Filippo Sassetti

Filippo Sassetti (1540–1588) was a traveller and merchant from a long-established Florentine mercantile family, who was born in Florence in 1540. Though his father had sold family interests and he had to commence as a clerk in a merchant business, Sassetti enrolled in 1568 at the University of Pisa and was imbued with a humanist education; he was proficient in botany, geography, astronomy and cosmography and was curious about philology and the classical languages.

Quotes

 * The fathers of the Church forbade the Hindus under terrible penalties the use of their own sacred books, and prevented them from all exercise of their religion. They destroyed their temples, and so harassed and interfered with the people that they abandoned the city in large numbers, refusing to remain any longer in a place where they had no liberty, and were liable to imprisonment, torture and death if they worshipped after their own fashion the gods of their fathers.
 * quoted in Forgotten Empire Vijayanagar - Robert Sewell