employment for the native vessels, beyond what was required in the pearl fisheries and in the ordinary course of traffic.
A.D. 527-65
A.D. 535.
A.D. 150.
A.D. 1271-95.
Though from the age of Ptolemy the trade between
Western Europe and India was carried on by the
way of Egypt, Rome and Constantinople being alike
supplied by the agency of the merchants of Alexandria,
we have not, till the reign of Justinian, any further
information concerning the progress of the over-sea
trade, or of any discoveries with reference to the more
remote regions of the East. In the course, however,
of his reign, Cosmas (commonly called, from the
voyages he made, Indicopleustes, an Egyptian merchant),
went on more than one occasion to India; and
when, in after days, he renounced the pursuits of
commerce, and became a monk, he composed in the
solitude and leisure of his cell, several works, one of
which (his "Christian Topography") has been preserved.[1]
It is not, indeed, a work of any special
merit, consisting, as it does, chiefly of fanciful views
about the shape of the globe. With a condemnation of
the notions of Ptolemy, and of other "speculative"
geographers, it contains, however, much curious and
reliable information with reference to the countries
he had himself visited, and especially, to the western
coast of the Indian peninsula. Indeed, from the
time of the merchant Arrian to that of Marco Polo,
Cosmas, who traded on the coast of Malabar about
the middle of the sixth century, is the only writer of
note who gives any account of the maritime and
commercial affairs of India, during a period of twelve
centuries.
- ↑ This treatise of Cosmas exists in Montfaucon: Bibl. Nov. Patrum. ii. p. 336.
