1434 Read online

  At first sight, Islamic towns and cities appear chaotic to Western eyes, with their elaborate, twisting streets leading higgledy-piggledy in all directions. They had, however, a master plan. At “the centre of the Islamic city stands the Friday Mosque; to it and from it everything flows as if it were a heart.”10 Next to the mosque stands the madrassah, where Islamic law and theology are taught, the forerunner of the Western university. Around mosque and madrassah sprawls the bazaar with its khans and caravanserais where merchants rest, feed their camels, and store their goods in safety.

  Trade and religion go hand in hand under Islam, which affords merchants great prestige (Muhammad was one). The status of the merchant was evidenced by the distance of his shop from the Friday mosque: perfume, spice, and incense shops were nearest, followed by gold merchants and silversmiths. Cobblers were farthest away. Mosque and market were both within easy reach of the caravanserais.

  The central square played host to all manner of entertainment, resounding with the cries of snake charmers, bears, dancers, and storytellers. Radiating outward beyond the bazaar was a jumbled assortment of residential districts divided by race and religion. Surrounding them was a defensive wall (in Cairo it was Saladin’s) to keep out Mongols and robbers.

  At the center of medieval Cairo was the city’s Friday mosque, Al-Azhar, founded in 970, as soon as the enclosure walls of Al-Qahira were completed. It is perhaps the most prestigious mosque in the world and is connected to the world’s oldest university. For more than a thousand years Al-Azhar University has provided Muslim students from around the world with free board and a theological education focused on the Koran and Islamic law, logic, grammar, rhetoric, astronomy, and science.

  For centuries, the mosque on Fridays has been packed. As it overflows, men lay their mats outside on the pavement. They pray in uniform lines, rich and poor side by side, old men and young, golden cloaks next to dirty kashmaks. All men are equal in Islam; no boxes are reserved for the gentry. Inside, Al-Azhar resembles London’s Southwark Cathedral, though it is not quite as tall and rather more austere. Gowned students, seated between gray marble columns, are taught by a wizened imam perched in a high chair. (The gowns of Oxford and Cambridge were copied from those worn by Islamic students, just as our university “chair” is derived from the imam’s perch.)

  The Al-Azhar competes with the mosques of Sayyid Hasan, al-Ghoury, and Sultan al-Ashraf Barsbay—all within a stone’s throw. The Egyptian president worships at the Mosque of Al-Azhar. Their muezzins call the faithful to prayer five times a day. Traditionally, muezzins are chosen from the blind, who cannot see down into the houses where unveiled women are dressing.

  In the square, Cairo’s festivals, the moulids, are held and the Sufi brotherhood prays with banners and drums; music blasts all night long. Vast crowds come up from the delta for the holiday of Eid, congregating at the cafés around the square, each one favored by a particular delta village.

  One can readily understand why Cairo would have been a magnet for all peoples of Islam, including Zheng He and his fellow Muslims returning from Mecca. In broad terms, foreigners lived in Cairo, white native Egyptians, the fellahin, lived on the delta and in the Nile Valley. With the holiest mosque in the world situated next to the largest market in the world, the city had everything. Here they could study the Koran, sell their goods, and enjoy the city’s storied evening delights.

  Today, as in the Middle Ages, Cairo is a city of good-natured people living in close quarters, bustling and jostling from one corner to the next. To motorists and pedestrians making headway through the crowds, a few hundred yards can seem like a mile. Cairo’s population is polyglot, full of the offspring of Sudanese, Armenian, Jewish, Georgian, Persian, North African, and Indian merchants. Indeed, Egyptians intermarried with the descendants of conquerors and merchants to such an extent that today it is difficult to find a “pure” Egyptian.

  Zheng He’s sailors would have seen, alongside Al-Azhar Mosque, two imposing complexes: the madrassah and the Wikala of al-Ghouri, named after one of the later Mamluk sultans. Wikala is the Egyptian name for a caravanserai. Both caravanserai and madrassah complemented the mosque and were frequently funded by a charity, or wakf, set up by the sultan or a wealthy merchant.

  Cairo’s madrassah, typical of an early Islamic university, is a large, rectangular building with an open courtyard at its center, surrounded by broad cloisters. In the cloisters, small groups of students debate with teachers; great importance is placed on mental agility. While Europe stumbled through the Dark Ages, Cairo safeguarded the world’s largest library. Here, the great books of the ancients, including Aristotle and Plato, were stored before at last being summoned to aid the Enlightenment.

  In the caravanserai of al-Ghoury, merchants from China laden with gold, silk, and ceramics could rest in simple, clean surroundings, a stone’s throw from the cool mosque. In Zheng He’s time, there were eleven caravanserais in Cairo, twenty-three markets for international trade, fifty smaller markets (souks) for local trade, and eleven race courses.

  Al-Madkrizi gave a vivid account of life in the caravanserais in the 1420s. Every sort of spice was for sale, along with all manner of silks and more mundane goods—fruits, nuts, and jams galore. Merchants carried with them their chests of gold and silver, all their worldly wealth. Theft was common. The punishment (still enforced in Saudi Arabia) was severing of the right hand.

  In the late Middle Ages, Cairo was the world’s leading emporium for three of the most important commodities of international trade—gold, spice, and perfume. Cairo had become bullion capital of the world as a result of Islam’s expansion. Arab caliphs, needing ever more gold to lubricate trade, initially adopted Byzantine coins, overstamping them with the caliph’s head. After Arab armies overran North Africa, they captured the gold trade from Mali and Guinea, which had by far the largest gold seams.

  Arabs’ domination of the gold trade led to the gold dinar becoming the currency of Mediterranean trade. The rulers of Castile, Aragon, and León copied Almoravid dinars, which they called morbetinos.

  Cairo’s spice bazaar, the Khan el-Khalili, faces the Al-Azhar Mosque. It was built by a wealthy Mamluk of that name in 1382 and still teems with business six hundred years later. The most prestigious part of the bazaar, nearest the mosque, is where the fabled incense is found. Brought from the wadis of southern Arabia, these concentrated essences are sold by the ounce, diluted with alcohol one part to nine for perfume, one to twenty for eau de toilette, one to thirty for eau de cologne. Cairo’s shops still maintain the medieval tradition of selling perfumes in large bottles alongside herbs and spices, and Egypt remains a source for many of the essences used by French couture houses.

  In the Middle Ages perfume and spice were equally valuable. The spice trade with the East, transacted through Cairo, was the cornerstone of Venetian wealth.

  Europeans devoured spices, the better to make palatable their salted meat and dried fish. In addition to enlivening food, spices were extensively used by apothecaries. Purges were accomplished by cassia or rhubarb; theriac, made of an assortment of herbs and spices, was a panacea for ills ranging from constipation to fever and even the plague. Ginger jams were said to encourage the flow of urine. Cinnamon assisted menstruation and was valuable for windy colic; nutmeg relieved coughs and asthma. As Iris Origo points out in The Merchant of Predo, there was hardly an Eastern spice, however rare or expensive, that did not reach the cooking pots or medicine chests of Italian bankers and merchants.

  Walking outward from the spice market today, one encounters the brass and copperware shops, stacked with Arab coffeepots, water jugs, tabletops, coal scuttles, and trays. Tiny pieces of mother-of-pearl, bone, and ebony are inlaid in intricate mosaic patterns on wooden boxes. Although amber prayer beads are used to count the mercies of Allah, much as Catholics use rosaries, amber appears less valuable in the marketplace than copper.

  Farther out, there are leather and clothing stalls. Egyptian men, like their mediev
al predecessors, wear galabayas, collarless tunics resembling large, floppy nightshirts. (Caftans are the more colorful version, embroidered at the front and on the hems.) Women seek dowry dresses made by desert Bedouin. The market encompasses a world. Remarkably, almost everything sold here today was available to Zheng He’s sailors and Chinese merchants as they passed through Cairo in 1433. It is an easy passage downstream from Cairo with the current. Just north of Cairo the Nile divides, the Western Rosetta Channel leading to Alexandria, linked to the Nile by a canal. In Alexandria the Mamluk authorities insisted all passing ships deposited maps they had used for their journey. These were copied and the originals returned. That done, the Chinese drifted into the Mediterranean.

  II

  China Ignites the Renaissance

  7

  TO THE VENICE OF NICCOLÒDA CONTI

  In the Middle Ages, sea traffic between Egypt and Europe was determined by the geography of the Mediterranean.1 Surrounding the Mediterranean are mountain ranges—in the southwest the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, then moving clockwise, the Sierra Nevada in southern Spain; the Pyrenees; the French, Italian, and Yugoslav Alps; the mountains of Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey; and finally the Anti-Lebanon Range between Lebanon and Syria.

  These mountains dictate the Mediterranean climate. Between the September and March equinoxes, a high anticyclone builds over the Azores, allowing Atlantic depressions to rush through the Strait of Gibraltar and then scurry west to east, the length of the Mediterranean. As these warm, wet winds reach the cold mountains on the coast, they create blustery winds and rain. The mistral in France is perhaps the best-known, but every Mediterranean region has gusty wet squalls in winter that make sea voyages hazardous.

  The whole Mediterranean shares a common climate; wet winter is followed by calm, hot summer. As regular as clockwork, the sun moves north each year, carrying with it the anticyclone over the Azores until it stops opposite the Strait of Gibraltar. The wet Atlantic winds are now shut out of the Mediterranean, and the air is still. By July, the whole sea is flat as glass, without a breath of wind. Dry Saharan air marches north, the skies clear to infinity, and searing hot summer winds—typically the terral in southern Spain—blow across the coast. The three major seafaring powers of Europe—Aragon, Genoa, and Venice, exploited this geography to conduct trade with the east through Alexandria and Cairo. Venice and Genoa were entirely dependent on trade for their huge wealth. The Venetian ceremony of La Sensa, which takes place on Ascension Day, suggests just how passionately Venice embraced the sea.2

  The doge embarks at Saint Mark’s in his great gilded ship, the Bucintoro. Perched on a golden throne, he sits high above a crew of 150 oarsmen, who row across the lagoon to the Lido. The doge’s golden robes are embroidered with the Lion of Saint Mark’s and he wears a diamond-studded cap, la renza—the same hat worn by Chinese admirals in the early Ming. Silk standards flutter above his head. After a short service, the doge casts a golden ring into the lagoon. As it sinks through the azure sea he proclaims: “Mare, noi ti sposiano in segne del nostro vero perpetua dominio” (O Sea, we wed thee in sign of our true and everlasting dominion).

  By 1434, the marriage ritual was already more than four hundred years old. It originated when Pope Alexander III gave the doge a ring and told him: “Receive this ring as the symbol of your empire over the sea…. You and your successors be married to her each year, so that succeeding generations may know that the sea is yours, and belongeth to you as a spouse to a husband.”3

  Venice’s wealth was rooted in her capture of Byzantium. In 1204 a Crusade had been launched to take Jerusalem. Financing for the Crusade was hard to come by until the Doge Dandolo offered support—provided the Crusaders would capture Zara (contemporary Zadar in Croatia) on their way south. The Crusaders agreed, becoming mercenaries in the process.

  The temptation to capture Byzantium for Venice, as well, proved irresistible to the Crusaders, who initiated the sack of the Orthodox Christian capital by another Christian state.4 When Byzantium fell, her empire was divided amongst the victors. Venetian spoils, exemplified by the four bronze horses and marble on the façade of Saint Mark’s Basilica, included Byzantine islands and ports from the Black Sea through the Aegean to the Ionian Sea. Venetian galleys thus had friendly harbors all the way to Byzantium and Alexandria.

  Venice now controlled the Adriatic. In 1396, six years after she had defeated Genoa and fourteen years after the Cretan revolt, she acquired Corfu. To Venetians, Corfu was of vital importance due to its strategic location. Corfu became the fortified base from which Venetian galleys policed the strait leading to the Adriatic.

  Venice built lovely colonial towns on these Adriatic islands. Her ports, modeled in her own image, each with its campanile, cathedral, piazza, and evening promenade, line the Dalmatian coast. From Ulcinj in the south to Piran in the north, the ports of Bar, Dubrovnik, Korcula, Hvar, Split, Zadar, Rab, Krk, Pula, and Porec are sublime legacies of Venetian architecture. By 1433 they were havens for the armadas carrying ceramics, silk, and spices from Alexandria and Cairo to the warehouses of Venice. While the Slavic chants of Orthodox churches resound in the mountains, on the coast Sundays are punctuated by bells summoning Catholics to mass.5 Saint Jacob’s in Sibenik, Saint Mark’s in Piran, Saint Laurence’s in Trogir, and Our Lady’s in Rijeca are superb by any standard. They are among the sights that greeted Zheng He’s ships on their passage from Alexandria to Venice. Even with fifteen men to each oar it would have been a ten-day slog from Alexandria to Crete across an airless sea. Once in the Adriatic they would have picked up a light evening breeze blowing on shore. What a relief that would have been!

  I know those islands well following a visit in 1966. In December 1965 I had met Marcella; we became engaged in June and decided to take a holiday traveling through the Dalmatian islands to Montenegro and Serbia. In the four years before meeting Marcella I had been navigating officer of HMS Narwhal, a submarine. It was the eve of the cold war and our patrols were spent in the North. Winters were drab and cold; the sun shone for an only hour or so, at midday; most of the time one looked at ice, sea, and sky in everlasting shades of gray.

  In August 1966, Marcella, my uncle Edward, and I boarded a ferry in Venice bound for Dubrovnik, en route wending through the Dalmatian archipelago. We passed Marco Polo’s home on Korcula, Diocletian’s vast palace at Split, and honey-colored Hvar. The searing colors of azure sea and sky emphasized by the brilliant white Karst of the coastline, the red campanile towers, and the russet and gold of drying tobacco are etched on my brain and will remain with me all my life.

  We slept on the upper deck under the stars, swam off remote beaches watched only by seagulls, and feasted on local seafish washed down by Dingaz, a rough, full-bodied, almost black wine.

  The same idyllic scene would have greeted Zheng He’s sailors and female slaves as his junks rowed slowly up the coast. They would have seen the outlines of these mini “Venices” from miles out to sea, dotted along the coast all the way from Dubrovnik to Trieste to Venice itself. They would have noticed Diocletian’s enormous palace, Hvar’s spectacular harbor, and the glistening white fortress walls of Dubrovnik, and would have surely called at some of those ports.

  So in my view we should find evidence of Zheng He’s fleets’ visits in museums along the Dalmatian coast. Over the years, Marcella and I have visited the most likely museums—the old maritime school at Perast, the Matko family museum at Orebic, the Seamans’ Guild (Museum) in the Gulf of Kotor, Ivo Vizin’s Museum at Prcanj, and the Maritime Museum in Kotor itself. We found nothing.

  However, my interest was renewed and sharpened in 2004 after meeting Dr. Gunnar Thompson in Seattle. He had brought Albertin di Virga’s world map to my attention. This map had been found in a secondhand bookshop at Srebrenica near the Dalmatian coast. It was dated to between 1410 and 1419 and showed the world from Greenland to Australia, including Africa, accurately drawn decades before Europeans knew Africa’s shape and centuries before they knew the
shape and relative positions of China, Japan, and Australia. The map had been authenticated by Professor Franz Von Wieser, the leading cartographer of his day. It must have been copied from a non-European map, and in the opinion of Dr. Thompson and me, it could only be a copy of a Chinese map that had been published before 1419. Moreover, Dr. Thompson had found evidence that ships from the Dalmatian coast had sailed to North America in the 1440s and settled near the Roanoke River in Virginia—the famous “Croatans.” 6 In my view, Dalmatian ships would not have visited America fifty years before Columbus unless they had maps showing the way—once again pointing to Zheng He’s fleets having visited Dalmatia and leaving maps. By 2005 we had sold Serbo-Croat literary rights to 1421, which I hoped would lead to new evidence of Chinese visits along the coast, but alas, none emerged.

  Then out of the blue on October 21, 2007, I received two e-mails from Dr. A. Z. Lovric, a geneticist whose old family name was Yoshamya (names were forcibly changed after the Ottoman invasions in the sixteenth century). Dr. Lovric told me that his distinguished predecessor Professor Mitjel Yoshamya had published a lengthy paper (of nearly twelve hundred pages) claiming that a Dalmatian admiral, Harvatye Mariakyr, had sailed the world before Ottoman invasions. He had done so having received world maps from a Chinese admiral who had visited the Dalmatian coast. Copies of the e-mails are included on the 1434 website.

  Here is a summary of the points made in Dr. Lovric’s e-mail:

  A legend persists among island people off the Adriatic that prior to the Ottoman invasions (prior to 1522) foreign sailing ships manned by “Oblique-eyed yellow Easterners” (in old Dalmatic: pashoglavi zihodane) visited the Adriatic.

  After the oriental naval visits the medieval Dalmatian admiral Harvatye Mariakyr with seven Adriatic ships reciprocated the visit by sailing through the Indian Ocean (Khulap-Yndran) to the Far East to Zihodane in Khitay (Cathay).