ABSTRACT
LUDOVICO DI VARTHEMA. 217 good houses and palaces built of stone, with lime.1 The king is extremely powerful in men, both foot and horse, and has with him more than a thousand Christians of the country which has been above mentioned to you.3 And he
1 So Ralph Fitch eighty years after Yarthema :— “ Pegu is a city very great, strong, and very fair, with walls o f stone, and great ditches round about it. There are two towns, the old and the new. In the old town are all the merchants strangers, and very many merchants o f the coun try. All the goods are sold in the old town, which is very great, and hath many suburbs round about it, and all the houses are made of canes, which they call bambos, and are covered with straw.” {Id., pp. 416-7.) Symes says: “ The extent o f ancient Pegue may still be accurately traced by the ruins o f the ditch and wall that surrounded i t : from this it appears to have been a quadrangle, each side measuring nearly a mile and a half. In several places the ditch is filled up with rubbish that has been cast into it, and the falling o f its own banks ; sufficient, however, still remains to show that it was no contemptible defence.” He de scribes the streets of the new town as well paved with the bricks brought from the old city, but all the houses o f the former as being made o f mats, or sheathing boards, supported on bamboos or posts, “ the king having prohibited the use o f brick or stone in private buildings, from the apprehension that if people got leave to build brick houses, they might erect brick fortifications.” Id., pp. 436-8.
