Annotated Copy of Persia and the Persian Question by George Curzon, with Inserted Papers [‎746v] (1509/1814)

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discoyered on the banks of the Minau creek (to the
east of Bunder Abbas) some six miles south-west of the Minau
History of f or t* Towards the end of the thirteenth century Marco
Ormuz Polo twice (in 1272 and in 1293 a.d.) visited the city
of Hormos, Hormes, or Curmosa, which was already the centre
of a vast trade with every part of the East, receiving, especially
from India, rich cargoes of spices, precious stones, pearls, ivory,
silks, and cloth of gold. It was ruled by a line of independent
Arab chiefs or kings , 1 the fifteenth in descent of whom, named
Kutb-ed-Din, being pressed by a Mongolian invasion from the north,
and finding that the exposed situation of his capital rendered it an
easy prey to rapine, took the decisive step, in 1300 a.d., of aban-
, doning the mainland, and founding a new Ormuz on a small island,
distant at the nearest point about four miles from the coast, which
has ever since borne the name. For 200 years the new city re
tained, in Arab hands, the fame and prosperity of its predecessor,
and wielded a sovereignty that extended to Bahrein and Busrah.
Ibn Batutah, the Moor, came hither in 1331 a.d., and reported
the new Ormuz as being a large and beautiful city, containing the
residence of the king . 2 A little later the reigning sovereign
escaped the hostility, by becoming the tributary, of Timur. In
1442, Abdur Bezak, the reluctant seafarer and envoy from Shah
Bukh, whom I have before quoted, starting for India from Ormuz,
left on record that that place ‘ had not its equal on the surface of
the globe , 5 that it contained c merchants of seven climates and
travellers from all countries , 5 and that ‘ the inhabitants united the
flattering character of the people of Irak with the profound cun
ning of the Indians .’ 3 Thirty years later the Bussian merchant,
Athanasius Nikitin, paid a similar tribute to the commercial glory
of Ormuz . 4 Ludovico di Varthema, in 1504, three years before the
Portuguese appeared upon the scene, described it as c the noble city
of Ormuz, which is extremely beautiful . 5 5 The Latin tongue
was even invoked by some scholarly eulogist, who thus rendered a
couplet that had also an English version :—
1 For a list of the Arab kings of Ormuz, vide Teixeira, Relaciones del Origen>
etc., de los Reyes de Persia y de Harmuz, Coimbre, 1610; Traduction Fran^aise,
2 vols., Paris, 1681; also Purchas’ Pilgrims, vol. ii. lib. x.; Herbert, Some Yeares'
Travels, pp. 108-9 ; De Guignes’ Histoire des Huns, vol. i. p. 345 ; and Yule’s Marco
Polo, vol. i. pp. 124-6. 2 Travels (edit. 1829), p. 63.
3 India in the 15th Century (Hakluyt Society), p. 7.
\fh 4 Hid. 5 Travels (Hakluyt Society), p. 94.
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