1434: The Year a Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance. Gavin Menzies
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 medieval pre de ces sors, 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.
Notes Chapter 6
1. This paragraph and indeed much else of chapter 6 is a paraphrase of chapters from James Aldridge’s marvelous book Cairo: Biography of a City. Macmillan 1969 To my mind this book is the finest travel book ever written. Aldridge has an amazing knack for accurately compressing and summarizing a wealth of information in a few sentences. He is also a brilliant writer, witty without being unkind, choosing with great skill how and when to highlight colorful episodes of Egypt’s history. This book is a joy to read, and I have done so many times. I strongly recommend it to anyone thinking of visiting Egypt.
2. Ibid., pp. 5, 27, and 127.
3. Redmount, “Wadi Tumilat”; and Payne, The Canal Builders. Payne’s chapter entitled “Scorpion and Labyrinth” gives a detailed account of the builders from the pharaohs to Greek and Roman times.
4. Aldridge, Cairo, pp. 27, 43, 78, 79.
5. Poole, History of Egypt, p. 20. “In a.h. 23…it ran past Bilbeys to the Crocodile Lake and then…to the port at the head of the Red Sea.”
6. Aldridge, Cairo, p.127; al-Makrizi, Histoire d’Egypte; and. Revaisse, “Essai Sur L’Histoire.”
7. SSECO. A more extensive report of the proceedings may be found on our website, www.1434. tv. See also Ibn Taghri Birdi, Abi I-Mahasin “A History of Egypt 1383–1469,” trans. William Popper (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958) p. 86.
8. R. L. Hobson, “Chinese Porcelain from Fustat” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 61, no. 354. A photograph of a piece of blue and white porcelain of Zhu Di’s reign found at Fustat is shown on our 1434 website.
9. Aldridge, Cairo. The chapter entitled “Saladin’s Cairo,” from which this quote is taken, is a sumptuously written description showing Aldridge at the height of his powers.
10. Jacques Berges, quoted in Braudel, History of Civilisations, p. 66.
TO THE VENICE OF NICCOLÒ DA 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 ser vice, 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