A look at 15th-century India through the eyes of a Genoan merchant
A year before Christopher Columbus set sail from Castille on a journey that would take him to the Americas, another two Genoans travelled south to Egypt and then to Sumatra through India, Ceylon and Burma.
The nearly-forgotten merchant duo of Giròlamo da Santo Stefano and Giròlamo Adorno set off on their adventure in 1491 from Genoa. While Adorno would die in Pegu, Burma, some years later, da Santo Stefano completed the trek, returning home via the Maldives in 1499.
Da Santo Stefano described his travels – coming a little before Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India – in a letter to Gian Giacomo Mainerio, who published it in Portuguese. Read today, that account provides a picture of late 15th-century southern India, a time of change and considerable activity.
Mountains and deserts
To get to India, da Santo Stefano and Adorno took the route that was popular among Arab traders plying between West Asia and Kerala. So they first went to Egypt.
In Cairo, they bought coral beads and other merchandise, and then travelled by land through what da Santo Stefano described as “those mountains and deserts, wherein Moses and the people of Israel wandered when they were driven out by the Pharaoh”.
At the Red Sea port of Quseer, they boarded a ship, “the timbers...
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