[(22.)] “twelve hundred and eighty years from Christ.”—The holy places had been frequently won and lost during the Crusades, but they were never again recovered from the Egyptians, after the expulsion of the Mongols from Syria by the sultan Koutouz and his amir Beïbars in 1260, the year 658 of the Hegira. Schiltberger’s error in computation, of twenty years, probably arose from his having added the years of this date, 658 instead of 638 to the 622 years that had elapsed from the birth of Christ to the commencement of the Mahomedan era. These dates amount together to 1280, which he must have thought corresponded to 658 of the Hegira, the period indicated to him as that at which Mussulman rule was established in Syria and Palestine, and Christians lost their influence.—Bruun.
[(23.)] “and this they do that they may make more profit.”—Many travellers in Egypt, whether previous to, during, or since the Crusades, have noticed that balsam was to be obtained only from the Matarea garden near Cairo. To his translation of Abd-Allatif’s description of Egypt, Silvester de Sacy adds several passages on the cultivation of balsam in that country, being extracts from the reports of European and Eastern writers; but he omits Arnold of Lubeck and De Lannoy. Whilst at Cairo, the latter was presented by the patriarch of India with a “fyole de fin balme de la vigne, où il croist, dont il est en partie seigneur”; and he repeats the tradition related by Brocardus (Terræ Sanctæ Descr., 311), that the vine of the balsam had been brought to Babylon, meaning Cairo, by Cleopatra.
Schiltberger was in Syria and Egypt at about the same time as De Lannoy, and may have heard this tradition, also the legend that was related to the Bishop of Lubeck, to the effect that the balsam tree did not put forth in the garden of Matarea until the Virgin, in passing by when on her flight from the persecutions of Herod, had washed her son’s clothes in the stream that irrigated the garden. Makrizi associates this very fable with the well at Matarea, adding, that the balm-tree had quite disappeared from the country about the Jordan where it was formerly exclusively obtained. Strabo (XVI, ii, 41) and Pliny (XII, v, 4) both say that this plant was cultivated in the royal gardens at Jericho, of which it was the chief ornament (Josephus, Wars, etc., iv, 8); but it is doubtful whether it disappeared entirely from Judæa after the days of Cleopatra and Augustus, because some was purchased at Jerusalem in 705 by St. Guillebaud (cited by S. de Sacy, Abd-Allatif, 91); and Burkhardt learnt that balm-oil was to be obtained at Tiberias, extracted from a fruit that greatly resembled the cucumber, and grew on a stem very like the balsam tree at Mecca.
Now-a-days, a sort of oil, produced from the myrobalsamum and prepared at Jerusalem, is sold to superstitious pilgrims for genuine balsam or extract of opobalsamum, although it does not possess its qualities. Deception was also practised in Schiltberger’s time, but he has shewn himself not to have been so great a simpleton as the many who are being continually duped.
That the sale of balsam was a great source of revenue to the sultan (the patriarch of Armenia paid a high price for it, see [page 92]), is confirmed by others. Makrizi considered it a most useful commodity. Christian sovereigns vied with each other in securing a supply, and it was greatly esteemed by Christians in general, because baptism was not considered efficacious unless oil of balsam was dropped into the water prepared for the purpose.—Bruun.
(23A.) A plant called the balsam, from which oil was extracted, and not to be found in any other part of the world, grew in the vicinity of Fostat the chief city of Egypt, situated on the river Nile to the north. So wrote Ibn Haukal in the 10th century. It was near Fostat that Cairo was founded in 968. Jacques de Vitry, a bishop in Palestine in the 13th century (afterwards bishop of Tusculum, the modern Frascati) alludes to the produce of balsam in Egypt, which previously was to be obtained in the Holy Land only (Gesta Dei per Francos, etc., Hanoviæ, MDCXI, Bongars edition). According to De Lannoy, it grew by the shore near the city of Cairo, and De Maillet, Consul for France at that city in the early part of the last century, specially describes the plant, which, however, he could not have seen, as it had disappeared two hundred years before his time.
The last of the plants that grew in the garden of Matarea, says this author, were not more than two or three cubits in height, the stem being about one inch in thickness; the leaves of a beautiful green, on slender branches, resembled those of the rue. The stem had a double bark, the outer of a reddish colour, the inner, the thinnest, being perfectly green. The smell of the two barks was not unlike that of the turpentine tree, but when bruised between the fingers emitted an odour similar to that of cardamom. Like the vine, this plant was primed annually, and De Maillet supposes that then was extracted the valuable balsam so greatly esteemed by all Christians, especially those of the Coptic church, the efficacy of baptism without its application being generally doubted (Descr. de l’Egypte, edited by the Abbé Le Mascrier, à la Haye, 1740). De Maillet distinguishes the balsam of Cairo from that of Mecca, which Ali Bey (Travels, etc.) informs us was not made there, but, on the contrary, was very scarce, as it could only be obtained when brought by the Bedouins. Ali Bey was told that it came from Medina. According to some authors, the last of the balsam plants growing in Egypt were destroyed in 1615 by an inundation of the Nile.—Ed.
CHAPTER XLI.
[(1.)] “Of these four rivers I have seen three.”—Well versed as Schiltberger was in the Holy Scriptures, he could not but have been aware that the Euphrates and Tigris were included among the four rivers that had their source in Paradise; but he substitutes the Nile and Rison for the Gihon and Pison.