Note (1) — 42.—How pepper grows in India.

(1.) “the city of Lambe, in a forest called Lambor.”—Pepper was cultivated in Malabar, the country indicated by these two names, long before Schiltberger’s time. Kazvini, who died in 1283, Aboulfeda and Ibn Batouta, all mention its produce, and Giovanni de’ Marignolli, who visited Malabar in 1348, describes the cultivation of pepper in pretty much the same terms as does our author, equally refuting the story that the black colour was owing to smoke employed to drive away serpents. We are informed by this author of the existence of many Christians of St. Thomas in the country, and that there was a Latin church dedicated to St. George in the town of Columbus, doubtlessly the Kollam of the Arabs (Peschel, Gesch. d. Erdkunde, 162, note 3), the Kuilon of the Chinese, called Coilum by Marco Polo, Chulam by Benjamin of Tudela, Kaalan by Haythoun, Palombo, Alembo, Polumbrum by Oderic and Mandevile, and Koulem by the natives. These names have nothing in common with Koulouri, where the Russian merchant Nikitin spent five months, but they somewhat assimilate that of Colanum taken in 1503 by the Portuguese, who stated that this town on the coast of Malabar was reputed to be the most ancient and the richest in India (Maffei, Hist. Ind., i, 52, xii, 289). Colanum may have been one of the places mentioned by Schiltberger, the other being Calicut, touched at by Vasco de Gama in 1498.