Fernao Mendes Pinto 1: From Lisbon, Poverty, and Pirates
07/01/23 • 41 min
Fernão Mendes Pinto, respected by many of his contemporaries for the expertise knowledge which he'd gained through his travels, absolutely synonymous for others with lies and exaggerations.
From humble beginnings and vaguely unfortunate events in his early life, Pinto would find a place for himself in the 16th-century world of colonial Portugal, would write himself into it if necessary.
He was, he said, “13 times a prisoner and 17 a slave.” As Rebecca Catz writes, he served as a “soldier, merchant, pirate, ambassador, missionary, doctor—the list is not complete.” He ran afoul of pirates, was shipwrecked, and robbed royal tombs. The characters in his story included a saint, an Indonesian ruler, the mother of Prester John, a Japanese lord, and someone who may or may not have been the Dalai Lama. He claimed to be among the very first Europeans to set foot in Japan, but then he claimed to be a lot of things.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
3 Things:
- Article on the history of the mango and a Portuguese connection.
- Article about the discovery of a shipwreck, thought to have come from Vasco da Gama’s armada.
- The story of the rhino of Lisbon.
Sources:
- The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
- The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History, edited by Malyn Newitt. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- Pearson, N.M. The Portuguese in India. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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Fernão Mendes Pinto, respected by many of his contemporaries for the expertise knowledge which he'd gained through his travels, absolutely synonymous for others with lies and exaggerations.
From humble beginnings and vaguely unfortunate events in his early life, Pinto would find a place for himself in the 16th-century world of colonial Portugal, would write himself into it if necessary.
He was, he said, “13 times a prisoner and 17 a slave.” As Rebecca Catz writes, he served as a “soldier, merchant, pirate, ambassador, missionary, doctor—the list is not complete.” He ran afoul of pirates, was shipwrecked, and robbed royal tombs. The characters in his story included a saint, an Indonesian ruler, the mother of Prester John, a Japanese lord, and someone who may or may not have been the Dalai Lama. He claimed to be among the very first Europeans to set foot in Japan, but then he claimed to be a lot of things.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
3 Things:
- Article on the history of the mango and a Portuguese connection.
- Article about the discovery of a shipwreck, thought to have come from Vasco da Gama’s armada.
- The story of the rhino of Lisbon.
Sources:
- The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
- The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History, edited by Malyn Newitt. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- Pearson, N.M. The Portuguese in India. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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Previous Episode
Medieval Lives 7: Long Distance Relationships
With all the medieval travel featured on the podcast—the trips across the Mediterranean, the Asian Steppe, and the Indian Ocean—of course we focus on the travellers themselves, the people actually making those trips, but whether they were merchants, envoys, or otherwise, they often left people behind, family that they were separated from for years at a time.
This episode is about those separations, the difficulties they caused, and what people did (or did not do) about them. We start with a letter from a merchant in Palermo, Sicily, move to one from an India trader in Aden, and finish with a pair of Rabbinic responses regarding a married couple in Egypt.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
3 Things:
- Article by Heather Dalton on the travels of a cockatoo to 13th-century Sicily.
- Article by Minjie Su about four medieval love stories.
- Blog post about the correspondence of a "happy family" in 2nd-century Egypt.
Sources:
- Goitein, S.D. Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders. Princeton University Press, 1973.
- Hofmeester, Karin. “Jewish Ethics and Women’s Work in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Arab-Islamic World.” International Review of Social History 56 (2011): 141–64.
- Melammed, Reneé Levine. “He Said, She Said: A Woman Teacher in Twelfth-Century Cairo.” AJS Review 22, no. 1 (1997): 19–35.
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Next Episode
Fernao Mendes Pinto 2: The Red Sea and the Siege of Diu
Pinto visits the "Land of Prester John," faces trouble on the Red Sea, and brushes up against the 1538 Siege of Diu. He takes part in combat along the Indian coast, grumbles as to his lot in life, and is whisked about by boat to Massawa, Mokha, Qeshm, Chaul, Goa, Honnavar, and Diu, before heading further east.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
- The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
- Casale, Giancarlo. The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Oxford University Press, 2010.
- Pearson, N.M. The Portuguese in India. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
3 Things:
- Article on ambergris, a substance which makes fairly frequent appearances on this podcast.
- Podcast episode on “The Ottoman Red Sea.”
- Article on the Ottoman coffee crackdown.
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