There are people who say “you can just do things”, and then there are people who at the age of fourteen stow away on an ocean-going vessel heading who-knows-where. Niccolao Manucci was the latter sort, and he held out down in that ship’s hold as long as he could, until hunger got the best of him. In fact, he lasted so long that when he finally gave in and presented himself to the captain it would have been inconvenient and uneconomical to return him to his parents in Venice. As the sailors debated whether to toss him overboard, press him into service, or maroon him on the closest bit of coastline, young Niccolao went and chatted up the other passengers. One of them, Lord Henry Bellomont, had recently escaped death at the hands of Oliver Cromwell, and invited Manucci to accompany him on an important mission to Persia.

That sounded pretty good to the teenager, so he disembarked with Bellomont at Smyrna, made the hazardous journey across Ottoman Anatolia, thence through Armenia, and finally to the Safavid Empire, where Bellomont declared himself an ambassador from the rightful king of England and sought Persian intervention in the English Civil War (!). The Shah was horrified by the regicide and amazed that the other Christian kings of Europe had not come to the aid of Charles I,¹ but gently rebuffed Bellomont’s request by pointing out that it would be quite impractical to send a large army from Persia to England.

Frustrated, Bellomont set off once again with his young charge, this time to the Mughal Empire. He got as far as the port of Surat, where he suddenly died, leaving the teenage Manucci completely on his own, thousands of miles from his home, in the middle of a civil war.

I sometimes wonder how often this sort of thing happens without us ever finding out. Perhaps history is full of ridiculous people having ridiculous adventures, it’s just that most of them aren’t Zhu Yuanzhang, or they don’t write detailed memoirs, or those memoirs are lost or destroyed before they reach us. Something like this very nearly happened to Manucci. The Venetian teenager left all alone in India not only survived, but flourished socially and financially, lived to a ripe old age, and wrote thousands of pages of penetrating social observations. His account is both the most entertaining and the most reliable history of the Mughal Empire at its zenith. Manucci had the singular talent of moving through every social circle, from the royal court to the lowest of peasants. He interacted with generals and statesmen, harem attendants, Islamic jurists, Hindu sages, elephant drivers,² Portuguese mercenaries, eunuchs, merchants, prostitutes, common soldiers, missionaries, beggars, and even the emperor himself. There are very few cases where we get to see a premodern society laid out in all its intimate detail and from every angle, and we only missed losing this one by the barest of lucky strokes.

The story of Manucci’s manuscript is a twisting one. The original copies of his tale fell into the hands of a French Jesuit who mutilated the text — excising all the fun parts, all the personal observations, the adventure stories, and of course anything remotely critical of the Catholic Church. The resulting “edition” found its way back to India and into Manucci’s hands before his death. Naturally, he freaked out and tried to reproduce his original text from memory, sending it along with a letter of protest by sealed courier directly to the Venetian Senate. But this second copy is the work of a much older man, much farther from the stories and events described, and has numerous omissions and differences from the original.³ In 1763, the Jesuit order was expelled from France and their Paris library, including Manucci’s first manuscript, was seized by the state. It was then lost during the Revolution and believed destroyed, before turning up in damaged and partial form at an auction-house in Berlin a century later.

Countless European intellectuals have tried their hand at stitching the mishmash of fragments we have back into a cohesive whole, including a “J. Bernoulli” (yes, one of those Bernoullis, but I can’t figure out which brother it was). But everybody agrees the most successful of these efforts was that by William Irvine, a British colonial administrator and fellow of both the Royal Asiatic Society and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, who also helpfully translated the whole thing into English. Irvine’s edition has been republished many times, most recently by the wonderful people at Forgotten Books, which is how it found its way into my hands.⁴

Irvine is not the sort of editor who confines his remarks to a preface and some footnotes. Instead, he directly injects his own commentary inline, into the body of the text. These asides range from bracketed remarks like “[here I have deleted a coarse and obscene description]” all the way up to essays dozens of pages long containing his reflections and opinions on the text. And this is layered on top of the various modifications and emendations made by French Jesuits and Venetian scribes. All of this gives the book a meta-textual, almost postmodern feeling. It’s a bit like House of Leaves. Sometimes you’re reading Manucci, and sometimes you’re reading three nested layers of people commenting on people commenting on people commenting on Manucci. And the effect is heightened when you suddenly realize that Manucci, like the protagonist of a Gene Wolfe story, is not telling you all that he knows.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Storia do Mogor, by Niccolao Manucci”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-09-08.

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1. Bellomont’s only real success in his mission was to completely poison the well for all future European travelers in Persia. Manucci reports that the next Englishman to visit the court of the Shah was thrown into a dungeon for disloyalty to his liege lord (a story independently corroborated by the French adventurer Jean-Baptiste Tavernier). “[The shah’s] object was to give a lesson to his own nobles as to the manner in which they should serve their king and the fidelity they ought to display, when the occasion arose, in defence of their monarch.”
2. The book contains extensive discussion of how all elephants and horses that the Mughal princes might want to ride are pre-ridden by an attendant, to “loosen its stomach” and eliminate any flatulence.
3. This is actually a huge simplification — there are four distinct Venetian codices, all with major differences from each other.
4. I started with the Forgotten Books paperback, but halfway through the first volume I was hooked, and seeing that I had a thousand pages left to go, picked up a handsome leatherbound set from a used book seller for a song. I would normally never dream of buying a second copy of a book I already own just because it feels nicer in my hands, but you, dear subscribers, have spoiled me.