Afanasy Nikitin

• Name — Afanasy Nikitin • Birthplace — Tver, Principality of Tver • Died — c. spring 1475 • Place of death — Near Smolensk, Grand Duchy of Lithuania • Notable Works — A Journey Beyond the Three Seas • Language — Russian

Afanasy Nikitin, son of Nikita, was a merchant in Tver. Prior to his voyage to Persia and India, Afanasy Nikitin was probably engaged in long-distance trade and had previously traveled to the Ottoman Empire, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Moldavia, Wallachia, Georgia, Crimea, and other countries. In 1466 or 1468, Nikitin left his hometown of Tver on a commercial trip, planning to trade in the lands around the Caspian Sea and go as far as Shirvan (in modern-day Azerbaijan). He travelled down the Volga, stopping at the Makaryev Monastery, then passing through Uglich, Kostroma, and Plyos to get to Nizhny Novgorod. Following the caravan of the returning ambassador to Moscow from Shirvan, Hasan Beg, Nikitin and his fellow merchants traveled further south. Near Astrakhan, his party was attacked and robbed first by Nogais (whom he calls Tatars), then again by Kaitags on the Caspian coast. Niktin's belongings were stolen, and some of his fellow Russian merchants were taken prisoner by the Kaitags. Nikitin went to the Shirvanshah's (the ruler of Shirvan) camp in Shemakha to plead for help. The Russian merchants "humbly begged" Shirvanshah to give them "the wherewithal to reach Rus". His captured companions were rescued by the Shirvanshah; however, he refused to give him and his companions means to return home. At that point, Nikitin writes, his party dispersed: "we wept and dispersed; those of us who owned something in Rus left for Rus, and those who had debts there went wherever they could; some remained at Shemakha, while others went to work at Baku". Hoping to recoup his losses, Nikitin continued on to Derbent, which was a familiar market to him, and then to Baku. He then crossed the Caspian Sea into Persia, where he followed a known trade route and made prolonged stops in market towns. He passed through Chapakur (Chapak Rud, where he remained for six months), Sari, Amol, Kashan, and Yazd before reaching Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. All in all, he remained in Persia for two years. Having heard about the riches of India from Muslim merchants, he decided to travel there. In the spring of 1471, Nikitin sailed for India from Hormuz and, after making several stops, arrived in the port of Chaul six weeks later. It was probably after his arrival in India that he began writing his travel notes. Nikitin observed the markets, lifestyles and courts of the Bahmani Sultanate and the Vijayanagara Empire. He visited the Hindu sanctuary of Parvattum, which he called "the Jerusalem of the Hindus". He mentions that he engaged in horse-dealing, although his mercantile activities may have been more extensive than directly stated in his account. He spent almost three years in India, before deciding to return to Russia after concluding that further travel would not make him any great profit and that he could not afford to remain in India. Nikitin, in his writings, showed a longing to return to his homeland: "May God protect the Russian land! There is no land in the world like it. But why can the princes in the Russian land not live with each other as brothers? May the Russian land be well ordered, because justice there is quite rare". On his way back, Nikitin visited Muscat, the Arabian sultanate of Somalia, and Trabzon. In November 1474, he sailed from Trebizond to Caffa (now Feodosia), where there was a large Russian settlement. It is most likely in Caffa that he composed Khozheniye za tri morya on the basis of his travel notes and memories. On his way to Tver, Nikitin died not far from Smolensk in the spring of 1475. Other Russian merchants took his notes to Vasily Mamyrev, secretary to Ivan III, the grand prince of Moscow. Nikitin's notes were considered valuable, so they were included in state chronicles dating from the late 15th to the 17th centuries. The author of the Lvov Chronicle writes that he received Nikitin's notes in 1475 and incorporated them into his work but was unable to learn anything more about the traveler.

After studying Nikitin's account, and especially his references to Islam (much of India was ruled by Muslim sultans, and many Muslim merchants lived along the coast), particularly the prayers he transliterates from Arabic and Turkic into Cyrillic letters, Gail Lenhoff and Janet Martin speculated that Nikitin might have converted to Islam in India. His loss of contact with Christianity and his life among Muslims (and apparent lapse from Christianity and conversion to Islam) bothered him, as he mentioned several times in his account. Indeed, he began his account calling it his "sinful voyage beyond three seas." He went on to explain that he continued to date events by Christian religious holidays and invoked the Mother of God and the saints ("the Holy Fathers"), he could not remember when Christian holidays were and so he could not celebrate Easter and other movable feast days or keep the Christian fasts (Lent, the St. Peters' Fast, the fast during Advent, etc.). Thus, he kept the fasts of the Muslims and broke fast when they did so. He also wrote that at Bindar in the third year of his journey he "shed many tears for the Christian faith". Very near the end of his account, he wrote of his wish to return home and to the Christian faith: "I, Afanasy, a damned servant of Almighty God, Maker of heaven and earth, pondered over the Christian faith, the Baptism of Christ, the fasts established by the Holy Fathers, and the apostolic commandments, and I longed to go [back] to Rus!". Yakov Lurye, an editor of Nikitin's Journey, sees his conversion as doubtful, pointing out that a circumcised convert would have been persecuted or even put to death in Rus', so if Nikitin had indeed become a Muslim, he would have avoided returning to his country, while in fact he died on his way back in the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania not far from the Muscovite border. However, Lurye characterizes Nikitin's religious expressions as "the peculiar syncretism of a man who acknowledged any monotheistic faith as 'true', if practiced with a pure heart".

Scholars became aware of Nikitin's Voyage relatively early and prominent historians mentioned it in their works, such as Nikolay Karamzin (1766–1826) in his History of the Russian State (1817). The text of Nikitin's Voyage in the Sofia Second Chronicle was published in its entirety for the first time in 1821. A German translation of Nikitin's notes was also published in 1835 as "Reise nach Indien unternommen von einem Russischen Kaufmann im 15 Jahrhundert" in Dorpater Jahrbücher für Literatur. The Russian diplomat in London, Mikhail Vielgorsky, translated a version for the Hakluyt Society, which was published in 1855. Many historians have used Nikitin's notes as a dependable source for the history of India in the 15th-century. The dates of Nikitin's travels have been debated by scholars; it was generally accepted until the 1980s that Nikitin spent the years 1466–1472 in India, when Leonid S. Semyonov challenged these dates and published a book dedicated to Nikitin's travels in 1980. His chronology was accepted in the Literaturnye Pamiatniki series by the Russian Academy of Sciences. According to Semyonov's reconstruction, Nikitin left Russia in 1468 and spent the years 1471–1474 in India.

The Russian rock band Aquarium composed a song titled "Afanasy Nikitin Boogie". The power metal band Epidemia composed a song titled "Khozhdeniye za tri morya (Walking the three seas) about Nikitin's writings. A brand of Tver beer, "Afanasy", is named after Afanasy Nikitin.