genre with printed compilations of voyages from the earliest years of the sixteenth

century, readily absorbed Poggio’s fourth book as an invaluable compilation of facts. But
37
PETRARCH, Itinerarium, 1.0, ed. CACHEY, p. 76. [A marvelous thing to say, if it were not for the fact
that we sometimes know many things that we have never seen and many things that we have seen we
do not know]. Trans. CACHEY, p. 77.
the humanists, overtaken by their hermetic and cabalistic enthusiasms, signally failed to

pursue the possibility of developing these beginnings in comparative religion and

ethnography further. What prospered was cartography and the practical ends it served,

trade and conquest. In 1618, the English clergyman Edward Terry, chaplain to the Sir

Thomas Roe, the East India Company’s ambassador at the court of the Mughal emperor

Jahangir, recorded the incident of his master’s presenting the emperor with his own copy

of Mercator’s Cosmographia. The gift was deliberately intended to show Jahangir that he

was not, as he thought, lord of the whole world. Disappointed with this cartographic

revelation, the emperor snubbed the tradesman by returning his gift. The clergyman

comments:

<<And the Truth is, that the Great Mogol might very well bring his Action

against Mercator and others who describe the world, but streighten him very

much in their Maps; not allowing him to be Lord & Commander of those

Provinces, which properly belong to him.

But it is true likewise, that he, who hath the greatest share on the face of

the Earth, if it be compared with the whole world, appears not great.>>38

Cartography, the <<new science>> of the Renaissance, <<straightens>> and therefore

lessens the apparent extent of India in the map of the world (in a world map using

Mercator’s projection India appears smaller than Terra del Fuego). India, or the three

Indias, is no longer a limitless extension of desire into space. Once mapped and known,

its cartographic reduction is a significant prelude to its annexation in material terms.

38
Edward TERRY, A Voyage to East-India (London: T.W. for J. Martin and J. Allstrye, 1655), pp. 368-
69.