The Caucasus, here used, perhaps, like "Taurus," or "Alps," in the general sense of "lofty mountains," was a great centre of mediæval myth. Here was situated, according to most authorities, the wall of Alexander, when with an iron rampart he shut up Gog and Magog, and "twenty-two nations of evil men" from invading the fertile countries of the south (see Koran, chs. xv, xviii; the Arabic record of "Sallam the interpreter," sent to the Caucasus about 840 by the Caliph Wathek-Billah; Ibn Khordadbeh, c. 880; St. Jerome On Genesis, x, 2, and On Ezekiel, xxxviii-ix; St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, xx, 11; St. Ambrose, De Fide ad Gratianum, ii, 4; St. Isidore, Origines, ix, 2; xiv, 3; and the Commentaries of Andrew and Aretes of Caesarea On the Apocalypse of a.d. c. 400 and c. 540; Dawn of Modern Geography, pp. 335-8, 425-434).
[10] (p. 7). Indians of Greater and Lesser India is a regular mediæval term for the inhabitants of India proper and of south-western Asia, sometimes including Abyssinia. Another frequent division was threefold: India Prima, Secunda, Tertia, or Greater, Lesser, and Middle, as in Marco Polo, Bk. III, chs. i, xxxviii-xxxix. Most commonly, Greater India means India west of Ganges; Lesser India corresponds to the classical India extra Gangem, or Assam, Burma, Siam, etc.; and Middle India stands for Abyssinia, and perhaps for some parts of the Arabian coast, as far as the Persian Gulf.
On this passage we must also notice the following MS. notes:—
[α. Garamantes, Ethiopians and Indians.—It must be understood that these are three peoples, as saith Isidore in his sixth book [i.e., of the Etymologies or Origins of St. Isidore of Seville, written c. A.D. 600], to wit, the Asperi, Garamantes and Indians. The Asperi are in the west, the Garamantes in the middle, the Indians in the east. He reckoned with the Garamantes, the Tregodites [Troglodytes or Trogodites] because they are their neighbours. Alfargano [Mohammed Alfergani, or of Ferghanah on the Upper Oxus, a great Mohammedan geographer of the ninth century, author of a "Book of Celestial Movements" translated into Hebrew and from Hebrew into Latin, which also described the chief towns and countries of the world] placed Meroe, which is Queen of the Nations, between the Nubians and the Indians. The Garamantes are so called from Garama, which is the capital of their Kingdom, and the castle of which standeth between Inenense and Ethiopia, where is a fountain which cooleth with the heat of the day, and groweth hot with the cold of the night. Ethiopia is over against Egypt and Africa, on the southern part thereof; from the east it stretcheth over against the west even to the Ethiopian Sea. And because much of the people of these three nations are Christians, and because they desired to see the world, they came to these parts of Spain, where they received great gifts from the Infant, on account of which the author hath given this description in his chapter thereupon.
β. Caucasus.—This mount is so called from Candor, the which stretcheth from India to Taurus, in its length, through various peoples and tongues, and therefore is variously named. Some say that Mt. Caucasus and Mt. Taurus are all one, but Orosius reproveth this opinion.] On the fountain of Garama, cf. Solinus, xxx, i.
[11] (p. 7). To visit the Apostle, viz., St. James of Compostella, patron saint of Spain, and traditionally the "Apostle" of that country. Santiago de Compostella was once the capital of Galicia; it lies 55 kilometres south of Coruña, on the north bank, and near the source, of the River Sar, which flows into the Ulla. The town is built round the Cathedral, which claims to possess the body of St. James. A star was said to have originally shown the place of this relic, hence "Compostella" (Campus stellae). The body of the great church was commenced in 1082 and completed in 1128; the cloisters were finished in 1533. An earlier church of the later ninth century had been destroyed in 997 by the Arabs under the famous "hagib" Almanzor, who also restored Barcelona to the Western Caliphate, and nearly crushed all the Christian kingdoms of Spain. For centuries Compostella was the most famous and fashionable place of pilgrimage, next to Rome, in Europe. It is referred to in Chaucer, Prologue to Canterbury Tales, l. 466, in the description of the "Wife of Bath:"
"At Rome she haddé been, and at Boloyne In Galice at Saint Jame, and at Coloyne."
[12] (p. 8). Ancient and venerable city of Thebes.—Here we have again a MS. note.
[We must understand that there are two cities of Thebes—the one in Egypt and the other in Greece. That in Greece was the selfsame which in the time of Pharaoh Nicrao (Necho, see Herodotus, ii, 158-9: Josephus Antiq. Jud.) was called Jersem, as saith Marco Polo, whence came the Kings of Thebes who reigned in Egypt C I R (190) years. And this was one of the places which were given to Jacob, by the countenance of his son Joseph, when by the needs of hunger he went with his eleven sons to Egypt, as it is writ in Genesis. And Saint Isidore saith in his xvth book (of Origins) that Cadmus built Thebes in Egypt, and that he, passing into Greece, founded the other and Grecian Thebes, in the province of Acaya (Achaia), the which is now called the land of the Prince of the Amoreans.]
It is not necessary to dwell on the additional confusion furnished by this "explanation"—Thebes given to the Israelites (as part of Goshen?), Cadmus building the Egyptian Thebes, Achaia for Bœotia, and so forth; but the point really noticeable is that in Azurara's text the "dwellers on the Nile who possess Thebes" came in here as "wearing the Prince's livery:" i.e., the negroes of the Senegal are supposed to live on the western branch of the Nile, which mediæval conceptions obstinately brought from Egypt or Nubia to the Atlantic, and which Prince Henry's seamen thought they had discovered when they reached the Senegal; just as later in the Gambia, the Niger, and the Congo, other equivalents were imagined for the Negro Nile of Edrisi, and the West African river-courses of Pliny and Ptolemy. Cf. chs. xxx, xxxi, lx-lxii, of this Chronicle.