Niccolo Manucci

-

Niccolao Manucci

Portrait of Manucci, National Library of France, Cabinet of Prints, Paris.
Born19 April 1638
Venice, now Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy
Died1717 (aged 79)
Monte Grande, Chennai (present-day Tamil Nadu, India)
OccupationPhysician, Historian, Geographer, Explorer
Years activec. 1660–1717
Notable worksStoria do Mogor (1698)
Signature
Manucci sign.png
Niccolao Manucci (19 April 1638 – 1717) was a Venetian writer, a self-taught physician, and traveller, who wrote accounts of the Mughal Empire supposedly first-hand but with many details now considered doubtful. He also documented folk beliefs and customs of the period.

Biography

Niccolò Manucci was born in Venice to Pasqualino Manucci and Rosa née Bellin. He joined an uncle in Corfu as a teenager and went aboard an English ship to India. In Delhi he lived with Jesuit priests learning Persian and some medical knowledge. He sent a ring back home with instructions that it should be sold for books on medicine to be sent back to him. After several dubious attempts as a medical practitioner with lucky cures effected for some influential patients[2] he seems to have managed to work as a physician in the court of the Mughals. In 1653, he was recruited as a servant and guide by Henry Bard, 1st Viscount Bellomont, envoy from Charles II of England to Abbas II of Persia and Shah Jahan.



After Bard died at Hodal on 20 June 1656, Manucci moved to Surat and around 1656 he became an artillery man for Dara Shikoh. Following the death of Dara Shikoh he moved to Patna and later worked with Mirza Raja Jai Singh and in 1666 he tried to find work in Portuguese Bassein and Goa. He then returned to Mughal service in Lahore as a physician. He lost material in a shipwreck and then worked as a physician for Shah Alam in the Deccan. In 1682 he tried to act as an intermediary between the Portuguese and the Mughals and was made a member of the Order of Santiago by the Portuguese Viceroy Dom Francisco de Távora, Conde de Alvor but this ends in 1686 when he lost Mughal trust. He then moved to Hyderabad and then to Madras, marrying Elizabeth Hartley Clarke, widow of Portuguese interpreter Thomas Clarke. He lived in Madras with some work at Pondicherry where he obtained a house on the Rue Neuve de la Porte de Goudelour. He maintained good relations with William Gyfford and Thomas Pitt.

Manucci remained in India for much of his life and is one of the few supposedly first hand European sources for Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb, Shivaji, Dara Shikoh, Shah Alam I, Jai Singh I and Kirat Singh. He had miniature paintings made of several of the Mughal rulers for his book.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What are the similarities between ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

-
Image
 How similar was Mesopotamia to Ancient Egypt? Overview q Students will be expected to explain how and why humans made the transition from small Neolithic villages to the first large scale complex societies located in Mesopotamia, Egypt, South Asia, China, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Mexico. q Emphasis should be placed on how the climate and geography shaped the government, economy (including trade and agriculture), and cultural features (including religion, social class, language and the arts). q Students  should be able to note similarities and differences in the development and characteristics of each civilization.  § Further, students are expected to explain how these societies changed over time as a result of interactions with neighboring civilizations.  Mesopotamian & Egyptian Society q Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations developed in substantially different environments.  § While both civilizations developed in fertile river ...
Read more

Who is the Most Documented Person in History?

-
Image
 Who is the most documented person in history? This question has no easy answer, and perhaps, no conclusive one, either. Even some of the most controversial persons may be overshadowed by other seemingly inconspicuous ones. In this post, we take a close look at some of the most documented people in history in an attempt to decide who is the most documented. Read on to find the surprising conclusion at the end! Who is the Most Documented Person in History? 1. Don Talayesva Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/chaparralbrad/3275685140/in/photostream/ Don Talayesva (1890-1985) was a Hopi American Indian who wrote his autobiography in conjunction with an anthropologist from Yale University, Leo Simmons. Talayesva was born in Old Oraibi, Arizona with the name Chuka. Until the age of ten, he was brought up in the traditional Hopi way. Later, he spent ten years exposed to European culture, and later returned to the Hopi way of life. In the field of anthropology, Don Talayesva was conside...
Read more

quality of Roman armor than the armor of knights of the XII-XIV centuries

-
Image
When I was studying the metallurgy of ancient Rome, I saw a rather controversial study done by Michael Fulford, David Sim and Alistair Doig called "The production of Roman ferrous armour:a metallographic survey of material from Britain,Denmark and Germany, and its implications".Here is what it says about the quality of the armor of ancient Rome: In the material itself there is perhaps a greater variation, from martensitic steel to pure ferrite, but the hardness is consistently greater than about 180Hv. Of our samples, 80% are of ferrite, most showing equi-axed grains from hot-working, and with hardness ranging from 124 to 325HV; the latter (no. 20, Vindolanda helmet) was achieved by heavy cold-working and showed elongated ferrite grains.In all, 64 measurements of different sheets of ferrite give an average hardness of 195Hv and a median of 190Hv. Given that annealed iron is normally 90-100Hv, the extent of cold-working to achieve hardnesses in excess of 180Hv can be well appr...
Read more