Niccolò de' Conti was an Italian merchant, explorer, and writer. Born in Chioggia, who traveled to India and Southeast Asia, and possibly to Southern China, during the early 15th century. He was one of the human sources used to create the 1450 Fra Mauro map, which indicated that there was a sea route from Europe around Africa to India. De' Conti departed from Venice about 1419 and established himself in Damascus, Syria, where he studied Arabic. Over a period of 25 years, he traveled as a merchant to numerous places in Asia. His familiarity with the languages and cultures of the Islamic world allowed him to travel to many places on board ships owned by Islamic merchants. De' Conti's travels followed the period of Timurid relations with Europe. They also occurred around the same time and in the same places as the Chinese expeditions of Admiral Zheng He. His accounts are contemporary, and fairly consistent with those of the Chinese writers who were on Zheng He's ships, such as Ma Huan and Fei Xin.
Travels
After the return of Marco Polo in 1295, there is no record of Italian traders returning from China until the return of de' Conti by sea in 1439. However, we do have the account of the travels of a Franciscan friar by the name of Odoricus Mattiuzzi from Friuli who in 1310 visited Armenia, Mesopotamia, Persia, Ceylon, Sumatra, Java, Cambodia, Champa and China. De' Conti first crossed the desert to reach Baghdad and from there sailed down the Tigris to Basra. He then sailed through the Persian Gulf and went to Iran where he learnt Persian. He then crossed the Arabian sea to Cambay, in Gujarat. He travelled in India to "Pacamuria", "Helly" and Vijayanagar, capital of the Deccan before 1420. It was in India that he coined the phrase 'Italian of the East' to refer to the Telugu language, which he found had words ending with vowels, similar to Italian. He went to "Maliapur" on the east coast of India, where he visited the tomb of St. Thomas, who in Christian tradition is recorded to have founded a Christian community there. About 1421, de' Conti crossed to "Pedir" in northern Sumatra, where he spent a year, gaining local knowledge, particularly on the gold and spice trade. He then continued after sailing 16 days to Tenasserim on the Malay peninsula. He then sailed to the mouth of the Ganges, visited Sonargaon and Chittagong and then went overland to Arakan. After traveling through Burma, he left for Java where he spent nine months, before going to Champa. De' Conti described South-East Asia as "exceeding all other regions in wealth, culture and magnificence, and abreast of Italy in civilization". In the 1430s he sailed back to India and then to the Middle-East, from where he travelled overland via Mount Sinai, where the Spanish traveller Pedro Tafur encountered him in 1436 and reported some of Niccolò's marvels, including detailed accounts of Prester John, and thence, in company with Pedro, to Cairo. Throughout his travels, he was accompanied by his family. However his wife, whom he had met in India, and two of his four children died in Egypt during an epidemic. He continued to Italy with his remaining children. de' Conti returned to Venice in 1444, where he remained as a respected merchant.
Account of voyages
's record of de' Conti's account, made in 1444, constitutes one of the best accounts of the East by a 15th-century traveler. It was included in the Book IV of his "De varietate fortunae". Accounts of Niccolò de' Conti's travels, which first circulated in manuscript form, are said to have profoundly influenced the European geographical understanding of the areas around the Indian Ocean during the middle of the 15th century. They were the first accounts to detail the Sunda Islands and Spice Islands since the accounts of Marco Polo, and there is reason to believe that some of the new information on Fra Mauro's map was gleaned from conversation with Niccolò. His accounts probably encouraged the European travels of exploration of the end of the century. , in the form of geographic conceptions and several quotes and names taken directly from Conti. of 1460 also relied extensively on Conti. de' Conti also influenced 15th century cartography, as can be seen on the Genoese map, and in the work of the mapmaker Fra Mauro, whose influential Fra Mauro map offered one of the clearest depiction of the Old World. In these two maps, many new location names, and several verbatim descriptions, were taken directly from de Conti's account. The "trustworthy source" whom Fra Mauro quoted in writing is thought to have been de' Conti himself. Mauro's map discusses the travels of a Zoncho de India, a "junk from India", beyond the Cape of Good Hope into the Atlantic Ocean around 1420, confirming that it was possible to sail around Africa through the south. In his descriptions of East Asia, de' Conti describes huge junks of about 1,000 tons, larger than the typical 16th century Western galleons and equal to the large Manila galleons:
Some translations have 2000 butts, which is around 1,000 tons, while other translations of de' Conti have 2,000 tons. The translation above is from the Hakluyt Society's translation. A butt was unit of volume that was half a ton.
The first printed edition of de' Conti's account was made in 1492 in the original Latin by Cristoforo da Bollate and dedicated to Pietro Cara, who was going on a journey to India. Various translations followed, into Portuguese and Spanish. The first Italian-language edition appears to have been translated from the Portuguese edition, and was made a part of the collection of travellers’ accounts published in 1550 by Giovanni Battista Ramusio. The first English edition was translated from the Spanish, and printed in 1579 by John Frampton, using a combination of Marco Polo's and de Conti's narrations.
