Introduction: Gems in the Early Modern World

Abstract

Are there diamonds in Brazil? There was no straightforward answer to this question in the eighteenth century, despite the fact that, as we now know, diamonds were discovered in the mountainous region of Serro do Frio in the 1720s. The discovery is usually associated with a man named Bernardo Fonseca Lobo, who claimed credit for the discovery in a petition to the Portuguese crown. 1 But Lobo claimed to have made the discovery in 1723, five years before he showed the diamonds to the Portuguese Governor of Brazil. A plausible explanation for the delay is that Lobo had taken five years to identify the stones as diamonds. At any rate, that was the view of Sylvestre Garcia do Amaral, a lapidary from Lisbon who claimed to have made this identification before anyone else, in 1727. Amaral may have identified the stones by sight or, more reliably, by attempting to cut them on a rotating iron wheel sprinkled with powdered M. Bycroft

A History of European Royal Jewel Sales, Including Sotheby's 2018 Auction of Marie Antoinette's Jewels

“…The gems passed through China, overland from trader to trader through the Himalayas and Persia, and then to the Syrian port of Aleppo near the Mediterranean. From there, they traveled to Venice and the trading center of Pavia, where Emperor Charlemagne had stationed buying agents (Sevillano-Lopez and Gonzalez, 2011;Bycroft and Dupré, 2019). Gemstones of any type were very costly by the time they reached Europe, with traders at every stop along the Silk Road adding in their profit.…”

“…Vasco da Gama, who discovered the sea route from Europe to India in 1498, brought quantities of gems back to his home port in Portugal. Diamonds from India and emeralds from South America were an important part of this trade (Shor, 2004;Bycroft and Dupré, 2019). Within a decade of da Gama's voyage to India, Portuguese traders had established a trading port in Goa and regular trade routes that imported diamonds through Lisbon and then to the trading centers of Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam.…”