A Late Antique Herodotus: Cosmas the Monk and His Adventures to India
Cosmas Indicopleustes is practically a ghost before his writings appear. Yet after this dramatic appearance the extraordinary details about his travels as a merchant that he would go on to document have left historians studying the ancient world eternally grateful.
Europe, Africa, Asia, the only three continents known in the 6th Century AD. He travelled them all. In an age where travel even to the next village was an unusual occurrence for people in Western Europe, in the Eastern Roman Empire merchants and writers regularly sailed to India and beyond. Cosmas was so famous for his travelling that he was given the name ‘Indicopleustes’ (‘The voyager to India’).
Innumerable painted images once illustrated his texts, temples of alien architecture, creatures of inconceivable form. Now the only pictures to aid us are his colourful vocabulary and enthralling descriptions of a world so very far away from Rome. He even describes a unicorn, though adding tactfully that he has not seen one himself. He does however include more realistic creatures such as the Indian hog-deer, mentioning gleefully that he has both seen and eaten them. Dolphins, turtles, and seals, nothing escaped Cosmas’ exotic tastes. So much for monastic plainness of palate…
This text that would at first seem dry and ecclesiastical to a classicist in fact contains a great deal of humorous narrative. An odd tactic of siege warfare is described where a king leads two thousand elephants along with cavalry to the moat of the enemy. Then the elephants, horses, and men are forced to drink all the water, and when all of it has been consumed he advances on the city, albeit with a heavily bloated army.
Photius, the great Byzantine commentator, compiled and summarised an enormous list of the books that he read, spanning from ancient times to the 9th century. You can probably guess the labelling he gives this book. ‘Nonsense’ he says, ‘such ridiculous absurdities’. You can almost hear Photius shifting uncomfortably in his seat as he reads the description of a spiralling unicorn hurling itself off a mountain to avoid its predators.
After many years of travelling the Indian Ocean bejewelled with desert islands, fragrant tastes, and the unrivalled glimpse it offers into the flavour of life, this Cosmas makes his home in Alexandria, a dry and dusty abode for hermits.
An ever-icy Gibbon revels in yet another of his jibes as he notices ‘the nonsense of the Monk’ seeping into the text of a keen traveller. Flat Earth theorists will be pleased to share a sympathiser in Cosmas, but our explorer was alone in his views even then…
Our story doesn’t end here however.
An eleventh century Byzantine legend records three monks deciding to make a similar voyage. This crack team of ecclesiastical enthusiasts, versed in Cosmas’ scripture, chase the sunset, pursuing Paradise at the edge of the world, their eyes set on the extremities of India: Tzinitza — China.
In Byzantine minds and hearts Paradise was not only a physical place but was thought reachable. Its location? The Far East.
One man alone knew the secrets of this heavenly realm, Saint Makarios, guided as he was to the edges of the known world by the Angel Raphael, commanded to live as a caveman among wild beasts.
Makarios must have presented a ghastly figure, flushed gashes running red on his skin from ceaseless contact with the stone on his windswept crag, all possibilities of washing as distant as the realms of civilisation.
The journey to him was no mean feat, nor was it dull for that matter. Animals of scarcely believable form would appear to the monks as they sat huddled in their tents on the wintry highroads, and creatures even stranger than those would drink in unison with our travellers as they hurled themselves into the blue waters of a desert oasis in the summer heat.
They had travelled more than five thousand miles. Their legs could hardly shift the burden by the time they arrived at the cave of Makarios. This is the man that they had been searching for the whole time to tell them where they could find the end of the world. So inspired were these men by Cosmas’ account with its marvellous descriptions of Mother Earth’s borderlands…
Then they are told in but a single sentence that it is impossible to get there.
I would certainly pay dearly to see the look on these monks’ faces as they stared despairingly at each other. What had they come for? What was the point of this whole journey? I’m sure their wishes were to burn every book of Cosmas as soon as they returned home.
But it was not all in vain, for sometimes a good story is all that is needed.
Makarios gives them one:
Images that would terrify even the soundest of minds are recalled with ease by this skilful wordsmith. ‘Cherubim’ (not to be confused with their winged angelic counterparts) peruse the land surrounding Paradise in search of prey, flying only to find human flesh to feast on. ‘Cynocephali’ (‘Dog-heads’), unspeakably horrific droves of humans scarcely worth the name, make even barbarians look civilised, slowly cowering under rocks, shading their hollow eyes from the sun’s telling light, mouths and hands tainted with human sinew and blood. The conjuring of such anthropological abominations makes the ‘othering’ of Persia seem laughable. For the civilised Byzantine, it doesn’t get more reviling than this.
Our three monks leave somewhat dismayed, cheated of the Paradise that they had never witnessed, but never forgetting how much their journey had taught them. They had hurdled barriers of hunger and thirst thought impassable, passed through terrain so rugged that even the fearless Hannibal would balk at tackling, seen species so exotic and diverse that the descriptions of Plato’s fugitive from the cave would seem positively credible in comparison.
You can imagine the inspiration that the West gained from such accounts. In fact, the influence goes both ways: strangely, Cosmas’ unit of measurement called a ‘gaon’ is still used today in Sri Lanka.
This is the stuff of adventures, stories of Eastern exploration that predate Marco Polo by more than seven hundred years.
Welcome to the beauty of Late Antiquity.
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