Medieval Relays
WHEN I TALK ABOUT what I mean by the ‘Middle Ages’, I tend to emphasise the absence of American contacts and of crops and commodities that arrived as part of the Columbian Exchange after 1492. The ‘medieval’ in Afro-Eurasia was, if you ask me, defined by the lack of tobacco and chocolate and other things only found in the Americas until early modernity. But another significant change in early modernity was the way in which things of all kinds — ideas, words, people, commodities, and so on — moved around Afro-Eurasia and the globe: Things traversed the medieval world in relays. In and after early modernity they did so in sprints.
To put it in linguistic terms, the Middle Ages is defined by Wanderwörter and early modernity by direct loanwords. The words for ‘sandalwood’ that came up in a recent post are good examples. Candana, a Sanskrit word, is the source of names for ‘sandalwood’ in many languages across Afro-Eurasia, from China to England. It wasn’t loaned directly from Sanskrit into all of these languages and its form was often distorted en route from one language to another: The Middle English word saundres came from Sanskrit candana after first passing through Persian čandal, Arabic ṣandal, Greek σάνταλον, Latin sandalum or santalum, and Old French sandre. The same applies to words like ‘camphor’ and sarbacane (the French word for ‘blowgun’) and the Old Sundanese word for ‘paper’, kertas.
By contrast, in the sixteenth century and later, a large number of Southeast Asian loanwords entered European languages (and vice versa) directly, with no intermediaries — and the same can be said of loanwords from Tupí, Hokkien, Tamil, and so on. In 1509 the first Portuguese ships arrived in Southeast Asia, and in 1511 a Portuguese expedition conquered the city of Melaka. A number of Malay words entered Portuguese at this time, including amouco, referring to someone who runs amok (amuck for US readers), borrowed directly from Malay amuk. Portuguese words started appearing in Malay and Javanese texts soon after 1511 as well, words like gereja ‘church’ (from igreja) and kereta ‘carriage’ (from carreta). Similarly, the English words ‘gong’, ‘ketchup’, ‘tea’, and ‘(rice) paddy’ were all borrowed directly from Malay in early modernity, after English merchants established factories in Southeast Asia. There were already some Malay words in English and Portuguese before the sixteenth century, but these had travelled through multiple intermediaries before entering those languages; a good example is the Portuguese word zarabatana, meaning ‘blowgun’ (cf. sarbacane above), which came ultimately from Malay sumpitan by way of several Indian languages and Arabic.
There were a few medieval exceptions — words and other things exchanged directly in brief one-off contacts. ‘Durian’, a Malay word for the large spiny fruits of trees in the genus Durio, is recorded in two fifteenth-century European texts, a word apparently recalled by the Venetian merchant Niccolò de’ Conti, who spent several months in Java and Sumatra. We’ve already seen that the Sanskrit word candana was recorded fairly faithfully (τζανδάναν) by the sixth-century Roman traveller Kosmas Indikopleustes. Some place names could be recorded accurately by lone travellers, even previously unknown ones from entirely unfamiliar languages, like the Jaua that appears in the earliest manuscripts recounting the travels of Marco Polo and Odoric of Pordenone.
By and large, though, the absence of sustained direct connections between disparate corners of Afro-Eurasia in the Middle Ages meant that the long-distance movement of stuff (ideas, words, commodities, etc.) was conducted primarily through indirect relays involving people of many nations and ethnicities and speaking many languages. And this means that long-distance trade in the Middle Ages is more interesting, to me at least, than long-distance trade in early modernity.
This is one of the key differences between the medieval hemisphere and the early modern globe, and it seems to me that it is a distinction often ignored even by scholars. When I mention that cloves appear by name in the (medieval) works of Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Nizami, people will often bring up the fact that John Milton mentions Ternate, source of cloves, in Paradise Lost. But the first version of Paradise Lost was published in 1667, well over a century and a half after cloves started arriving in Europe in European ships travelling directly from eastern Indonesia with only a small number of stops in between. The context is entirely different. After 1512, appearances of cloves, nutmeg, or, well, cockatoos in Europe — or, really, anywhere in the world — are much less noteworthy, because each entire journey could be conducted by a single ship and a single crew travelling by a direct route, and because such routes could encompass the entire globe in one way or another. In the days of Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Nizami, cloves could only make their way to England, Italy, and the Persian-speaking world by travelling across several seas (Banda Sea > Java Sea > Malacca Strait > Indian Ocean > Arabian Sea > Persian Gulf/Red Sea > Mediterranean), usually in several different ships crewed by people speaking several different languages. This is very much not the same thing.
Most of the things I write circle around this idea in one way or another. There’s a lot more to say on the topic, and I will be returning to it in the future. I thought it would just be a good idea to lay it out simply and directly here.
This brief essay was originally published on my Patreon account last year (2022) — I wrote it while I was still in Leiden. It’s not a great piece of work but it says more or less what I want it to say. This idea will form the basis of my contribution to a chapter in a new volume, so I thought it would be best to make it publicly accessible on this site. I’ll be doing the same with a few of the more interesting Patreon pieces over the next few weeks. This piece isn’t typical, I should say; it was just a short thing that I wanted to get down in writing. (Those are usually the most popular types of posts on this blog.) Most of the other pieces are about specific topics, like yams or taro or specific manuscripts.
I’m not sure I will continue posting on Patreon, incidentally. I haven’t uploaded anything over there since September 2022; I was far too busy in autumn last year to keep it up. I may return to it this year depending on how things develop, but for now I’m keeping it dormant.
Dr A. J. West — Lisbon, 2023.
