Marco Polo
translation: Henry Yule, Henri Cordier

THE TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO
Volume II.
complete book, e-book

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CHAPTER XXVII.

CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF TANA.

Tana is a great kingdom lying towards the west, a kingdom great both in size and worth. The people are Idolaters, with a language of their own, and a king of their own, and tributary to nobody.[NOTE 1] No pepper grows there, nor other spices, but plenty of incense; not the white kind however, but brown.[NOTE 2]

There is much traffic here, and many ships and merchants frequent the place; for there is a great export of leather of various excellent kinds, and also of good buckram and cotton. The merchants in their ships also import various articles, such as gold, silver, copper, and other things in demand.

With the King's connivance many corsairs launch from this port to plunder merchants. These corsairs have a covenant with the King that he shall get all the horses they capture, and all other plunder shall remain with them. The King does this because he has no horses of his own, whilst many are shipped from abroad towards India; for no ship ever goes thither without horses in addition to other cargo. The practice is naughty and unworthy of a king.

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-Tána, 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 Anc. 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 Tánasi, 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 11th 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 (...)

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