XVI.
CONCERNING TURKEY.[190]
1. I was also in Turkey, in a certain camp on the coast of the main, held by a noble Genoese, by name Andreolo Cathani, who hath with him only fifty-two knights[191] and four hundred foot soldiers. He doth much scathe to the Turks. And there he himself maketh alum, without which no cloth can be properly dyed; and ’tis made in a marvellous way, nor do I believe that the art could have been invented by human ingenuity, but rather by the Holy Spirit.[192] For thus it is: stones be taken from under the ground, not stones of any kind, but such as be specially suitable, for few be found of that kind. And these stones be baked like bricks or pottery, and that in great quantity and for many days, and with a most potent fire. The stones be afterwards placed on a great platform, and water is poured upon them, and this two or three times a day for a month continuously, so that the stones become like [slaked] lime. Afterwards they be placed in great caldrons with water, and that which falleth to the bottom is extracted with great iron ladles. Then four-square tanks of plaster are prepared, numerous and large, and into these the water from the caldrons is poured, and there gradually taketh place a precipitation like crystal, and that is choice alum.[193]
2. In this Turkey be the VII Churches to which wrote the Blessed John in the Apocalypse, who also ordered a sepulchre to be dug for him in Ephesus, whereinto he entered and was seen no more. But I will tell one very marvellous thing concerning that excavation, as I heard it from a certain devout religious person, who was there and heard it with his own ears. From time to time is heard there a very loud sound, as of a man snoring, and yet is the sepulchre void.[194]
3. This Turkey, which is called Asia Minor, is inhabited by the Turks, and by a few schismatic Greeks and Armenians. Which Turks be most rascally Saracens, and capital archers withal, and the most warlike and perfidious of all mankind.
4. The country is very fertile, but uncultivated; for the Turks trouble not themselves.[195]
EXPLICIT.
FOOTNOTES
[41] Admiral Smyth says that the currents in the Faro are so numerous and varied, that it is difficult to ascertain anything precise about them. In settled seasons a central stream runs north and south, at the rate of two to five miles an hour. On each shore there is a refluo, or counter-set, often forming eddies to the central current. When the main current runs to the north it is called Rema montante, or flood; when it runs south, Rema scendente, or ebb; and this has obtained, perhaps, even from the days of Eratosthenes. He considers that the special danger from the Faro currents is insignificant. There are dangerous squalls from the ravines or river-beds on the high Calabrian coast.
He admits some little more of reality in the celebrated vortex of Charybdis, which must have been formidable to the undecked vessels of the ancients; for in the present day small craft are sometimes endangered, and he has seen even a seventy-four whirled round on its surface. The “Galofaro” appears to be an agitated water of from seventy to ninety fathoms in depth, circling in quick eddies, but rather an incessant undulation than a whirlpool, and the cases are only extreme when any vortiginous ripples threaten danger to laden boats. “It is owing probably to the meeting of the harbour and lateral currents with the main one, the latter being forced over in this direction by the opposite point of Pezzo. This agrees in some measure with the relation of Thucydides, who calls it a violent reciprocation of the Tyrrhene and Sicilian seas, and he is the only writer of remote antiquity I remember to have read who has assigned this danger its true situation, and not exaggerated its effects.” (Abridged from Smyth’s Mediterranean, pp. 180-1). Our author seems to mix up the two phenomena in his exaggerated account. The upward and downward current suggest that he had heard the local terms quoted by Admiral Smyth.