Journey
Afanasy Nikitin — Tver merchant in the Bahmani Deccan (1468–1474)
A Tver merchant who set out on the Volga in 1468 to trade in Shirvan, lost his goods to pirates at the river mouth, and worked his way south through Baku and Hormuz to the Konkan. He lived three years at the Bahmani capital Bidar, visited Junnar and the Vijayanagara borderlands, and started home overland through Hormuz and Trabzon. He died at Smolensk in 1475; his notebook survived as The Journey Beyond the Three Seas — the first substantial Russian first-hand account of India.
Stops (5)
- Tver · home · Tver on the Volga, 1468
Nikitin set out from Tver in the summer of 1468 with a hundred rubles' worth of trade goods on a Shirvan mission backed by the Tver merchant guild. His account begins at the Volga, which is where it also ends — he never reached Tver again, dying at Smolensk on the return in 1475, but his notebook made it back to Moscow.
- Hormuz · Hormuz · the great Gulf entrepôt
After pirates took his goods at the Volga mouth and he worked his way south through Baku and Shirvan, Nikitin reached the Indian Ocean at Hormuz — the sultanate-city on the Gulf through which almost all late-medieval horse, pearl and spice trade between Iran and India passed. From here he bought passage on a Konkan-bound ship with a cargo of a stallion he intended to sell in India.
- Bidar · Bidar · the Bahmani capital, three years
The core of Nikitin's India stay: about three years (c.1471–74) at the Bahmani sultan Muhammad Shah III's court. His description of the twenty-thousand-horse daily parade, the three hundred elephants, the markets, the sultan's minister Mahmud Gawan, and the sharp contrast between the Persianate ruling class and the Hindu merchant and agrarian population is the clearest outsider snapshot of the mid-Bahmani Deccan on record.
- Junnar cave groups · Junnar · two monsoons at the Bahmani hill court
Nikitin stayed two monsoons at Junnar, where the Bahmani court moved up into the Ghats during the rains. He writes down the heavy monsoon rainfall and the horse market in which his own stallion was briefly confiscated by the governor Asad Khan — the episode that almost formally converted him to Islam, since the horse was offered back only on condition of a Shahada.
- Hampi / Vijayanagara · Vijayanagara border · the Hindu enemy to the south
Nikitin travelled south into the Vijayanagara borderlands and describes the great Hindu capital, its markets and its army as the Bahmani sultan's standing enemy, almost a century before the Deccan sultanates' coalition would sack Hampi in 1565. He is the only non-Persianate, non-Hindu eyewitness source on the Vijayanagara-Bahmani confrontation at this date, and the fact that a Russian merchant with no political stake wrote it down matters.