Detail from Tang Yin’s Watching the Spring and Listening to the Wind
YOU CAN LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE OR ON YOUR USUAL PODCAST APP
Sources:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Hart, Thomas R. “Style and Substance in the Peregrination.” Portuguese Studies 2 (1986): 49–55.
Hart, Thomas R. “True or False: Problems of the ‘Peregrination.’” Portuguese Studies 13 (1997): 35–42.
Rubiés, Joan-Pau. "The Oriental Voices of Mendes Pinto, or the Traveller as Ethnologist in Portuguese India." Portuguese Studies 10 (1994): 24–43.
Script:
“I must confess,” wrote our traveller, “that I am already beginning to worry about how I will be able to describe even the little that we did see of [China], not that it would seem strange to anyone who has already seen the other wonders of the kingdom …, but because I fear that those people who try to measure the many things that are to be found in the countries they have never seen, against the little they see in their native lands, will doubt, or perhaps refuse completely to believe, those things that do not conform to their ideas and limited experience.”
Pinto could at times be incredibly complementary of China, even effusively so, as to its, quote, “magnificent buildings, infinite wealth, excessive and overwhelming abundance of all the necessities of life, people, trade and countless ships, orderly government, justice, tranquil court life” and more. “...whenever my thoughts turn to the many things ... that I saw,” he would write, “on the one hand, I am overcome with amazement when I think of how lavishly our Lord shared the material blessings of this earth with these people… .”
But that was just “on the one hand” of his assessment.
On the other, was a total dismissal of beliefs and religious practices, of, quote, “repugnant, diabolical idolatries,” and, in Pinto’s writing:
“...the utter senselessness and the enormous jumble of superstitions they believe in, which entail sacrifices with human blood, which they offer with all different kinds of incense, together with large bribes they give their priests in order to be assured by them of great blessings in this life and of infinite treasures of gold in the next.”
It is to this China, this place he painted in contrasting tones of admiration and disgust, that we return, a place which our guide may or may not have actually visited himself, having perhaps only seen its coasts and islands. It is to that place that we go today, to hear of what happened next in Pinto’s story and how his time of unpleasant legal entanglements would play out, whether smashing silver from the chapels of that island would catch up with him or if/how he would slip away from yet another of his many, many periods of captivity.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, a history podcast which travels that world and follows the stories of those who did so. And it is a podcast that is supported by a Patreon, one where you can help ensure that this little boat avoids the multitude of pirate attacks, shipwrecks, and other oceangoing mishaps that plagued its current main character. One where you can enjoy your podcast listening early, ad-free, and with extra mini-episodes along the way, and you can do so for as little as a dollar a month or as much as makes sense to you, and whatever the number, I really do appreciate it.
That said, let’s now get back to the story, back to the Pinto story.
Previously on the pod, we witnessed the disastrous conclusion to de Faria’s exploits on the seas, as his ship went down soon after a kind of raid and plundering of silver in the homes of the dead, and he went down with it. We also witnessed Pinto, one of relatively few survivors from the shipwreck, falling afoul of the Chinese authorities and heading once more for trouble. That is where we now find him.
We find him and his fellows again having claimed to be innocent castaways from Siam, just hoping to make their way to a port where they could ship out to Canton, and from there home, but this time telling that tale to a travelling judge whose eyes happened to fall on them. We find him raging against the false allegations that followed regarding “the most appalling crimes,” and the near-month they then spent in imprisonment, watching one of their number die before them in the cell, “eaten up by the lice.” We find him being first transferred to Nanjing, the city that they’d been telling everyone they were bound for, though they would not now be signing on there as oarsmen and shipping out for home.
The way there was in hard rain, and with an encounter with a fellow European prisoner, a German Pinto says, from the Muscovy, or Moscow, region. He’d been five years for murder so far, he told them, and was being taken to make his appeal.
Nanjing, when they reached it, is described as being situated in a climate that was cold but wholesome, as being walled in on all sides. It was composed mostly of two or three story buildings, but the civil servants lived in walled single-story structures, the ditches around them spanned by, quote, “bridges of excellent stonemasonry leading into the gates, all of which [were] covered by very costly and richly decorated archways, with all sorts of ornamental devices on the turned-up eaves of the tile roofs, so that a complete view of the building create[d] a total effect of great majesty.”
It seemed a very comfortable situation for your average civil servant, but if that sounded a little fancy, then the homes of the governors were truly fantastic:
“...tall towers, six or seven stories high, topped with gilded spires, where they store their weapons, household goods, treasures, silk furnishings, and other valuables, as well as endless quantities of very fine porcelain pieces, which are like precious jewels to them. This type of porcelain is not exported from the kingdom, not only because they value it more highly than we do, but also because there is a law, carrying the death penalty, that prohibits the sale of this porcelain to any foreigner, with the exception of the Persians of the Shah Tahmasp, called the Sophy, who are licensed to purchase a few pieces at exorbitant prices.”
That exception, the Safavid shah, was a figure who has appeared before on the podcast, now an unspeakably long time ago in the buildup to some Elizabethan diplomacy with the Ottomans.
Pinto was told that the population of the city was 800,000, a number that was certainly an exaggeration, for it would make it larger than Beijing or Istanbul, would make it the most populous city in the world, I believe, which it was not. But it was still an impressive city at nearly 200,000, nearly twice as large in population as Lisbon very roughly.
Pinto was told that there were, quote:
“...62 huge public squares, 130 slaughterhouses with eighty butchering blocks in each, and 8,000 city streets, 600 of which, that is, the most elegant ones, all have heavy brass railings fashioned by lathe, running along both sides of the street. [There were] 2,300 religious pagodas in the city, a thousand of them being used as monasteries for the people who have taken vows, and that they are very beautiful buildings with belfries containing sixty and seventy huge bells of bronze and wrought iron that make a horrible racket when they ring.”
The depiction of the city carried a tone of some admiration, though not so much for the prison system, which was fair.
As for Pinto’s legal situation, it was not ideal. The sentence called for a flogging, meant to show him and the others the badness of their ways, and the cutting off of their thumbs, which must surely have been put to use in robbery and other such crimes. The flogging was administered immediately and resulted in another two Portuguese deaths, reducing their number to nine, and also one of the enslaved who travelled with them, the formerly enslaved I suppose I should say given that their circumstance now does not seem to have been any different from that of the Portuguese, though Pinto has little to say on such things.
The thumb cutting, more fortunately, was going to wait, for with the intervention of a pair of charitable workers on behalf of the unfortunate, which Pinto and the rest certainly qualified as, it was agreed that they would be sent to Beijing for their sentence to be reconsidered.
That was where their story would take them next, a convenient reason, narratively speaking, to travel cross-country, a good excuse to speak of what was seen and what had been.
The journey went by river, and at times in its flow they passed rustic hamlets, lived in, Pinto judged, by those who fished and “poor people who laboured for a living,” while “as far inland as the eye could see, there were huge pine forests, woods, groves, orange orchards, and fields of wheat, rice, millet, sorghum, barley, rye, vegetables, flax, and cotton, and fenced-in gardens surrounding some elegant homes that must have been country estates.” There was livestock in the lowlands, varied enough, Pinto said, to rival those of the lands of Pester John, temples in the mountains, that were, quote, “adorned with numerous gilded spires, looking so proud and magnificent on the exterior, that even from afar it was a pleasure to see, for the total visual effect was one of great wealth and splendour.”
At times in the reading, the journey seems so pleasant that one is able to forget that those on the trip were prisoners hoping to avoid having their thumbs severed, and the whole thing takes on the air of a rather grand, if old-fashioned, travel guide, a Rick Steves’ China of quite another time.
In one city, Pinto and some others were permitted to walk about under guard for a time to ask for alms, clothing, and food in order to support themselves. They described a grand pagoda, more of a palace really, both in scale and in former use. The emperor’s grandfather was said to have been born there, but with the mother dying in childbirth the building had been rededicated as a temple. Pinto describes the compound in some detail, and outside it, the bronze-cast statues of giants with halberds and maces.
“The entire complex presented such a splendid and magnificent spectacle,” Pinto wrote, “that one could never get tired of looking at it,” not that he had much time or respect for the belief system it represented, writing that “there are many … different kinds of superstitions which they in their blindness believe in with such deep sincerity that they would die a thousand deaths for each one of them.” The prisoners would at least learn to keep their disdain to themselves after one of their number laughed dismissively when one statue was explained to them, earning the whole party a whipping after a priest complained to their minders.
Outside one small town, the Portuguese were surprised to find a reference to their deeds inscribed beneath a monument, or not their doings personally, but those of their fellows who had taken Malacca and those of one of them in particular. “Here lies … [the] uncle of the king of Malacca,” that inscription read, referring to the one who once ruled that place, “whom death carried off before God had avenged him on Captain Albuquerque, lion of the robbers of the sea.”
It was all very startling for these fellow “robbers of the sea” to find this remnant of their actions, in that reference to the former ruler’s plea for help against them, help that had never amounted to anything.
In another town, they would encounter another reminder of home.
A sickness had kept them there, and they were permitted to go ashore again to beg. One woman who heard their now well-practised tale of woe, of being formerly wealthy merchants who had encountered disaster at sea, responded that this was not at all surprising. “Most of the men who seek their livelihood at sea find their graves at sea,” she said. “And that is why, my friends, the best and the surest thing for a man to do is to value the earth more highly, and to labour on the earth, since it pleased God to create us out of earth.”
But then the woman continued, rolling up her sleeve to reveal the image of the cross on her skin. Was it familiar to any of them, this sign? Which of course it was, as they then ecstatically made clear.
There followed a kind of reunion of strangers there in that place. “Come with me, Christians from the end of the world,” said Inez de Leiria, for that was her name, and they did, once she had given their guards a little money.
She told them all about the little Christian community there and its origins, how they had all been converted by her father, Tomé Pires. He had been sent as an ambassador from Portugal long ago, she told them, but after some trouble, not of his own making, had been taken for a spy along with the others who were with him. They had been banished throughout the kingdom, and only he had survived, flourished in a sense, and raising the daughter who now stood before them. And it’s a story that’s broadly true, at least up to a point.
The apothecary Tomé Pires was sent to China as a Portuguese ambassador in 1517, and his diplomatic mission, already a drawn out and frustrating one, did indeed crumble due to causes outside of his control. He would be seized and certainly never allowed to leave China. But he was generally said to have died in 1524 with no mention of having gone on to have a family. It’s an intriguing inclusion of Pinto’s.
For five days, he and the rest stayed in the company of Tomé’s daughter and her community, and then their journey took them onward, upriver, past silver and copper smelting operations, past areas where large quantities of salt were yielded from evaporation pools, past great herds of domesticated deer, past barges of food animals of all sorts, from pigs and turtles to eels and otters, barges of animals trained to provide spectacles, including snakes, tigers, and giant lizards, and barges, much to Pinto’s amazement, loaded with human excrement to be used as fertilizer. He was shocked and disgusted by the practice but did attribute the bountiful Chinese harvests to its effectiveness. He was more generally astonished by the remarkable range of services offered by those who travelled by boat, from the medical to the legal and everything in between.
This section of the story is filled with myths and wonders, origin stories such as those for Beijing and the great wall of China, and also a tale surrounding a large city in ruins which Pinto says that they sighted from the boat and asked their keepers about.
They were told of the prosperous city that had once stood there and of the holy man from abroad who had come there, of how the local priests had accused him of sorcery and antagonized him, how he had performed many miracles such as raising five people from the dead. It was said that the priests had whipped up a mob against them, and when the mob stormed the home where he stayed, that they killed the weaver who sheltered him, along with the weaver’s family. The holy man rebuked them for this, telling them the story of Jesus Christ, for this was a Christian holy man, and denouncing as false idols the gods of the local priests. Naturally, they did not take this well.
They arranged for the man to be burnt alive, but at a word and a sign from him the fires went out, prompting further wonder in the audience. They, the priests that is, stoned him to death then, and threw his body in the river, but the river held its course so that his body hovered there in the same spot for five days, prompting even more wonder, and now large scale conversion to the man’s faith.
Pinto’s telling has the boat rounding a bend in the river to reveal a large and finely formed stone cross. It has the Portuguese responding in awe and astonishment, begging to be allowed to go see it, and an untimely death among those conveying them to Beijing ensuring that they were able to do so. Pinto has them approaching the cross and hearing all about the Christian community that had sprung up, hearing of the terrible earthquake that had struck, killing all the priests responsible for the holy man’s death and causing a flood which soon submerged the entire city, a confusing last detail there, as the city, as I read it, was supposed to be visibly in ruins in sight of the river while also, we are told, being 100 fathoms below. That little issue aside, Pinto’s telling has the holy man given a bit of a back story, a hermitage on Mount Sinai, and also a name and origin: Mateus Escandel from the Hungarian city of Buda.
Pinto is not the only source to deal with this mysterious/legendary figure, and perhaps I’ll devote an episode or maybe a mini episode to him in the future. However, Pinto does seem to be the first to have done so, so make of that what you will.
For now, let’s take a short break. Beijing was waiting for Pinto, and in that city, judgement and hopefully for him a favourable decision. We’ll get to that and more, after this quick break.
…
The Beijing that Pinto approached is described in his text as magnificently walled and moated, with awninged boats doing business of all kinds in that water. It is described as having many well-fortified towers, their spires painted in appealing colours, as having 360 gates, each watched over by four halberdiers who checked all that entered or exited the city. It is described as, quote, “a metropolis that truly stands far above all other cities in the world, for its grandeur, good government, bounty, wealth, and everything else that one can possibly think of or say.”
“One should not imagine for a moment,” he wrote, “that [Beijing] is anything like Rome, Constantinople, Venice, Paris, London, Seville, Lisbon, or any of the great cities of Europe, no matter how famous or populous. Nor should one imagine that it is like any of the cities outside of Europe, … all [the] capitals of great kingdoms; for I dare say that all of them put together cannot compare with the least thing, let alone the sum total of all the grandiose and sumptuous things that make up this great city… .”
He goes on at length as to the grand public squares, the wonderful architecture, the sumptuous feasts of the banquet houses, the enormous bronze statuary, and much, much more, including details as to the well-organized systems that constituted a pretty robust social safety net, but Pinto and the others were not exactly in the city to enjoy all of that.
Legal matters kicked off on a dark note for the Portuguese. Tied together in threes, they were lashed 30 times each and left in prison for a few days to recover. They were horrified to witness the execution of 27 men and I’m sure felt very strongly that they might be next. But it wasn’t all bad in Pinto’s depiction. They were being held in chains, round the neck and hands, and they did live in fear that their inglorious actions on that island would somehow come to light, but their case was taken on by some kind of office for aiding the needy whose members worked on their behalf.
For six months and more, Pinto said the matter dragged on, but wrote that he wouldn’t bother us with all the details. What he did say was that they had been essentially naked when seized and without possessions, that there was neither witness nor proof of any kind that they’d actually committed theft or any sort of crime to merit having their thumbs cut off.
So their defenders maintained, but on the other side there was the argument that they should have their hands and noses cut off and then be banished, having not entered the official ports to deal with customs and instead having “drifted about like pirates,” which was to say nothing of the piracy that they really had engaged in. Fortunately for the Portuguese, that latter argument was rejected, but the question of what would actually be done with them remained.
When the day came for the sentence to be revealed, they were dragged out in chains.
“...we were in such a state that I swear,” wrote Pinto, “I cannot even begin to describe clearly what we were going through at the time, for at that hour none of us were in any condition to know where we were going … in some places along the way, suddenly overcome by terror at the thought of the cruel form of death that awaited us, we would all fall to our knees with our arms around each other and beg … for mercy, creating a scene that utterly amazed the Chinese.”
Pinto described the set-up for the courtroom drama that followed in some detail, from the illustrations of potential punishment that were displayed on the walls to the dress of those in attendance. He gave the judge himself an enormous speaking role, summing up their entire case thus far and perhaps building the suspense a little before the verdict was to be delivered. When that verdict finally came, it was kind to them.
The Portuguese were to be released from their chains. They were to be sent to carry out eight months of labour after which they’d be granted safe passage and the freedom to go where they would. They were, of most immediate importance, to be keeping their thumbs intact, along with their hands and noses.
And in the period that followed all, at first, would go well. They would initially be assigned to a bit of a comfy job in their place of labour, a spot in their supervisor’s personal guard and the wages and relative freedom that went with it. But after one month, all of that would be undone. “It arose,” Pinto wrote, “out of a certain vanity, typical of our Portuguese nation, which I cannot really explain except by saying that they are by nature very sensitive people when it comes to questions of honour.” And I must reiterate that this was Pinto’s opinion, not mine—I am, despite what this series might have you think, tremendously fond of Portugal.
The trouble, Pinto said, came out of discussion of two noble families, out of argument over their respective position in the Portuguese court, an argument that came to “vulgar language” and then blows, blows that were answered with a knife slash which left a man’s cheek dangling from his face, a knife slash that was then answered with a polearm swing which took off a limb. They were all a little sick of each other by this point, I guess you could say.
Soon, the nine Portuguese were again being lashed in punishment, fettered and imprisoned. They were kept that way for months, recovering from their wounds but also hungering, suffering, and, I’m sure, regretting ever having discussed the topic of this noble family or that among themselves. And it would get worse. There’d be famine and lice, and an unnamed “lethargic disease.”
But there’d also be another chance encounter with a countryman of theirs, Vasco Calvo, a merchant who, historically, was ill-fated enough to arrive in China unaware that the Portuguese name was not, just then, in good standing there, and who managed to have a letter taken out in 1524, explaining his circumstances and the death of that ambassador whose daughter we met earlier. And here the man was, after 26 years, exchanging tales of misery with our protagonist, taking Pinto home to meet his wife and children, showing him their secret chapel. I wonder if the use of Portuguese letters of imprisonment like Calvo’s as a prominent source for Pinto’s writing in this section might have influenced and shaped the story he told, that it was one of legal difficulties and imprisonment.
Pinto, or his character, had been held in that place for eight and a half months, the brouhaha over Portuguese nobility having set their cause back substantially, when something happened to interrupt the ordinary order of things. It was mid-July, just a few days before my birthday, in 1544, when there, quote, “arose such a tumult in the streets, with the pealing of bells and shouts and screams coming from all over the city, that it sounded as if the whole world were coming to an end.”
The Mongols were coming again.
Like I said at the close of the last episode, I’ve read of this story as a peculiar inclusion here in the Pinto text, as if a confused interpolation of a Kublai Khan, come out of time to rampage across these very ahistorical pages. But it seems much more like the raiding appearance of the rather less well known Altan Khan, who was actually contemporaneous with Pinto’s quote/unquote time in China, and who did indeed besiege Beijing, if not, strictly speaking, in the precise year of 1544.
For Pinto, the Mongols’ coming is with rumours of, quote:
“...the largest army in the world ever assembled by any king since the days of Adam and Eve, … it was reported that twenty-seven kings had joined forces with [the Mongol ruler], swelling his ranks, it was said, by 1,800,000 men, including 600,000 cavalrymen …, travelling overland with a train of eighty-thousand yak laden with all their food and supplies; also, that the 1,200,000 foot soldiers had come down the … river in a fleet of sixteen-thousand ships …, and that …, in the pine forest … only a league and a half away, a [general] of the [Mongol ruler] was encamped with an army of seventy-thousand cavalrymen … ready to strike.”
There were, just to paraphrase, quite a few of them, and the Portuguese were concerned. They were, Pinto said, beside themselves, stammering back and forth and unable to think straight. They ran to Vasco Calvo and asked him what to do, and he replied that he would very much like to be hiding in a bush back home, between Lisbon and Porto. However, that was not where they were. They were caught in the midst of large-scale military operations, but that, in the Pinto story, was going to prove advantageous. It was going to provide them with a way out.
The situation was that the Mongols had been frustrated in their efforts to take a certain castle or fortress. They’d seen their first attempt pushed back and many of their number cut down with poisoned arrowheads. Their leaders had been forced to reconvene and talk over how they ought to approach this new obstacle, as if they had never encountered fortifications before, and they had noticed our Portuguese travellers where they were being held nearby, Pinto and the rest apparently having traded one captivity for another.
Their new captors were curious about them, about who these strangers were and where they came from. They were even more curious when one of the Portuguese, a man named Jorge Mendes, talked of how he and others had all been reared and raised for war since childhood, and they were driven to still further heights of curiosity when this Mendes declared himself willing to tell them how they might quite easily conquer that troublesome castle, if only they’d let the Portuguese go safely where they would.
It was a big promise, one that his countrymen were not entirely pleased with, telling him to sit down, to shut up, and to stop drawing attention to himself and to them. But the Mongols were interested now and would not be put off. They maybe saw an opportunity to get their commander off their backs, and they forwarded the Portuguese to his tent, some going more willingly than others.
Annoyance at Mendes aside, they were at least freed from the chains that bound them in sets of three, and they were fed, quite well fed, it sounds like, being given platters of rice with thin slices of salted duck and then more rice along with beans and eggplant. But then the commander wanted to know exactly how Mendes intended for the castle to be taken. What was this bright idea of his? And an embarrassed Mendes, having rather drastically over-promised, could only say that he might need to walk around and have a closer look at the situation before he could say anything more.
The answer pleased the Mongol commander well enough, but the Portuguese slept poorly that night, half-certain that they would all be drawn and quartered the next day if Mendes could not produce some stroke of tactical brilliance. Their faith in him seems not to have been strong, and the next day, watching him ride about alongside the Mongol commander with a “new spirit of pride and vanity,” their ill-feelings toward him only grew. In Pinto’s depiction though, and somewhat reminiscent of Marco Polo’s claimed role at the siege of Xianyang, he would have a plan.
Basically, it all came down to the castle’s moat. Under Mendes’ apparent direction, the Mongols weathered an initial rain of arrows, rocks, and firepots, and then that protective ribbon of water was drained and refilled with branches and soil so that the ladders which could then be placed were that much closer to the top of the wall. Mendes and a few of the other Portuguese, the success of the matter meaning more to them perhaps than anybody, were first up those ladders.
After that, it was “little more than half an hour [that] the whole business was done with and the castle taken.” It was all over except for the beheading of the enemy corpses in the courtyard, the burning of the flags, and the destruction of the walls. By early afternoon, it was time to feast, and the Mongol commander kept Mendes ever close beside him, showering him with honours, rewarding all of them, to a limited degree, but him most of all.
Some of them, Pinto said, began to feel a little down about all of this, for they thought themselves distinctly better than him but received less respect. Still, at least they were free. Pinto, after traversing a China that was, it must be said, generously dotted with Portuguese and Christian elements in his rendition, would again be free to go where he would and to carry his adventures into a new chapter and new places.
We’re going to follow him for just a couple more stops in his wide and wild journey before we wrap up this series. Our next stop is going to be Japan, and I’ll talk to you then.