Abstract
Since ancient times, societies and cultures have been consumed with the acquisition of gold, but the fascination was particularly high among the early moderns, especially those seeking and sometimes finding gold in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.2 José de Acosta, a Spanish Jesuit who traveled to Peru in 1572 and subsequently published Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590), devotes an entire chapter to gold, of which he writes, “Gold was always held to be the chief among all metals, and rightly so, because it is the most durable and incorruptible.”3 Explorers believed that the Americas or “western Indies” were overflowing with gold in the form of untapped mines, unexplored rivers, and Amerindian kingdoms with innumerable gold possessions. As Acosta testifies, more than fifty years after Hernän Cortés’s conquest of Anahuac—Aztec and Maya principalities—and Francisco Pizarro’s plunder of Tawantinsuyu or Inca areas,4
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Notes
For analyses by modern-day historians, see Peter L. Bernstein, The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000)
Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993)
Louis B. Wright, Gold, Glory, and Gospel: The Adventurous Lives and Times of the Renaissance Explorers (New York: Atheneum, 1970)
Agustîn de Zarate, The Discovery and Conquest of Peru, ed. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore: Penguin, 1968).
José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane E. Mangan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 166.
I learned of the terms “Anahuac” and “Tawantinsuyu” from Walter D. Mignolo, “Introduction to José de Acosta’s Historia Natural y Moral De Las Indias,” Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane E. Mangan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), xvii.
See Edmund Valentine Campos, “West of Eden: American Gold, Spanish Greed, and the Discourses of English Imperialism,” Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, eds. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 247–69
Mary C. Fuller, “Ralegh’s Fugitive Gold: Reference and Deferral in The Discoverie of Guiana,” Representations 33 (1991): 42–64.
Stuart Cary Welch, “Encounters with India: Land of Gold, Spices, and Matters Spiritual,” Age of Exploration: Circa 1492, ed. Jay A. Levenson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 363.
R. B., The English Acquisitions in Guinea & East-India (London: Printed for Nathaniel Crouch, 1700), 157.
In the fourteenth century, the publication of cartographer Giovanni da Cari-gnano’s map, showing the kingdom of Prester John in Ethiopia, prompted the Portuguese, in 1520, to announce that Prester John was finally found in the form of Emperor David II or Lebna Dengel (1508–1540), an Ethiopian of the Orthodox faith. See Charles F. Beckingham, “The Quest for Prester John,” Lecture at Manchester University, October 31, 1979, Between Islam and Christendom: Travellers, Facts and Legends in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Charles F. Beckingham (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1983), 294.
Francisco Alvares, The Prester John of the Indies: A True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John, ed. C. F. Beckingham and G. W. Huntingford, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society, 1961).
Christopher Marlowe, Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, ed. Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey (New York: Penguin, 2003).
At its height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Mughal Empire spanned almost four million square kilometers. In contrast, the Ethiopia-based Aksumite Empire in the fourth-century CE reached only 1.25 square kilometers, which included much of northern and eastern Africa. This empire dissolved in the tenth century, so by the early modern period, Abyssinia consisted only of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Early modern narratives about the Mughals will be elaborated upon later in this essay, but for an Ethiopian counterpart, see Jeronimo Lobo, A Voyage to Abyssinia: Containing the History, Natural, Civil, and Ecclesiastical, of that Remote and Unfrequented Country (New York: AMS, 1978).
Mariam Makani aka Hamideh Banu Begum was Akbar’s mother. Mariam uz-Zamani or Rajkumari Hira Kunwari was Akbar’s Rajput wife and the mother of Akbar’s successor, Jahangir. Ellison B. Findly, “The Lives and Contributions of Mughal Women,” The Magnificent Mughals, ed. Zeenut Ziad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 28.
See Bernhard Klein, “Tamburlaine, Sacred Space, and the Heritage of Medieval Cartography,” Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, ed. Gordon McMul-lan and David Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 143–58.
John Mandeville, The Travels of John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (New York: Penguin, 1983), 120.
R. H. Major, ed., India in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hakluyt Society, 1857), 21.
See Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Recep-tion of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371–1550) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003)
Kennon Breazeale, “Editorial Introduction to NicolÖ de’ Conti’s Account,” SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research 2, no. 2. (200): 102.
Christopher Dawson, Mission to Asia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 22
Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo (New York: Orion, 1958), 98.
Martin Collcutt, “Circa 1492 in Japan: Columbus and the Legend of Golden Cipangu,” Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 305.
The St. Thomas Christians of the southern Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu claim to be descendants of the first Indians converted by the Apostle Thomas. Today, the St. Thomas Christians belong to the Syro-Malabar Church. See J. N. Farquhar and G. Garitte, The Apostle Thomas in India (Kot-tayam, India: s.n., 1972)
Eugene Tisserant, Eastern Christianity in India: A History of the Syro-Malabar Church from the Earliest Time to the Present Day (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1957).
Wright, Gold, Glory, and Gospel, 61; adOliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr., eds., The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America 1492–1493 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 141.
C. D. Ley, ed., “A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama in 1497-99,” Portuguese Voyages, 1498–1663: Tales from the Great Age of Discovery (London: Phoenix, 2000), 27.
Richard Eden, A Treatyse of the Newe India (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1966)
See, for instance, Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: Discoveries of India in the Language of Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 1996)
John Michael Archer, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001)
Shankar Raman, Framing “India”: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002)
Pompa Banerjee, Burning Women: Widows, Witches, and Early Modern European Travelers in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
John Ogilby, Asia, The First Part Being An Accurate Description of Persia and the Several Provinces Thereof. The Vast Empire of the Great Mogol, and Other Parts of India: And their Several Kingdoms and Regions (London: Printed by John Ogilby, 1673), 169.
William Foster, ed., Early Travels in India, 1583–1619 (Delhi: S. Chand & Co., 1968), 246.
For a good review of military history under Akbar, see S. M. Burke, Akbar: The Greatest Mogul (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1989).
Abdul Aziz, The Imperial Treasury of the Indian Mughuls (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabi-yat-i Delli, 1972), 28.
Muhammad Arif Qandhari, Tarikh-i-Akbari, trans. Tasneem Ahmad (Delhi: Pragati, 1993), 63.
Abul Fazl, The Ain-i Akbari, trans. H. Blochmann (Delhi: Aadiesh Book Depot, 1965), 39.
Larisa Dodkhudoeva, “Gold in the Pictorial Language of Indian and Central Asian Book Painting,” Persian Painting from the Mongols to the Qajars: Studies in Honor of Basil W. Robinson, ed. Robert Hillenbrand (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 97.
William Foster, England’s Quest for Eastern Trade (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1967), 92.
M. P. Singh, Town, Market, Mint and Port in the Mughal Empire, 1556–1707 (New Delhi: Adam, 1985), 169.
Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4.
C. R. Singhal, Mint-Towns of the Mughal Emperors of India (Bombay: The Numismatic Society of India, 1953), 33.
Joe Cribb, Barrie Cook, and Ian Carradice, eds., The Coin Atlas: The World of Coinage from its Origins to the Present Day (New York: Facts on File, 1990), 176.
Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Akbar & Religion (Delhi: Idarah-i-Adabiyat-i-Delli, 1989), 123, 134.
Iqtidar Alam Khan, “Akbar’s Personality Traits and World Outlook—A Critical Appraisal,” Akbar and His India, ed. Irfan Habib (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 85.
Annemarie Schimmel, “Religious Policies of the Great Mughals,” The Magnificent Mughals, ed. Zeenut Ziad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 61.
John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 26.
Makhan Lal Roy Choudhury, The Din-i-Ilahi or the Religion of Akbar (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1985), 155–64.
John Correia-Afonso, ed., Letters from the Mughal Court (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1981), xv.
By 1586, however, the Portuguese had fallen out of favor with Akbar due to their trouble-making in the Bay of Bengal and their harassment of pilgrims going to Mecca. See Mansura Haidar, ed., Mukätabät-i-’Alläml (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1998), 36, 44.
Milo Cleveland Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 48.
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Howard Miller, “Tamburlaine: The Migration and Translation of Marlowe’s Arabic Sources,” Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period, ed. Carmine G. Di Biase (New York: Rodopi, 2006), 263.
Linda McJannet, The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
Neil H. Landman, Paula M. Mikkelsen, Rüdiger Bieler, and Bennet Bronson, Pearls: A Natural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 33.
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© 2009 Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim
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Malieckal, B. (2009). As Good as Gold. In: Johanyak, D., Lim, W.S.H. (eds) The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106222_7
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