CONTI, NICOLO DE' (fl. 1419-1444), Venetian explorer and writer, was a merchant of noble family, who left Venice about 1419 for 25 years. We next find him in Damascus, whence he made his way over the north Arabian desert, the Euphrates and southern Mesopotamia, to Baghdad. From Baghdad he sailed down the Tigris to Basra and the head of the Persian gulf ; he next descended the gulf to Ormuz, coasted along the Indian ocean shore of Persia to Cambay, where he began his Indian life and observations. He next dropped down the west coast of India and struck inland to Vijayanagar, the capital of the prin cipal Hindu state of the Deccan (destroyed in 1555), of which he gives an interesting description. Thence he travelled to Malia pur near Madras, the traditional resting-place of the body of St. Thomas, and the holiest shrine of the native Nestorian Christians. He then went for a year to Sumatra, gaining a good knowledge of the cannibal natives, and of the camphor, pepper and gold of this "Taprobana." From Sumatra he took a stormy voyage of sixteen days to Tenasserim, near the head of the Malay peninsula. We then find him at the mouth of the Ganges, which he ascends and descends, visiting Burdwan and Aracan, pene trating into Burma, and navigating the Irrawaddy to Ava. From Pegu he went to Java, his farthest point. After remaining there for nine months, he returned by Ciampa (usually Cochin-China in later mediaeval European literature, but here perhaps some more westerly portior of Indo-China), Coloen (Kulam or Quilon), Cochin, Calicut and Cambay, to Sokotra, which he describes as still mainly inhabited by Nestorian Christians; to the "rich city" of Aden; to Gidda (or Jidda), the port of Mecca; over the desert to Cairo; and so to Venice, arriving in 1444.
As a penance for his (compulsory) renunciation of the Christ ian faith during his wanderings, Eugenius IV. ordered him to relate his history to Poggio Bracciolini, the papal secretary. The narrative closes with Conti's replies to Poggio's questions on Indian life, social classes, religion, fashions, manners and cus toms. Conti divides the Indies into three parts; from Persia to the Indus; from the Indus to the Ganges; and beyond the Ganges. This last he considered to excel the others in wealth and culture, ancl ,o be abreast of Italy in civilization. He notes many interesting Indian customs, and reproduced several old legends. Conti's name-forms, partly through Poggio's vicious classicism, are often unrecognizable, but on the whole this is the best account of southern Asia by any European of the i5th century; while the traveller's visit to Sokotra is an almost unique performance for a Latin Christian of the middle ages.
The original Latin is in Poggio's De varietate Fortunae, book iv. (ed. Abbe Oliva, Paris, 1723). The Italian translation printed in Ramusio's Navigationi et viaggi, vol. i., is from a Portuguese transla tion. India in the Fifteenth Century (1857), contains an English trans lation made by J. Winter Jones for the Hakluyt Society, with an introduction by R. H. Major.