Ibn Battuta (1350) -- like Abu-l Fazl (1590) and Hamilton Buchanan
(1800) -- viewed his world in commercial terms, and standing outside
the state, he does not indicate that coercion was needed to generate
agrarian commodities. At each stop in his journey, he observed
everyday commercialism. "Bangala is a vast country, abounding
in rice," he says, "and nowhere in the world have I
seen any land where prices are lower than there." In Turkestan,
"the horses ... are very numerous and the price of them is
negligible." He was pleased to see commercial security, as
he did during eight months trekking from Goa to Quilon. "I
have never seen a safer road than this," he wrote, "for
they put to death anyone who steals a single nut, and if any fruit
falls no one picks it up but the owner." He also noted that
"most of the merchants from Fars and Yemen disembark"
at Mangalore, where "pepper and ginger are exceedingly abundant."
In 1357, John of Marignola, an emissary to China from Pope Benedict
XII, also stopped at Quilon, which he described it as "the
most famous city in the whole of India, where all the pepper in
the world grows."1