(1.) “the city of Lambe, in a forest called Lambor.”—Pepper was
cultivated in Malabar, the country indicated by these two names, long
before Schiltberger’s time. Kazvini, who died in 1283, Aboulfeda and
Ibn Batouta, all mention its produce, and Giovanni de’ Marignolli,
who visited Malabar in 1348, describes the cultivation of pepper in
pretty much the same terms as does our author, equally refuting the
story that the black colour was owing to smoke employed to drive away
serpents. We are informed by this author of the existence of many
Christians of St. Thomas in the country, and that there was a Latin
church dedicated to St. George in the town of Columbus, doubtlessly the
Kollam of the Arabs (Peschel, _Gesch. d. Erdkunde_, 162, note 3), the
Kuilon of the Chinese, called Coilum by Marco Polo, Chulam by Benjamin
of Tudela, Kaalan by Haythoun, Palombo, Alembo, Polumbrum by Oderic
and Mandevile, and Koulem by the natives. These names have nothing in
common with Koulouri, where the Russian merchant Nikitin spent five
months, but they somewhat assimilate that of Colanum taken in 1503
by the Portuguese, who stated that this town on the coast of Malabar
was reputed to be the most ancient and the richest in India (Maffei,
_Hist. Ind._, i, 52, xii, 289). Colanum may have been one of the places
mentioned by Schiltberger, the other being Calicut, touched at by Vasco
de Gama in 1498.
The colonisation of the Christian communities seen by the Portuguese
at the south-west extremity of the Deccan, dates from the earliest
centuries of our era. Neander says (_Allg. Gesch. d. christlichen
Relig. und Kirche_, I, i, 114) that the Syriac-Persian community on the
coast of Malabar owes its origin to St. Thomas, although its existence,
according to Cosmas “Indicopleustes”, cannot be traced earlier than the
6th century. Gregory of Nazianzus asserts (_Orat._, 25) that the Gospel
was preached in India by the apostle St. Thomas, who was murdered at
a place near Madras called Mailapur, on the Coromandel Coast, the
Maabar of Marco Polo, and identical with Mirapolis, where Giovanni de’
Marignolli tells us the apostle was buried. We are scarcely encouraged
to look for the forest of “Lambor” in the province of Maabar, because
there happened to be indications of Christian churches, rather than on
the coast of Melibar or Malabar, where the produce of pepper in ancient
times is fully established.—BRUUN.
(1A.) Friar Jordanus, 1333 (_Hakluyt Soc. Publ._, 27), indignantly
denies that fire was placed under the pepper trees, and is satisfied
that the fruit turns black simply upon coming to maturity. Oderic
(Hakluyt _Voyages_, ii, 160), also a predecessor of Schiltberger,
repeats the statement that in the kingdom of Minibar where pepper
grows, fires are made with the object of burning up the serpents, that
the people might gather at the harvest without injury to themselves.
Oderic estimated the circuit of the forest at an eighteen days’
journey, and the two cities in it, not named by our author, he calls
Flandrina and Cyncilim. At the south end of the forest stood a city
called Polumbrum, noticed in the foregoing note, and at a distance of
ten days’ journey was the kingdom of Mobar, where lay interred the body
of St. Thomas.
“It is seventeen hundred and forty years ago”, said the papa or
priest at Cacador to Buchanan in 1800, “since a certain saint named
Thomas introduced the Nazareens; he landed at Meliapura, and took
up his residence on a hill near Madras, now called after his name”
(_Journey from Madras_, London, 1807). There he performed a miracle
annually, says another authority, until English heretics came into
the neighbourhood. St. Thomas afterwards made a voyage to Cochin, and
near that place established a church which became the metropolitan; he
returned to Meliapura and there died, or, according to others, was put
to death. It appears that a bishop of India was present at the Council
of Nice, A.D. 325, and in the following century the Christians on the
coast of Malabar received the accession of a bishop of Antioch, who was
accompanied by a small party of Syrians. That Christians in Malabar
were numerous at the time Schiltberger obtained his information is most
probable, because Portuguese historians relate that in the year 1503
they possessed upwards of one hundred churches, those in the interior
refusing to conform to Rome (Assemanus, _Bibliot. Orient._, iv, 391
_et seq._; M. Geddes, _The Hist. of the Church of Malabar_, 1694;
Gardner, _Faiths of the World_, etc., ii, 900; see also G. B. Howard,
_Christians of St. Thomas and their Liturgies_, 1864; Yule’s _Marco
Polo_, ii, 341 _et seq._).—ED.
(2.) “the juice of an apple which they call liuon.”—There can scarcely
be a doubt that this was the lemon, called nimbouka in Sanscrit;
neemon, leemon in Hindostani, and lemonn by the Arabs, a fruit with
which Schiltberger could scarcely have been familiar in his own
country, or in those parts of Asia Minor, Central Asia, and even
Egypt, through which he travelled. The lemon, brought from India by
the Arabs about A.D. 912, was first planted at Oman; then at Basra in
Irak; afterwards in Syria, where the plant became common, whence it
was introduced into Palestine and Egypt. Jacques de Vitry includes
the lemon tree with others he saw for the first time when in the Holy
Land in the 13th century: “sunt ibi speciales arbores tam fructiferæ
quam steriles” (_Gesta Dei per Francos_, etc., lxxxvi); from which it
might almost be inferred that the Crusaders, who are supposed to have
introduced this plant into Europe, did not do so until after Jacques de
Vitry wrote. The genus, however, could not have been entirely unknown
in the West, it being recorded in _Chronica Montis Cassiniensis, Pertz
Scr._, 7, 652, that when the prince of Salerno in the year 1000 (1016?)
was besieged by the Arabs, forty Norman knights who passed that way on
their homeward journey from the Holy Land, delivered him. Upon taking
their leave, the knights were accompanied by ambassadors from the
prince, who were bearers of presents of the “poma cedrina (citrina?),
amigdalas quoque et deauratas nuces”, and a message to the Norman
people, inviting them to come to so beautiful a country and help him
to defend it (Abd-Allatif, S. de Sacy edition, 115–117; Makrizi in
Quatremère; _Journ. Horticultural Society_, ix, 1855; Risso et Poiteau,
_Hist. et Culture des Orangers_, Paris, 1872; Hehn, _Kulturpflanzen und
Hausthiere in ihrem Uebergang aus Asien nach Griechenl. und Ital._,
Berlin, 1877).
Lemon-juice was employed at Ceylon as protection against the numberless
land-leeches that seized upon the bare legs of the natives in the
lowlands (Ibn Batouta, _Lee edition_, 188; Knox, _Hist. of Ceylon_,
etc., I, iv, 49), precisely the sort of country where the vine
pepper—Piper nigrum—grows to best advantage, viz., on level ground
along the banks of rivers and rivulets (Simmonds, _Tropl. Agriculture_,
476). In his notice on “Sylan”, Friar Oderic says that the people who
dive into a lake infested with horse-leeches, for the purpose of
recovering precious stones, “take lemons, which they peel, anointing
themselves thoroughly with the juice thereof, that so they may dive
naked under the water, the horse-leeches not being able to hurt them”
(Hakluyt _Voyages_, ii, 160). Sir Emerson Tennent quotes Oderic, and
distinguishes the land- from the cattle-leech. The former, so inimical
to man, never visits ponds or streams, but is found in the lower ranges
of hill country kept damp by frequent showers; it attains a length of
two inches (_Natural History of Ceylon_, Chap. xiii). There is strange
confusion, in associating the use to which the lemon is put, in Ceylon,
with the pepper-growing country of Malabar by no means famous for
leeches.—ED.