ABSTRACT
Richard Hakluyt's materials for the description of the Caspian and adjoining countries derive from the same sources which he used for Russia – notably his contemporaries Stephen and William Borough and Anthony Jenkinson. Hakluyt was familiar with the work of Ramusio, but he does not incorporate in his materials the important information which had been provided by Genoese and Venetian merchants and diplomatic agents at intervals over the period between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Hakluyt was primarily the editor of materials on the English contribution to the expansion of knowledge of the world beyond Europe during the sixteenth century. Hakluyt made use of a Latin version of Mandeville where the account of the countries round the Caspian lacks many of the details given in the Egerton and Paris MS s of the late fourteenth century. An intrepid traveller and an acute man of affairs, Jenkinson was the first Englishman to sail the Caspian and to penetrate to Bukhara.
