The Pepper Port of Calicut

Calicut, on the Malabar coast of south-western India, was in the fourteenth century one of the greatest emporia of the Indian Ocean and a chief port of the pepper and spice trade. Ruled by a Hindu king, the Zamorin, it was nonetheless a deeply cosmopolitan city, and much of its rich sea-trade was in the hands of a large and prosperous community of Muslim merchants, Arabs, Persians and Indian Muslims, who had settled there over generations, built their mosques and lived under the protection of the Zamorin, whose tolerance and the security and honesty of whose port were widely praised. Calicut lay at the meeting of the eastern and western halves of the Indian Ocean trade: from the west came the ships of the Arabs and Persians for pepper and spices, and from the east, riding the monsoon, came the great Chinese junks, the largest ships of the age, towering vessels of many masts and decks, to exchange the goods of China for those of India and the lands beyond. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta came to Calicut about 1342, having been sent by the sultan of Delhi as an envoy to the emperor of China, and waited there for the season of the winds; he left a vivid account of the port, of its Chinese ships and its trade, and praised especially the honesty with which the property of foreign and shipwrecked merchants was kept safe for its owners. This Muslim mercantile presence on the Malabar coast was one of the channels by which Islam spread peacefully through the lands of the Indian Ocean, carried by traders rather than armies. This scene depicts the harbour of Calicut with its junks and its spice-trade. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.