With the King’s connivance many corsairs launch from this port to plunder merchants.  These corsairs have a covenant with the King that he shall get all the horses they capture, and all other plunder shall remain with them.  The King does this because he has no horses of his own, whilst many are shipped from abroad towards India; for no ship ever goes thither without horses in addition to other cargo.  The practice is naughty and unworthy of a king.

NOTE 1.—­The town of THANA, on the landward side of the island of Salsette, still exists, about 20 miles from Bombay.  The Great Peninsular Railroad here crosses the strait which separates Salsette from the Continent.

The Konkan is no doubt what was intended by the kingdom of Thana.  Albiruni speaks of that city as the capital of Konkan; Rashiduddin calls it Konkan-Tana, Ibn Batuta Kukin-Tana, the last a form which appears in the Carta Catalana as Cucintana.  Tieffentaller writes Kokan, and this is said (Cunningham’s Anc.  Geog. 553) to be the local pronunciation.  Abulfeda speaks of it as a very celebrated place of trade, producing a kind of cloth which was called Tanasi, bamboos, and Tabashir derived from the ashes of the bamboo.

As early as the 16th year of the Hijra (A.D. 637) an Arab fleet from Oman made a hostile descent on the Island of Thana, i.e.  Salsette.  The place (Sri Sthanaka) appears from inscriptions to have been the seat of a Hindu kingdom of the Konkan, in the 11th century.  In Polo’s time Thana seems to have been still under a Hindu prince, but it soon afterwards became subject to the Delhi sovereigns; and when visited by Jordanus and by Odoric some thirty years after Polo’s voyage, a Mussulman governor was ruling there, who put to death four Franciscans, the companions of Jordanus.  Barbosa gives it the compound name of TANA-MAIAMBU, the latter part being the first indication I know of the name of Bombay (Mambai).  It was still a place of many mosques, temples, and gardens, but the trade was small.  Pirates still did business from the port, but on a reduced scale.  Botero says that there were the remains of an immense city to be seen, and that the town still contained 5000 velvet-weavers (p. 104).  Till the Mahrattas took Salsette in 1737, the Portuguese had many fine villas about Thana.

Polo’s dislocation of geographical order here has misled Fra Mauro into placing Tana to the west of Guzerat, though he has a duplicate Tana nearer the correct position.

NOTE 2.—­It has often been erroneously supposed that the frankincense (olibanum) of commerce, for which Bombay and the ports which preceded it in Western India have for centuries afforded the chief mart, was an Indian product.  But Marco is not making that mistake; he calls the incense of Western India brown, evidently in contrast with the white incense or olibanum, which he afterwards