The Dynasties of the Kanarese Districts of the Bombay Presidency from the Earliest Historical Times to the Musalman Conquest c7.s4.52

c7.s4.52

travellers is Ibn Batuta in the fourteenth century, who did not visit the Konkan, but mentions Thána as one of the ports from which great ships used to go to Aden.¹ But this last traveller was later in date than the famous Venetian Marco Polo (1290). His description of this part is unfortunately rather vague, nor does he mention the name Konkan. But he divides all this coast into the kingdom of Tanna and the kingdom of Lar. Of the latter his account is very indefinite, but Tanna he calls "a great kingdom with a language of its own and a king of its own, tributary to nobody; many ships and merchants frequent the place." He mentions leather, buckram, and cotton as the exports, and then he comes to the pirates, and their custom of giving up all the horses they take to the king, and keeping the rest of the plunder to themselves. With so much specified it is not difficult to assume Lar to be the Larika of Ptolemy, and to have included the northern part of the Konkan and part, at all events, of Gujarát. Colonel Yule adds that all the sea, west of this coast, was in early times called the sea of Lar.² The account of the martyrdom of the four friars at Thána, which is believed to have taken place on the Thursday before Palm Sunday 1322, is so curious that it cannot be omitted. It is given by the Friar Odoricus who himself visited Thána, and, though full of wonders anachronisms and absurdities, seems from some of the local details to be founded on fact. It is not clear whether the friars ever received the official beatification of Rome, but they appear as Beati in the Acta Sanctorum and are commemorated in one of the churches at Goa.