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Updated: June 22, 2025
From Aduli, vessels regularly sailed to the East: here were collected the aromatics, spices, ivory, emeralds, &c. of Ethiopia, and shipped by the merchants of the place in their own vessels to India, Persia, South Arabia, and through Egypt and the north of Arabia, for Rome. Cosmas was evidently personally acquainted with the west coast of the Indian peninsula.
It seemed that he had slipped ashore without leave and had not returned. "There let him bide," said Menas, with an oath. "Doubtless the hog lies drunk in some den. When he awakes he may tell what tale he pleases and find his own way back to Lesbos. Cast off, cast off! I say." At this moment that same Cosmas appeared. I could not see him, but I could hear him plainly enough.
One party held that God had wonderfully brought this precious volume to light, for the guidance of His Church at a most critical moment. The other party wondered that any importance could be attached to the nonsense of a nameless scribbler of the thirteenth century. Much was written about the deprivations of Chrysostom and Photius, of Nicolaus Mysticus and Cosmas Atticus.
If the last country is China, of which there can be little doubt, as he mentions that the Tzinitzae brought to Ceylon silk, aloes, cloves, and sandal-wood, and expressly adds that their country produced silk, Cosmas is the first author who fully asserts the intercourse by sea between India and China.
The town and various settlements around it were growing up, as is proved by the number of churches which were considered necessary or appropriate. The Hradšany was very well off in that respect. Then there was the Church of St. Cosmas and Damian, where you now see the towers of Emaus, and in the twelfth century, if not at the end of the eleventh, the foundations of the Tyn Church were laid.
Lorenzo lies with his murdered brother Giuliano, who fell under the daggers of the Pazzi on that Easter morning in the Duomo, between the two splendid and terrible tombs of his successors, under an unfinished monument facing the altar; a beautiful Madonna and Child, an unfinished work by Michelangelo, and the two Medici Saints, S. Damian by Raffaello da Montelupo, and S. Cosmas by Montorsoli.
We shall conclude our notice of Ceylon, as described by Cosmas, from the account of Sopatrus, with mentioning a few miscellaneous particulars, illustrative of the produce and commerce of the island. The sovereignty was held by two kings; one called the king of the Hyacinth, or the district above the Ghants, where the precious stones were found; the other possessed the maritime districts.
Cosmas notices the great abundance of silk in Persia, which he attributes to the short land carriage between it and China. In our account of the very early trade of Carthage, a branch of it was described from Herodotus, which the Carthaginians carried on, without the use or intervention of words, with a remote African tribe.
Or is he the stern Judge who frowns above the altar of SS. Cosmas and Damianus? Or can he be rightly represented by the bleeding ascetic, broken down by physical pain, of too many mediæval pictures? Are we to accept the Jesus of the second, or the Jesus of the fourth Gospel, as the true Jesus?
Wherever ships could go, there went he, intent on learning all there was to know of the world he lived in. He read eagerly all that was written about the earth's shape and size. The modern science of his time he well understood. He pored over the maps of the ancient geographer Ptolemy, over the maps of Cosmas, a later geographer, over Palestrello's charts, given him by Philippa's mother.
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