Description of Makkah in 1503 AD


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Ludovico di Varthema was a traveler in the 16th century. He yearned to see all parts of the world and the book on his travels show a young man with insatiable curiosity. He wasn’t a Muslim but some of his observations on Hajj in 1503 AD are quoted below:


…The city (Mecca) is most beautiful, and it is very well inhabited, and contains about six thousand families. The houses are extremely good, like our own, and there are houses worth three or four thousand ducats (European gold coin) each. This city is not surrounded by walls. A quarter of a mile distant from the city we found a mountain where there was a road cut by human labor. The walls of the city are four mountains, and it has four entrances…

…The highest mountain is two or three casts of a stone by hand, and it is made of some kind of stone, not marble, but of another color. On the top of this mountain there is a mosque according to their custom, which has three doors. At the foot of the mountain there are two very beautiful reservoirs of water. One is for the caravan from Cairo, and the other for the caravan from Damascus; with water which is collected there from rain which comes from a great distance…

…Now let us turn to the city. When we entered the city we found the caravan from Cairo which had arrived eight days before us because it used a different route. In the caravan there were 64,000 camels and one hundred Mamluks…

…You must know that in my opinion the curse of God has been laid upon the city, for the country produces neither grass nor trees, nor any one thing... I will tell you in what manner they live. A great part of their provisions come from the Red Sea. There is a port called Jeddah which is forty miles distance. A great quantity of food comes from Arabia Felix (Yemen), and also a great part comes from Ethiopia…

…We found a great number of pilgrims, of whom some came from Ethiopia, some from India major, some from India minor, some from Persia, and some from Syria. Truly I never saw so many people collected in one spot as during the twenty days I remained there…

…From India major there come a great many jewels and all sorts of spices, and part comes from Ethiopia; and there also comes from India major, from a city called Bangehella (Bengal), a very large quantity of cotton and silk, so that in Mecca there is carried on a very extensive traffic of merchandise, that is, of jewels, spices of every kind in abundance, cotton in large quantities, wax and odoriferous substances in the greatest abundance…

… In the midst of the city if a very beautiful temple, similar to the Colosseum of Rome, but not made of such large stones, but of burned bricks, and it is round in the same manner; it has 90 or 100 doors around it and it is arched. On entering the temple, you descend ten or twelve steps made of marble, and here and there about the entrance stand are men who sell jewels and nothing else. And when you have descended the steps, you find the temple all around, and everything, that is, the walls, covered with gold. And under the arches there stand about four or five thousand persons, men and women, which persons sell all kinds of odoriferous things. Truly, it would not be possible to describe the sweetness and the odors which are smelled within this temple. It appears like a spicy, full of musk, and of other most delicious odors…

… In another part of the temple in an enclosed place in which there are two live unicorns, and these are shown as very remarkable objects, which they certainly are. I will tell you how they are made. The elder is formed like a colt of thirty months old, and he has a horn in the forehead, which horn is about three braccia in length. The other unicorn is like a colt of one year old, and he had a horn of anout four palmi long (*). The color of the animal resembles that of a dark bay horse, and his head resembles that of a stag; his neck is not very long, and he has some thin and short hair which hangs on one side; his legs are slender and lean like those of a goat; the foot is a little cloven in the fore part, and long and goatlike, and there are some hairs on the hind part of the legs. These two animals were presented to the Sultan of Mecca as the finest things that coule be found in the world at the present day, and as the richest treasure ever sent by a King of Ethiopia, that is, by a Moorish King. He made this present in order to secure an alliance with the Sultan of Mecca…

*Varthema’s scale of measurements was probably Venetian. The modern braccia at Venice varies from 25.08 to 26.87 inches. The palmo is 3.937 inches.

 

 

[Wolfe, One Thousand Roads to Mecca, pp 81-89, abridged]

 

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