Afanasy Nikitin, a 15th-century Russian merchant, sets out from Tver and immediately runs into trouble before travelling to India.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
Sources:
Afanasy Nikitin's Voyage Beyond The Three Seas, 1466–1472. Geografgiz, 1960.
Alam, Muzaffar and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-1800. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Belkov, Gregory. The Journey Beyond Three Seas of Afanasij Nikitin in A.D. 1466-1472 : Establishment of Text, Translation and Commentary. University of British Columbia, 1950.
Paulau, Stanislau. “Embodying the World beyond Three Seas: India in the Imagination of the Mediaeval Rus," in Body, Emotion and Mind. ‛Embodying’ the Experiences in Indo-European Encounters, edited by Martin Tamcke and Gladson Jathanna. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2013.
Romano, John. Medieval Travel and Travelers: A Reader. University of Toronto Press, 2020.
Script:
Our traveller today would write in passing about this port city or that one, and he’d write about the goods that could be had there. There was Dabhol, with its many horses from Egypt, Arabia, Khorasan, and elsewhere. There was Khambhat, or Cambay, the harbour long-since silted up, with its manufacturing, its silk, cotton, and indigo, its cloves and its carnelian gems. There was Calicut, a, quote, “port for the whole Indian sea, which God forbids any craft to cross,” with its pepper, nutmeg, and aromatic roots, its spices and its slaves. There were the ports of China, many and large, with their porcelain sold by weight. He would mention all of these wares and these places, but he does not, by his own telling, seem to have had much success in trading those goods and nor, as we’ll see, did he visit all those ports, that lack of detail as to China being a bit of a tell there.
Our traveller today would write of God, saying for example that, quote, “God is Allah. God is munificent, God is merciful, God is Lord, God is great, God, king of glory, Allah exists, Allah, you are the merciful. You! Oh, you, Allah.” However, he was not a Muslim, or he certainly didn’t think of himself as one, or at least it was all a fair bit more complicated than that.
Our traveller today would write of how he had journeyed over three seas—it’s in the very name his text now goes by—but he would do much else besides in visiting far-flung places. He would encounter unfamiliar peoples and their ways of life—he would struggle deeply with his own—and those crossings, though he’ll certainly mention them, were hardly the focus of his account.
Our traveller is one who we will be following today across those three seas, to Iran, to India, and elsewhere.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World. It is, as you’re probably already aware, the history podcast which follows in the footsteps of that world’s travellers, with the occasional excursion outside of the era. It is, as you may also be familiar with, a history podcast with a patreon, supported by the good people currently enjoying listening which includes bonus mini episodes, arrives a little earlier, and does not include advertising. Thank you to all of those supporters, both current and past.
That said, let’s get into the story.
The subject is one which I’d initially, and indeed foolishly, thought that we might manage in a standalone episode, but then that one episode was feeling increasingly long and unwieldy as I went along so it’s actually going to be a two-parter, with each half coming just a little under the customary length. It’ll be part one today with episode two coming along after, and I already have that second one well on the way to completion, so the wait for that will not be long. The subject is one Afanasy Nikitin, son of Nikita.
Our traveller’s journey was an impressive one, which, as these things sometimes do, would take him well beyond what appears to have been its initial scope. It would prove to be a commercial disappointment, a years-long trial, and a source of no small amount of spiritual distress along the way. It was also a trip that Afanasy would never actually make it all the way home from, which seems like a pretty crucial point, especially to him. Maybe I should have led with that. Fortunately for us, though it didn’t help Afanasy much, he would leave a written record of his travels, A Journey Beyond the Three Seas. But what particular three seas were those, you might be wondering. Readers would not need to wait for long to find out.
“By the prayer of our holy fathers,” began our source, “O Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, your sinful servant, Afanasy, son of Nikita,” and immediately after that, he helpfully addressed our curiosity.
Quote:
“This is, as I wrote it, my sinful wandering beyond the three seas: the first, the Sea of Derbend, or the Caspian Sea; the second, the India Sea, or Sea of Hindustan; the third, the Black Sea, or Sea of Stambul.”
Question asked, and question answered. If only it were always so easy.
Afanasy Nikitin’s quote/unquote “sinful wandering” began in 1466. It began in the Russian city of Tver, then the Principality of Tver at the intersection of the Volga and Tvertsa rivers and northwest of Moscow, the city it once rivalled for regional supremacy but which would annex it within the next 20 years. Northwest of Moscow now by some 180 kilometers or 110 miles by road, about a two-hour drive by my current search results, though I don’t know how truly representative or traffic-laden that is, and one hour by train. They began in the company of a group of merchants apparently intending to trade along the shores of the Caspian Sea, but you already know from the mention of those two other seas that Afanasy’s travels were not going to stop there. Events, as they have a way of doing, would get in the way of the group’s intentions—they would scatter the group in question—and to our benefit and interest, if not necessarily to poor Afanasy’s, a much longer, more interesting, and indeed more solitary journey would result.
Like those initial companions of his, Afanasy was a merchant, and as historians Alam and Subrahmanyam write, he was very probably a well-travelled one already, having, quote, “clearly travelled before, to Georgia, Crimea, Wallachia, and other lands,” and possessing “a fair command of Persian, and … some notions of Arabic and Turkish.” The written record which Afanasy left of his journey forms not just a fascinating travel narrative with observations of the peoples and events along the way, but an important entry into Russian literature, often noted for the way it stood out as an early depiction of a commercial or non-religious trip, though you wouldn’t necessarily know that second part from reading his first page.
After all that talk of holy fathers and of sinners, Afanasy gets us going first with his departure from the golden-domed cathedral of Tver and then talks of travel down the Volga to the “monastery of the holy life-giving trinity” and to the holy shrines of the martyrs Boris and Gleb, the assassinated sons of Vladimir the Great. The journey being covered may have been noteworthy for not being specifically religious in focus—it was not a pilgrimage—but that certainly does not mean that the text or its protagonist were not concerned with religion. As historian Stanislau Paulau writes, “Although [Afanasy’s] book contains a lot of very personal remarks and deals with all kinds of matters, the perception of all that happens also from a deeply religious point of view is evident.” It’s something that will become ever more evident as we progress in the story and in Afanasy’s anxieties, as he draws further from home in distance and in time.
Afanasy is not effusive in describing the opening stages of his journey, and that makes sense. The text he was leaving behind was a relatively short one, and he hardly felt the same need to dwell on the customs, practices, and appearances of the people along his familiar Volga that he would later on. He passes briefly over the practical necessities of permission from a grand duke and a document that was required, of reaching Nizhny Novgorod and speaking there with a governor and a collector of duties, both of whom allowed him to go on his way. He passes two weeks waiting for the arrival of the Shirvanshah’s ambassador who was bringing 90 falcons from the grand duke to his land in present-day Azerbaijan. He would travel onward in the company of that ambassador, whose Shirvan was then less than a century from a state of Safavid vassalage followed by direct Safavid rule.
Down the Volga they went, passing untroubled through areas which Afanasy listed off without further elaboration or remark. Down the Buzan they went, following its course as it split away from the larger river, and by moonlight they attempted to pass Astrakhan, then very fresh into its century or so as the Khanate of Astrakhan, a fragment or successionist rump of the Golden Horde. They’d been warned by three men that the khan, quote, “watche[d] foreign merchants in the Buzan, and three thousand Tartars [were] with him.” The ambassador had rewarded the apparently helpful three with coats and linens, but they’d accepted the gifts only to then promptly go off and inform on the travellers. Afanasy and his colleagues were spotted in the river and pursued, one of those colleagues shot in the process along with two of the pursuers.
It is, as you can already tell, a pretty adventurous start to the journey, and there was more of that to come, but these difficult beginnings were not at all the focus of his text. They were there more as an explanation for his circumstances, or at times one would almost say an excuse, just a bit of backstory, no matter how eventful, and our traveller moved through it with the brisk pace of someone who was still relatively close to home and hadn’t yet quite gotten to the good bit.
As they travelled on, the smaller of their two boats ran afoul of some fishing stakes and was plundered, with all of Afanasy’s things taken in the process, while those on the larger boat, Afanasy himself included, didn’t do much better. They reached the Caspian only to run aground around the mouth of the Volga where they were robbed and four of their number were taken prisoner. Afanasy and those who remained were, quote, left “bare and naked beyond the sea,” and forbidden to return the way they had come.
Diminished in number and without their possessions, they travelled on their boats, fortunately for them, apparently of little interest to their assailants. In the one vessel there was the “ambassador … some Iranians, and ten Russians,” and in the other, “six Muskovites and six men from Tver.” Misfortune was not done with them yet. It returned first as a storm, which wrecked the smaller ship on the shore, and then as a group of Kaitags who took the ship’s occupants prisoner.
For those who remained free, there was some hope of relief from the Shirvanshah, whose ambassador still travelled with them, but the needful were too many, Afanasy wrote, and though the shah did arrange for those who had been captured to be released, they received nothing. “So we wept,” he wrote, “and dispersed to wherever it was; whoever had anything in Russia returned home; whoever was in debt went where [their] eyes looked; some stayed at Shamakhi; others sought work at Baku.”
Our traveller, apparently among those who had little to go back to in Russia after losing his wares to robbery, was one of those who went to Baku, the point on your map where the land juts out from Azerbaijan on the Caspian’s western shore. It was the place where “the fire burn[ed] unextinguished,” as he wrote in the late 15th century, and it still does so today, assuming we are talking about the Ateshgah of Baku, or fire temple, though that particular flame is now fed with gas from the city and not from the large reservoir beneath the ground, exhausted since Afanasy’s time.
For the rest of his time on the road, we will pick that up after this short break
…
From Baku, our traveller headed to a village in what is now Iran’s Mazandaran Province, on the sea’s south coast, staying there for six months before spending one in Sari about 30 kilometers to the south. He’s still not saying much of anything about these places, no matter the length of stay, but we can trace his travels onward, southwest to Demevand in the province of Tehran, west to Rey, now part of Greater Tehran, and south to Kashan in Isfahan, none of which he’ll remark upon.
Southeast from there, he was one month in Nain and another further southeast in Yazd. He was south to Sirjan, and ever further south until he reached the strait and island of Hormuz. He would comment on the way there only of a place where the cattle were fed with dates for four copper coins. There had been many great cities, he said, but he wouldn’t mention them, and he would say less than that about his plans at this stage, almost as if he drifted from one town to another without goal or intent, though the direction of travel was pretty clear and the destination significant: the jumping-off point for the next leg of his travels, and of the text, which, after all, was not titled only “Journey Beyond The One Sea.”
Of Hormuz, he would have a bit more to say, mostly just of its scorching sun which burnt the skin but also later in his writing of its status as a “vast emporium of all the world” containing “people and goods of every description,” though the latter, he grumbled, were subject to very high duties. He was there also for a month, including Easter, and then he was sailing on. He won’t say it here just yet, won’t really say anything of his goal, but he’d apparently been led to believe that the possibilities for trade ahead were bountiful, and we know they kind of were but maybe just not for him.
For now, he wrote of sailing the Indian Ocean, his second sea and one that he’d complain was riddle with pirates. He wrote of making the crossing with horses, though not where he’d gotten them. He said he’d lost his goods by the time he’d hit the Caspian, and there was that mention that those who could had gone home while those who couldn’t had pressed on. He, it had been implied, was one of those who couldn’t, one of those who lacked resources to be going home to, but he’d gained some number of horses since then, plural in this section, though only singular for the rest of text. He’ll later write that, quote, “I, poor sinner, brought a stallion to the land of India.” Perhaps the difference is explained by a mistake, an error introduced to the text at some point. Perhaps the horses, save that one, had already been traded away, though he doesn’t mention this, or maybe they hadn’t survived the trip to India, though he doesn’t mention that either. It will, in any case, always be a singular stallion from this point on.
Many of our travellers have written rather dramatically of the crossing he was making here, have said that they despaired of ever completing it alive—in some of the stories we’ve covered, there were those who didn’t complete it at all. But there was none of that for Afanasy, who more than once in this text would mention the many pirates on the sea. There were perhaps no pirates this time, no drama, or at least not in his report, just a smooth ten days to Muscat, in the Gulf of Oman, just a trouble-free crossing to Gujarat, to Khambhat, “where the indigo grows,” and then Chaul, very roughly halfway down the Maharashtra coast of India. There would be a Portuguese fort there at Chaul, somewhere we’ve been in the Fernao Mendes Pinto series, but that was for the future. When Afanasy arrives, there’s no Portuguese fort there, no Portuguese India at all, not just yet. Vasco da Gama’s first visit will not be coming along for another three decades still, and by that point our Afanasy will be long gone, having left much less of a mark, or scar, than would come later.
“This,” our traveller writes in one translation, “is an Indian country,” and what will he notice about it, now that we have arrived at the portion of his travels where he’s far enough from home to have much more that he’ll want to put on the page. What will he say? “People go about naked,” he’ll say, “with their heads uncovered and bare breasts; the hair tressed into one tail, and thick bellies. They bring forth children every year and the children are many; and men and women are black. When I go out many people follow me,” he writes, “and stare at the white man.”
I do tend to think, based on his writing, that the staring would have went both ways, and he was hardly done with his observations as to the local clothing, speaking briefly of the prince’s garb and those of his servants too, and then again more generally. “All are naked and barefoot, and strong,” he wrote, far from done on the topic of nudity. “Women walk about with their heads uncovered and their breasts bare. Boys and girls go naked until seven years, and do not hide their private parts.”
As you can tell, all of this was new and powerfully strange to him, or he thought it would be so to his reader, and it was evidently what stayed with him when he came to write of this portion of his travels. It was so striking, in fact, that he could think of nothing else to write in regards to Chaul, which was surely a place both new and unfamiliar in other ways, nothing before he left and went by land to Junnar, a place about 105 kilometres, or 65 miles, east of Mumbai in the Pune district, and as Afanasy described it, a place which took “a whole day’s uphill walk to go there, the path [was] narrow and two people [could not] pass.”
At Junnar, there is mention of an Asad Khan, master of 70,000 soldiers and servant of Malik al-Tujjar, or “Chief of the Merchants,” who had 200,000. There is talk of how the khan had “many good elephants and horses” but chose in any case to “ride on men.” There is the observation of many Khorasanians who were there among the khan’s attendants, the term then pointing to an area beyond the region of northeastern Iran, who had travelled over the sea from “Arabia, the Turkoman land, and Central Asia.”
Afanasy, who wintered there in Junnar, lived there long enough to look a little beyond the unfamiliar norms of dress. He lived there long enough to write, or perhaps I should say bemoan, that both “day and night for four months there [was] nothing but rain and dirt.” The people there tilled the ground that time of year, and sowed wheat, pulses, and rice. They made wine in large coconuts and beer from a local plant. They fed their horses with morning rice cakes, along with pulses and rice with sugar and ghee, but horses, unlike oxen and buffalos, were not bred there.
At Junnar, we get some sense of the where and how of Afanasy’s living there, as he described inns where strangers would stay and the women who would prepare food and make beds for their guests, among whom he was presumably included. We also get another mention of his horse—and it is again only the one horse, one stallion—and we hear about it only because it was taken from him by the aforementioned khan who offered Afanasy an ultimatum of sorts.
If Afanasy agreed that he would convert to Islam, then our traveller would get the horse back and in addition receive a generous 1,000 pieces of gold—based on his comments and complaints throughout the text, he was in no kind of financial position to casually dismiss such an offer. If, on the other hand, he refused to convert, if he would not take the money, then the khan would keep the horse and place a ransom price of 1,000 gold to return it. It would be a hard loss, that one horse of his, and not one it seems he could have sustained, but the alternative was also hard, also costly, though in quite a different way. Happily for him, in the end he would not need to pay either one.
For Afanasy, it was something of a miracle the way it turned out for him, or at least that’s how he frames it in his writing, the way the khan was persuaded to change his mind and return the horse freely, no ransom, no more threats, and on a Christian feast day no less. It was all highly auspicious. True, it might be noted that the persuasion was actually carried out by a man named Koja Muhammad of Khorasan who had arrived in town just in time to hear of Afanasy's troubles and to take up his cause, but for him the moment, the anecdote, had real religious weight. It had demonstrated a real religious threat, and it’s a moment that anticipates his distress that would come later on, as he grappled with his religion and with practising it so far from home. And that, it must be said, wasn’t all he had been grappling with.
Afanasy had set out from Tver as part of a group of merchants. He himself was a merchant, in the business of buying, moving, and selling, but he had lost what he had way back on the river before reaching the Caspian, and then he had been badly led astray, or so he’d write. He had been misled by certain Muslims, or, as another translation rather less politely has his words, certain “infidel dogs,” men who had put much too rosy a complexion on things and told him of “an abundance of goods” waiting for him to trade in.
Safe to say that Afanasy had not found this to be the case, not exactly. “The goods are free from duties only if one takes them to Muslim lands,” he’d grumble, allowing that pepper and dyes were at least inexpensive. “These people do not allow us to pass without extracting some taxes from us,” he’d continue. “There are many duties and [there are many] pirates on the sea.” It had not been so hospitable to trade as he’d been told, not as he’d found it.
With stress on the religious front and failure on the commercial side, you’d imagine that Afanasy would be looking to turn back for home at some point, that this was not a place which it seemed he would make his home, and you’d be right. Next time out, we’re going to follow him as he does so.