In 1580, the English merchant John Frampton, a member of the Muscovy Company, presented A Discoverie of the Countries of Tartaria, Scithia, & Cataya to the corporation to encourage the expansion of its activities towards east Asia. This text, translated from material written by the Spaniard Francisco Thamara, was designed to assist the company in its search for a maritime passage to ‘Cataya’ (Cathay), to ‘better shun perils’ along the way, ‘and on the other side take the benefit of the place the better’. Frampton believed that a north-eastern route, by sea, would allow English merchants to avoid the long southern route to Asia around Africa, dominated by the Spanish and Portuguese in any case, and discover their own entry into these distant markets via the ‘Anian Straight’ (see Figure 1). In Frampton’s text, Cataya was presented as source of incredible wealth, providing ‘gold, spices, and precious stones’ as well as ‘ginger, pepper and cloves’. It was also presented as friendly space, with ‘many Christians’ already living there, ‘universities and studies of learning, and the scripture of the old and new testament, whereof it comes to pass that they honour God’. If rumours were true, Christianity in Cataya might be even more entrenched than this, and Frampton reported that ‘in old time it was said, that it belonged to Prester John’. Finally, if it was to believed, in Cataya there was ‘neither pestilence, nor any other contagious diseases’ - what better location could there be for English merchants to trade?

Figure 1: ‘Cataya’ is identified in the top-right of this map, accessible via the northern sea and the Apian Straight between Eurasia and America, while ‘Tartaria’ as a whole is bordered in yellow. Asiae Novo Descriptio, Jodoco Hondio (1610).

Yet, despite further efforts to explore the northern seas, no navigable passage to ‘Cataya’ was found. Instead, during the first decade of the seventeenth-century, English merchants shifted their focus to overland routes, through lands in central Asia that were barely understood and often subsumed into a vast land known as ‘Tartaria’ that stretched from the Caspian Sea the whole way to the Pacific Ocean. At their most ambitious, these plans included suggestions that the Muscovy Company should conquer Russia, currently embroiled in its own troubles, to control the northern access to these Eurasian trade routes. Some company members suggested the cost of invasion was well worth it and that the proposal was ‘the greatest and happiest overture that ever was made to any king of this realm, since Columbus offered King Henry VII the discovery of the West Indies.’ Most plans were less bold, but nevertheless saw in ‘Tartaria’ the possibility of an entrance the distant riches of Cataya.

In making their plans, England’s merchants were encouraged by decades of experience trading eastward through Russia. As early as 1566, Muscovy Company traders had resided in ‘Sumachia’ – a city on the western coast of the Caspian Sea ‘chiefly inhabited by Armenians and Georgians’ where ‘English merchants did traffic much’. Further south, in Gilan, they traded into Safavid Persia, where ‘silks of all sorts of colours, both raw and wrought’ were sold, that, the traveller John Cartwright believed, could be exchanged for English tin, copper, brass and woollen cloth. The English presence on the Caspian Sea also promised access to the Eurasian trade route, and Cartwright described the city of Derbent, on the west coast of the Caspian Sea, as a renowned gateway between ‘Tartaria into Persia, and out of Persia into Tartaria’. With this connection in mind, Anthony Linton promised that ‘the great empire of Cataia… and the great riches of the same’ would soon be accessible ‘by land from the confines of the Caspian Sea’, whereby ‘our nation may be entertained by a very rich trade of merchandize with the Cataians’. From this perspective, the Caspian Sea was not the edge of the known, but a well-trodden entrance to a world beyond, to trade routes eastward, and eventually to the ludicrous wealth of Cataya itself.

These general descriptions were also backed up by eye-witness accounts of trade in ‘Tartaria’, recorded by Anthony Jenkinson, who had travelled from the Caspian Sea to Bukhara in 1558. Jenkinson recognised Bukhara as the capital of an Islamic, Persian-speaking kingdom with close ties to the Safavid empire (although not always peaceful ones). Furthermore, he also noted the trade links that it provided, describing the ‘yearly great resort of merchants to this city of Bukhara, which travel in great caravans from the countries thereabouts adjoining, as India, Persia, Balkh, Russia, with diverse others, and in time past from Cathay’, although the latter trade was disrupted by wars. Sadly, Jenkinson did not record his news of the Cathay trade, noting only that ‘I have thought it best to reserve it to our meeting’, informing the reader only that ‘in times of peace, and when the way is open’ merchants from Cathay brought ‘musk, rhubarb, satin, damask, with diverse other things’ to the market. However, despite its reproduction in Richard Hakluyt’s edited collection, Jenkinson’s account of Bukhara made little or no impact on the plans of the Muscovy Company to venture eastward from the Caspian Sea, or on the descriptions of ‘Tartaria’ that dominated English understanding of the region.

Figure 2: Depiction of 'Tatars' from Adam Olearius's 1656 account of his earlier travels to the Caspian region in the 1630s.

Despite this early interest and enthusiasm, English access to these Eurasian routes would require traversing these lands to the east of the Caspian Sea, that in early seventeenth century texts were often described only as ‘Tartaria’. This region was shrouded in ambiguity for English authors, editors, and travellers, having attracted interest but little in the way of repeat interaction on the part of English traders. Within this area, the geographer Robert Stafford reported that there were ‘both Pagans and Saracens’, and peoples ranging from ‘hordes’ subject ‘unto the Turk’ and ‘unto the Muscovite’ to the west, and ‘Cathayo’ to the east where the city of ‘Cambalowe’ was the ‘chief seat of the Great Cham’. Between the two, the mythical land of ‘Gog and Magog’ was situated, as well as vast ‘empty’ spaces. Many texts were highly critical and did little to situate the region as part of the wider Islamic world (that English merchants knew well), repeating stereotyped descriptions of the Tatar people as violent, uninterested in trade, and even cannibalistic. Some texts, like Edward Aston’s, concluded ‘there be no cities or great towns in the whole country, but only one called Cracuris’ and highlighted the Tatars ‘rude behaviour’ rather than possibilities of trade in the region.

Yet, this perception of central Asia was not the only one available to English readers, and the Muscovy Company’s plans to strike east from the Caspian Sea were more likely inspired by accounts of authors like Giovanni Botero, whose text explicitly placed the region not only as part of the Islamic world, but as a historical driving force behind its contemporary power and wealth. In his text, which was translated into English during this period, Botero described in Tartaria ‘far greater cities than in any parts else in the world’ and the source of two great empires. The first, of the ‘Mogorian Tatars’ who were descended from Tamerlane, who ‘like a horrible tempest, a deadly raging flood, he threw down to the ground the most ancient & worthiest cities, and carried from thence their wealth & riches’, and had now formed the Mughal Empire. The second empire of the ‘Cataian Tartars’, was ruled by ‘the great Cham’ whose ancestor had ‘subdued China, and made a great part of India tributary unto him, he wasted Persia, and made Asia tremble’. The chief city of the Cataian Tartars was reportedly ‘Chiambalu’, a site ‘of such traffic and commerce’ where ‘there are every year brought in to it, very near a thousand carts all laden with silk’. Among the cities described by Botero were the great trading centres of Samarkand and Bukhara, that in the sixteenth century had undergone a renaissance as centres of learning, art, and commerce. 

In the early seventeenth century, English hopes of finding a route to Cataya overland were shaped by these descriptions. Yet, despite enduring interest and access to the borders of central Asia’s trading circuits through the Caspian Sea, a passage eastward never materialised. In the end, the risks and ambiguities of an imagined ‘Tartaria’ were too much to overcome, and the riches of Bukhara, Cataya and China would remain out of reach.

Figure 3: The Po-i-Kalyon complex in Bukhara was built by rulers of the Shaibanid dynasty in the sixteenth century, under whose leadership the Khanate of Bukhara rose to prominence in central Asia as a site of learning, trade and diplomatic exchange.

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Bibliography

BL, Cotton Nero B XI, f. 382-4. Discussion of trade into the Baltic and Russia, [1609-10]

Edward Aston (trans., ed.), The Manners, Lawes, and Customes of All Nations Collected out of the Best Writers (London, 1611)

Giovanni Botero, trans. Robert Peterson, A Treatise, Concerning the Causes of the Magnificence and Greatness of Cities (London, 1606)

John Cartwright, The Preachers Travels: Wherein is set down a true journal to the confines of the East Indies (London, 1611)

John Frampton (trans.), A Discoverie of the Countries of Tartaria, Scithia, & Cataya, by the Northeast: with the manners, fashions, and orders which are used by those countries (London, 1580)

Anthony Jenkinson, The Voyage of Master Anthony Jenkinson in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (London, 1599-1600)

Anthony Linton, Newes of the Complement of the Art of Navigation and of the Mighty Empire of Cataia (London, 1609)

Robert Stafford, A Geographicall and Anthologicall Description of all the Empires and Kingdomes, both of Continents and Ilands in this Terrestrial Globe, Relating to their Situations, Manners, Customes, Provinces, and Governments (London, 1607)

Edmond Smith is a Presidential Fellow in Economic Cultures at the University of Manchester. Formerly a capital markets research manager, Smith now specialises in the histories of capitalism and globalisation, having completed his PhD at Cambridge in 2016.

Smith has published articles and chapters on topic related to trade, shipping, and early modern diplomacy. Most recently, they have authored Merchants: The Community That Shaped England’s Trade and Empire (Yale University Press, 2021) and edited Trading Companies and Travel Writing in the Early Modern World (Routledge, 2021).