ABSTRACT
It is comparatively recently that historical scholarship has begun to escape from the Eurocentric assumption that the first global economic system was 'invented' by European seafarers in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Ironically, the flawed and fable-ridden Mandeville's Travels overshadowed, in the later medieval period, the much more reliable account of Marco Polo, who had had the opportunity to travel extensively in Asia in the heyday of that Mongol imperial ascendancy which had itself provided a vast area of stability and unity which helped underpin the global trade network. A favourite pendant of the jewel-loving Queen Elizabeth, it was used by her successor James VI and I as a cap-badge, and then significantly removed from its setting by his Scots banker-cum-court-jeweller, George Heriot, in 1623. Jacobean goldsmiths' accounts of the gemstones in current use give a fascinating illustration of just how dramatically knowledge of the geography of the Deccani diamond-bearing areas had expanded by the early seventeenth century.
