Kodungallur : Mission SuccessfulThe Seventy-two PrivilegesIncidents at KodungallurThe Cap - BearerThe Royal CoupleSpread of christianity in keralaCoastal ExpansionGeographical Dispersion Common roots of christianity in india NotesCHAPTER 1CRANGANORE: PAST AND PRESENTTHE GLORY THAT WAS CRANGANOREK.P. Padmanabha Menon, writing at the dawn of this century, laments:The present condition of Cranganore is, indeed, deplorable. Having continued to beprosperous and important almost from pre-historic times till the middle of the14th century, it has since fallen into complete ruin and decay.Cranganore was already on the decline when the Portuguese arrived in India. "Yearsago," says the Revd. Richard Collins, "by one of those strange vicissitudes whichso often mark the progress of time, Cranganore was shorn of her glory. It was noNebuchadnezzar, no Alexander, no Titus, that blotted out her name from history,and ‘laid her stones and her timbers and her dust in the midst of the waters;’ andmade her ‘a place to spread nets upon’ - a mere village, as she is now, of a fewfishermen’s huts. She fell a prey to the geological instability of the coast,before referred to. Like so many things of the earth, the very foundation on whichshe was built was insecure; the entrance to her harbour became choked up; theremorseless monsoon washed away her bulwarks, and, losing her trade, she lost alsoher inhabitants".The opening of the Cochin outlet for the discharge of the monsoon flood of watersinto the sea and the consequent choking up of the Cranganore outlet led to theforming of the present beautiful harbour of Cochin. That tolled the deathknell ofthe commercial prosperity of Cranganore. Deprived of its natural harbour, itgradually dwindled into insignificance. Its trade fled northwards to Calicut andsouthwards to the new harbour of Cochin, and with its trade its prosperity also.The subsequent efforts of the Portuguese to revive Cranganore were of no avail,and it now remains only a name in history.Pliny described Cranganore as primum emporium Indiae. Well did it deserve thatproud distinction. Situated on the coast, eighteen miles to the north of Cochin,at a place where the great rivers that form the only means of comunication withthe interior debouched into the sea, it attained an unrivalled prosperity fromvery early times.It was through this port that the Hindus received from the Phoenicians their artof writing; it must have been from this port that the shipmen of Solomon ofIsrael, ‘that knew the sea’, obtained their valuable cargoes of gold, ivory,sandalwood, etc.It was to this port that the Greek merchant and mariner Hippalos, that Columbus of
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