Download PDF | Marianne O’Doherty_ Felicitas Schmieder - Travels and Mobilities in the Middle Ages_ From the Atlantic to the Black Sea-Brepols (2015).
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INTRODUCTION:
TRAVELS AND MOBILITIES IN THE MIDDLE AGES:
FROM THE ATLANTIC TO THE BLACK SEA
Marianne O’Doherty and Felicitas Schmieder
The Mobile Middle Ages
Before we can talk about travels and mobilities in the Middle Ages, we first need to address a factor that has cast a long shadow over scholarly and public perceptions of the period, and from which scholarship has only recently begun to emerge: the long-standing association between mobility and modernity. In the nineteenth century, when pioneering scholars such as E. G. Ravenstein began work in the fields of mobility and migration studies, they did so in the context of the mass movement of people set in motion by the Industrial Revolution in England.' The influence of the field’s early history has been pervasive; scholarship on this major dimension of human movement has, until very recently, considered modern movements of people largely in isolation from their premodern counterparts.” Scholarship on travel and exploration, too, has suffered historically from a similar bias.
The major English language series that publishes translated primary sources in this field is the Hakluyt Society’s. Thus we read our accounts of whaling voyages in the nineteenth-century Atlantic and Christian missions in thirteenth-century Asia alike under the shadow of an early modern editor who did much to further and promote English activities in the world’s incompletely known oceans and new found lands.* When Cambridge University Press published its first Companion to Travel Writing in 2002, the editors chose 1500 as its terminus a quo. Early modernity, it implied, is when travel really begins.* Long distance travel, exploration, discovery, mobility, and migration became, and for a long time remained, associated with modernity. Unexamined in the background of these assumptions, the Middle Ages too often provided, as Kathleen Davis has pointed out, ‘an alterior, static mode of existence against which claims of modernity can define themselves.’
If the contrast, often implied rather than explicitly stated, between a static Middle Ages and a mobile modernity was sharp, that between the Middle Ages and fast-moving post-modernity is often presented as starker still. We ‘global citizens’ are routinely reminded through media and marketing that our globalized world has been and continues to be shaped by hitherto unimaginable speeds and levels of transportation and communication. Our impression is that we — meaning, of course, an economically and geographically privileged subset of the world’s population with the financial and technical means — are travelling more and further than anyone has travelled before. Based on these assumptions, scholarly claims not dissimilar to those for the link between modernity, mobility, and migration are now advanced for postmodernity. ‘Regions formerly remote’, the editor of a recent collection of studies focused on migration and diaspora informs us, have now ‘become connected through the spread of industrialization and the opening of markets, a process that relies heavily on advances in communications technology.
With postmodernity comes increased globalization, a phenomenon often equated with instantaneous connection between different areas of the world, unprecedented levels of mobility, the elision of distance and, sometimes, a concomitant sense of dislocation.’ But for some time now, medievalists have been fighting back against the assumption, whether explicit or implied, that the medieval period is a kind of inversion of the contemporary, a backdrop against which the increasing momentum of modernity and the dizzying speed of post-modernity can be thrown into relief. Historians of travel, exploration, and expansion have long reminded us that this was a period when rulers often moved in person around their realms, when place pilgrimage was a central component of Christian religious belief, and when intercontinental trading networks brought cloves from the Spice Islands to England and propelled Venetian and Genoese traders as far as China.
It was also a period when the Catholic Church claimed universal spiritual jurisdiction and, as we will see in Nordeide’s article below, attempted through legates and missionaries to make good on those claims.’ Such exceptional travellers — traversing great distances, leaving detailed accounts of their journeys, working on behalf of the great political and religious figures of their day — have enjoyed significant amounts of scholarly attention in recent decades.
This attention may even be said to have placed their journeys in a great tradition of medieval travel.'°
Medievalists have, furthermore, become restive about the compartmentalizing effects of historical periodization that have enabled scholars and the general public alike to disconnect the Middle Ages from modernity and post-modernity, and ourselves from aspects of culture and society, past and present, that we wish to disavow." John M. Ganim, for instance, sees affinities between the role of the ‘medieval’ in producing the self-images of modernity and postmodernity and the role of ‘the Orient’ in the construction of ‘the West’? Scholars have also made headway in tracing connections across our artificial but often institutionalized historical divides.
In a recently published collection of classic essays, James Muldoon and Felipe Fernandez-Armesto have argued that the European expansion often considered characteristic of the renaissance in fact began with the processes of domestication, urbanization, conquest, and conversion of the high and later Middle Ages.'* At the same time, other scholars have investigated mobilities through late antiquity and the less well documented early medieval period.’ Such work participates in a broader historiographical trend to work across the sometimes restricting and damaging artificial boundaries of historical periodization. Indeed, the desire to explore connections, continuities, and changes between the medieval and early modern periods is reflected in several essays in this volume, notably those of Riither, McCleery, and Jakobsen.” These developments have led to a realization in recent years that medievalists ask not just medieval questions, but modern ones, and that our period of focus is one that has connections with its own past and future, and our present.
Among those medievalists concerned with the connections and affinities between present and medieval worlds are those engaging with work that draws, overtly or silently, on postcolonial methodologies. Such work, with its inbuilt mistrust of anything that resembles a ‘grand narrative’, takes issue with the positivist assumptions that underpin the associations between mobility and modernity. Rather than arguing for the hitherto-unrecognized significance of medieval travel, imperial or colonial ventures, and cultural encounters within a broad historical schema, postcolonial approaches have pointed out affinities between the medieval and post-modern experiences of cultural encounter, dialogue, and exchange. These affinities are often born out of the shared experiences of contested borders, conflict, diaspora, dislocation, inequitable power-relations, but also of cultural exchange, globalization, migration, and cultural assimilation."
Perhaps also influenced by the priorities and focus of postcolonial work, recent historical work has also advanced our understanding of the constitution and traversal of borders, frontiers, and peripheries, and their interrelationship with perceived centres.'” Scholars are also using different documentary sources to illuminate the mobility of a wider group of people, including those from lower socio-economic social groups vulnerable to under-representation and overgeneralization.’ This is resulting in increasing understanding of the spatial horizons of a wider range of medieval people than that achieved through focus on the exceptional, the intrepid, and the celebrated.
As we stand in the second decade of the twenty-first century, then, we are beginning to unfold a picture of medieval mobilities and travels that is complex, nuanced, and very far from the caricature of general stasis punctuated by the occasional exceptional individual or movement. Travel along medieval roads across Latin Europe and beyond its borders was common; indeed, late medieval pilgrimage included a certain amount of organized, package travel on a large scale that would not seem unfamiliar today.” It is now axiomatic that goods, people, technologies, religions, cultural and political knowledge, social, economic and military ideas and practices all travelled in the European Middle Ages.
Our notions of what travel is, and the evidence that can be used to approach it have also changed; plants and animals, ideas, skills, technologies, texts, and artistic motifs travelled and spread with wandering merchants, missionaries, envoys, soldiers, and slaves. Medieval people were thus anything but immobile, unadventurous, or ill-equipped to travel. Moreover, while a lack of personal freedom may have been common in lower levels of medieval societies, the automatic correlation of this with restricted movement is questionable. Mobility is found across society’s ranks in the period to the extent that the editor of a recent collection on the subject urges scholars, unless there is good reason to do otherwise, to ‘assume mobility in the medieval past’.
Scope of the Collection
When the International Medieval Congress 2010 took up the theme of travel and exploration, marking the 550th anniversary of the death of Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’ of Portugal, it stepped into a flourishing and expanding field. Papers presented at the Congress took in a wide range of topics related to travel, exploration, mobility, and the geographical imagination. Irrespective of the name featured in the Call for Papers, the conference was far from dominated by historians of medieval exploration and discovery — the very idea of which was, in fact, critiqued by keynote speaker Patrick Gautier Dalché.”' The papers were, rather, diverse.
They elucidated the journeys of travellers well and lesser known, considered literary journeys, investigated the landscapes travellers encountered and explored the infrastructure of travel through documentary evidence and archaeology. The conference as a whole testified, in fact, to diversification: a shift in focus away from the exceptional — and the well known — figures who might have monopolized such an event a decade or two earlier and towards the harder to reconstruct and less extensively studied journeys of a variety of individuals and groups of higher and lower status. The range of papers submitted, moreover, testified to a shift in focus away from travel as a separable phenomenon, divisible from the rest of medieval life, and towards a consideration of geographical mobility as embedded in all sorts of social, cultural, religious, and political contexts.” Studies of medieval mobility and travel now combine these considerations not just with more obvious research areas such as communication, migration, and refugees, but with examinations of rulership and administration, disability studies, studies of the history of thought, art, and technologies, mentalities, and emotional response, and with consideration of gendered, political, cultural, or class identity.”
Finally, the interdisciplinary mandate of the conference encouraged the contribution of papers that deployed literature to shed light on developments in social, cultural, and military history, that combined archaeological, onomastic, historiographical, diplomatic, and inventory evidence that asked new questions of well known texts, and that brought new methodologies or approaches to bear on questions of mobility. These trends have, together, governed the choices made for this volume.
Like the conference from which they grew, the articles in this volume are mixed. We have intentionally selected papers that treat a range of individuals and groups who took to the road or to the sea in medieval Europe. Some are more familiar individuals of the kind one would expect to find in the category of ‘medieval traveller’: kings, queens, nobles, crusaders and soldiers, diplomats, migrants, and refugees. But some are less familiar: the medical traveller, the political exile, the student, religious beggars, and men, women, and children with disabilities. The volume’s bias is intentionally towards travel undertaken as part of everyday life. In the editors’ view, hinted at in the preceding section, exceptional travels — whether over exceptional distances, exceptionally well documented and recorded, or involving highly unusual inter-cultural and inter-religious experiences — have received disproportionate levels of attention in recent years.
Whilst such work is, of course, of critical utility and importance to medievalists, the firm aim of this volume is to put this into perspective among the myriad quotidian journeys and mobilities of medieval Europe. Work on travels from the perceived ‘centre’ of the world to its imagined peripheries is therefore principally represented here in two articles (Nordeide; McCleery). The majority of articles focus on the less studied area of the integration of mobility into everyday life: the student who must necessarily be mobile (Schuh); the disabled person for whom everyday mobility is an extraordinary challenge (Metzler); the soldier for whom peregrination is a way of life (Riither); and the cultural constructions of mobility and identity that help create that norm (Fischer).
Finally, we have made an intentional effort to honour the IMC’s interdisciplinary traditions by selecting articles that combine different varieties of evidence in unaccustomed ways or read their evidence against the grain for unusual information (Hosler; Metzler; Watson; QuiriniPoplawski; Nordeide). These scholars go beyond the usual sources of evidence for travel and mobility — whether historiographical or travelogue — or read these from an unaccustomed perspective, asking why a king did mot crusade; reading miracles for mobility; extrapolating historical and cultural information from inventories; bringing architectural and environmental evidence to bear on historical sources.
Volume Sections
The volume’s essays fall into four thematically organized sections: Centres and Peripheries: Travellers on the Margins; Nobility of the Road: Travel and Status; Men and Women on the Move: Gendered Mobilities; and Migration and Return: Peoples and Objects on the Move. The rationale of these themes was to combine two aims: to reflect established research trends well represented at the International Medieval Congress — such as research on travelling rulers — and to place in the foreground emergent research areas, such as the intersection of mobility and (gendered) identities, marginality and mobilities, and histories of displacement.
Centres and Peripheries: Travellers to and on the Margins
The articles in the volume’s opening section speak to two concerns that have become important in medieval studies over the last few decades: the geographical and conceptual peripheries of what scholarship terms ‘Latin Christendom’ and the peoples and places that have not thus far been considered central in scholarly treatments of the medieval world. In recent years, medievalists have made a concerted effort to push at the boundaries of what and where the Middle Ages were, to situate the medieval within a broader historical context, and to bring methodologies and conceptual categories and tools developed in relation to other (normally later) periods to bear on the Middle Ages. The result has been some interesting and challenging work. Robert Bartlett has alerted us to the fact that in order to understand the making of medieval Europe, we need to look at its conceptual edges, a trend that has been productively continued by other scholars.”
Literary, historical, and interdisciplinary scholars of travel, travel writing, geographies, and mythologies of the world have focused our attention on the importance of other spaces — at the periphery, beyond the known — in the construction of medieval Europeans’ self-images and epistemologies.** Disparate though all this work undoubtedly is, it shares certain key concerns: a desire to break down established boundaries; an impetus to problematize monoliths like ‘the Latin Middle Ages’ as concepts; a concern to pay more attention to regions and to people that Anglophone scholarship in particular has neglected, and a belief in the capacity of ‘the marginal’ — constructed though that concept may be — to question and critique ‘the central’ Ranging in scope from the far North-West to the South-East, from diplomats to the disabled, this section comprises essays that share affinities with these perspectives. Johnny Grandjean Gogsig Jakobsen looks at what were, from the perspective of Rome, the furthest northern reaches of Latin Christendom. He considers the mobility of mendicant friars in medieval Scandinavia, focusing not, as is more usual, on the long distance journeys of missionaries among nonChristian peoples, but on the everyday mobility of Franciscan and Dominicans and these friars’ roles within dispersed, rural communities.”
Jakobsen discusses the ways in which the common European mendicant practice of terminario — walking the limits of one’s allotted district to preach and collect alms — was adapted to the specific geographical and demographic conditions of medieval Scandinavia. With vast, often inhospitable and cold reaches of sparsely populated land to cover, Scandinavian mendicants could not always expect to return to their monastic house or a specific domus terminariae overnight as regulations required. Scandinavian mendicant orders also demonstrated high levels of cooperation, in contrast to the rivalry between the Franciscans and Dominicans found in more urbanized and populous parts of Europe. Jakobsen’s detailed investigation questions the anti-clerical and post-reformation stereotype of the travelling mendicant as an unwelcome, parasitic visitor to stable rural communities. Complaints about the activities of the fratres terminarii tend to be balanced by documents witnessing their cooperation with parish priests, their provision of vital religious services in out-of-the-way areas, and their value to isolated rural communities. Moreover, the mundane practice of mendicant terminario conceals some quite extraordinary journeys of thousands of miles, such as that of the Norwegian Dominican encountered by Italian merchant Pietro
uirini in the remote fishing community of Lofoten, some one thousand miles from his house (p. 12).
Saebjorg Walaker Nordeide’s discussion of “Papal Delegations to the Northern Edge of the World’ takes a different perspective, examining interactions between Europe’s religious and administrative centre and this constructed periphery in new and interesting ways. Supplementing the few written sources concerning the papal embassies led by Cardinal Nicholas Breakspear (1152-54) and Johannes de Serone and Bernhard de Ortolis (1311-12) to Scandinavia with archaeological, climatological, and architectural evidence, Nordeide considers the importance in the experience of mission of matters such as visitors’ ‘responses to the climate, the lodgings provided for them, the food served, and the table manners they encountered’ (p. 34). Nordeide explores the ways in which the geographical origins and backgrounds of travellers, their formation, and the circumstances of their journeys would have affected their experiences in medieval Scandinavia. For travellers from different parts of Europe, journeys in the far north would have been a combination of the environmentally, architecturally, culturally, and linguistically familiar and strange, a fact that should cause us to think twice about application of simple categories of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in medieval cultural analysis. A travelling diplomat’s capacity to adapt to changing conditions — a capacity influenced by his formation and background — could contribute significantly to the success or failure of a diplomatic mission.
At the end of the Middle Ages as these are traditionally understood, and ranging from the edge of the continent to the retreating confines of the known world, Iona McCleery’s article, ‘From the Edge of Europe to Global Empire: Portuguese Medicine Abroad’ looks at the relationship between travel and the medical in a very different context. McCleery’s article exemplifies how a consideration of a seemingly self-explanatory category like the ‘medical’ traveller can lead to new ways of thinking about a number of related problems in the histories of medicine, imperialism, and colonialism. Medically trained and experienced travellers from or connected with Portugal saw the regions through which they travelled and the people they encountered in ways heavily inflected by their scientific formation. The observations that they made contributed to a growing body of knowledge and concern with medicine, public health and disease, diet and nutrition, and the relationship between human health and environment. At the same time, however, the article shows some of the questionable uses to which such knowledge could be put, from the identification of ‘cannibals’ in the Americas by Diego Alvarez Chanca (1493-96) to the contribution of seemingly neutral medical observations by Master Afonso (1565-66) to a broader sixteenth-century anti-Ottoman discourse. But the figure of the ‘Portuguese medical traveller, McCleery shows, is also a lens through which one can productively examine other issues raised by cultural encounter in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Under close examination, the distinctively ‘Portuguese’ nature of certain medical travellers emerges as problematic. This peripatetic figure, moving around a burgeoning empire in an expanding world, cannot be considered without simultaneously examining the meanings of categories such as ‘home’ and ‘abroad; and the constructions of identity that related to these.
From travellers from and to places considered on the margins of medieval Europe’s geographical or conceptual worlds, the volume turns to a group of travellers marginalized within modern scholarship almost to the point of nearinvisibility. In “Have Crutch, Will Travel’ Irina Metzler reads a number of textual and pictorial sources of a familiar genres — miracle stories, marginal illustrations — specifically for the information that they can offer us concerning the mobility of people with disabilities in the medieval period. Metzler’s article addresses a somewhat shameful gap in scholarship; in academic discussions of miracle cures at saints’ shrines, the lives and experiences of the disabled people central to the narratives have seldom been central to research.
Metzler opens up a vista onto a quite different medieval Europe, one in which the roads were travelled, in the hope of ‘a cure’ by disabled people walking with crutches, travelling in carts, baskets, wheeled barrows, and litters, often aided but sometimes abandoned by members of their families and communities. Through sources concerning the exceptional mobility of such individuals, we can also access information about their daily lives; the ‘before and after’ structures of miracle stories offer sometimes meticulous and detailed accounts of the mobility impairments suffered by some, and their methods for circumventing or overcoming these. Metzler’s article makes for uncomfortable but nonetheless vital reading in more than one way. Not only are we alerted to a deep-seated prejudice that has rendered medieval disabled people all but invisible, but we are reminded that in the medieval period, as now, access for disabled people was ‘a matter of affordability as much as of the (built) environment’ (p. 114).
Nobility of the Road: Travel and Status
The mobility of noble men and women is a topic that has attracted the attentions of scholars for many decades.** Early and high medieval European rulers, of course, rarely remained in one place for long; their rulership depended to a significant degree on their capacity to move around and be seen by their people. The movement of a monarch entailed the movement of that monarch’s entourage. In many regions of the Latin West and Orthodox East of Europe, that entourage, which would include women as well as men, was highly mobile. Broad territories had to be rapidly covered for military purposes, while the king’s frequent physical presence was of great importance in societies that placed particular weight on face-to-face interactions. Rulership was bound up in the capacity to cover ground and fill space. Indeed, when, early in the fourteenth century, Pierre Dubois, counsellor to Philippe le Bel, proposed that a king should stay put and send others out to fight, negotiate, and handle business on his behalf, he could find precedents for his proposal only in ancient Rome and among the distant Mongols.” In fact, the interdependence between more sedentary elements of society and its highly mobile élite presents something of a challenge to received anthropological divisions between settled and nomadic societies.*” Whilst historians once considered such structures as indicative of the backwardness of medieval society — a society considered not yet able to function on a more abstract level — the articles gathered here set aside such positivist notions to consider the relationships between mobility and power for the royal and the noble in three different ways and settings.
Crusading was a motivation that set members of the European élite, along with socially diverse entourages, into long range motion. John Hosler inverts our more usual perspective on the motivations of this group, however. Assuming desire to crusade as the normative position for high medieval elites, why, Hosler asks, did Stephen, English king from 1134-54 not take the cross? From an examination of Stephen’s information networks, court, and interests, Hosler paints a picture of a monarch fully apprised of preparations for the Second Crusade undertaken during his monarchy and likely to consider crusade a family tradition and indeed obligation, but who did not take a vow. Rather ironically, Hosler finds a possible answer to the question of this monarch’s failure to undertake a major, long distance journey in his domestic itineraries. The King’s domestic movements in 1146, Hosler suggests, may be construed as an ‘all-out effort’ to put an end to domestic infighting (p. 135): an effort of the type one would expect a monarch to make before a long overseas journey. The failure of this effort, and thus the continued need for the contested monarch’s personal presence throughout his domains, made crusading an impossibility for the king.
But medieval kings and queens did not only rule in person. Regional and international diplomacy as well as the control of dispersed or disputed lands relied upon a network of higher level nobles and functionaries, studies of whose mobility can be both informative and fascinating.*! In “The Travels of Ivan Baboni¢’, Hrvoje Kekez shines a light on the mobility of a member of this class in late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Slavonia (northern Croatia), then part of the lands of the king of Hungary. Kekez’s study shows that Ivan Baboni¢ and other members of his family needed high levels of personal mobil-ity to maintain and further their interests. Kekez traces Baboni¢’s movements as he maintained and increased his family’s estates, undertook duties for members of his extended family networks, and acted, as banus of Slovenia, on behalf of the Hungarian king in military and administrative roles. Kekez alerts us to the symbiotic relationship between mobility and power. The family’s willingness and ability to travel probably influenced King Charles Robert’s decision to appoint first Ivan’s brother, Stephen, then Ivan himself, to the important position of banus. But travel for diplomatic and military purposes also enabled the family to develop other important political and familial affiliations beyond the kingdom of Hungary. Throughout his career, Ivan Baboni¢’s influence and mobility rose and fell in tandem; in Babonic’s case ‘there is, Kekez observes, ‘a direct relationship between levels of mobility and the growth and decline of political influence’ (p. 159).
The final article in this section takes its themes of crusading and the relationship between mobility and nobility in new directions. As Kekez has amply shown, for members of the lower nobility, status was not a given, but had to be actively asserted, pursued, and maintained. Mary Fischer looks at another theatre in which lesser nobles asserted and affirmed their noble status and gendered identity: the fourteenth-century Prussian Crusade. Fischer’s article explores the relationship between the establishment of participation in Prussian crusades in the fourteenth century as a ‘rite of passage’ for European noblemen and chivalric, peripatetic constructions of masculinity in a central historiographical text of the Teutonic order, the Chronicle of Nikolaus of Jeroschin. Fischer uncovers a text concerned on the one hand to legitimize Prussia as an appropriate destination for armed pilgrims while, on the other, drawing upon a model of crusading masculinity that combines nobility, piety, and moral and spiritual progression. Weaving together the languages of chivalry, mysticism, pilgrimage, and Marian devotion to construct Prussia as the ideal destination for an armed pilgrim, the Chronicle emerges as pivotal to the establishment of the ‘Preufenreisen’ as a proving ground for many of Europe’s young noblemen.
Men and Women on the Move: Gendered Mobilities
With its focus on the inter-relationship between constructions of chivalric masculinity and international mobility, Fischer’s exploration of the ‘Parfit gentil knight’ brings us to an aspect of medieval mobility that has only recently begun to be recognized and explored: its gendered nature. At the time of writing, it is well over twenty years since the study of masculinity and men began to take its place alongside the study of femininity and women as a legitimate and indeed urgent object of historical enquiry among medievalists.** However, while many essay collections and at least one recent monograph have probed cultural constructions of masculinity among clerical, bourgeois, and knightly groups and considered the relationships between literary models of masculinity and lived experience, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the role played by mobility in masculine identity formation and socialization.» While works have probed the connections between masculinity, militarism, empire and rulership, celibacy, learning, and literature, the dimension of mobility that unites the real and imagined men has been curiously absent from analyses.* However, while the intersection of mobility and constructions of masculinity is an area where there is more work to do, the study of women’s mobilities in the Middle Ages is still, relatively speaking, in its infancy.” Attention to medieval Europe’s cultural gender paradigms has been a significant influence here; observations such as that ‘men often form their identities by extending themselves beyond the home in journeys of conquest, discovery or trade’ while ‘women’s identities are typically defined within the home’ have sometimes gone hand in hand with the treatment of female mobility in the Middle Ages as exceptional or deviant.** The articles in this section advance these developing fields. Two explore how gendered identities and cultural ideals of masculinity were inflected by mobility among two very different social groupings. Mobility emerges as important in the construction of a normative, sedentary model against which mobile masculinities could be judged. The final essay in the section turns to queens, a group of medieval women who, though exceptional, can hardly be considered deviant. Often born to move, queens could spend much of their lives in motion, and we need to attend to the gendered paradigms of mobility that could permit and enable that motion.
Opening this section’s discussions of masculine mobilities, Stephanie Riither’s article turns its attention to a class of soldier that falls conspicuously outside the traditional class of bellatores to which Jeroschin’s Chronicle had attempted to appeal: the mercenary.” Riither takes an unusual perspective on the subject.” Instead of examining mercenaries from the point of view of the inhabitants of the regions they raided or as a tactic in late medieval warfare, she traces the self-perceptions of the group of German-speaking mercenaries known as Landsknechte using the songs attributed to them (Landsknechtslieder). Her study shows that the representations and self-representations of the landsknechts reveal a complex relationship between masculinity, mobility, class, and individual and group identity. Borrowing from the military orders, the landsknecht songs emphasize brotherhood and equality among their own ‘order’, a condition that sets them apart from the hierarchy of the settled community. At the same time, however, landsknecht songs promised a life of freedom, rootlessness, self-sufficiency, and sexual promiscuity. Disbarred by their mobility from normative, settled models of masculinity related to household, property, and hierarchy, the marginal landsknechts developed alternative models that sometimes paralleled those of settled society, but sometimes valorised what settled communities did not and, at times, positively revelled in the dangerousness of their countercultural gendered identity.
In his examination of scholars in later medieval Germany, Maximilian Schuh draws upon and extends the work of Rainer Christoph Schwinges and others who have recently taken forward work on masculine, academic mobility in the Middle Ages.*! Through an examination of the effects of increasing university attendance in late medieval Bavaria, Schuh’s work takes issue with the literary and rhetorical goliardic stereotype of the marginal, dangerous wandering scholar.” At the same time, he also questions certain anthropological approaches to the all-male rituals of medieval university life, cautioning against the ‘generalizing notions of manhood in medieval university contexts’ that they tend to create (p. 248).*° Schuh explores the intersection between scholars’ social status, status within the university, behaviours, and mobility. Alongside drinking, gambling, and chasing women — the stereotypical behaviours often attributed in literature and invective to male students away from the regulatory influences of a fixed home — students engaged in very different gendered behaviours. Some maintained wives and children at a distance; others looked after the interests of extended families, while some headed what we might term substitute academic families within their chosen universities. Schuh finds that, rather than being an elite, all-male, exclusive community, the late medieval University of Ingolstadt was composed of graduated and varied ‘sub-communities’ that had ‘different ways of imagining, negotiating, and performing their gender’ (p. 259).
The final essay in this section reminds us that noble women could be as mobile as their male counterparts.** While some were dedicated to religious orders and could become nuns, abbesses, or prioresses of religious foundations close to their places of birth, many married, and often far from their childhood homes. These mobile agents of cultural transfer and change undoubtedly had to leave aspects of their lives behind them, but also brought entourages, fashions, technologies, languages, literatures, and customs with them to their new homes.* Philippe le Bel’s adviser, Pierre Dubois, went so far as to suggest that the cause of the recovery of the Holy Land for Latin Christendom could be advanced if better use were made of women’s potential as agents of transfer; specially trained Christian girls given in marriage to Muslim leaders might bring about by stealth what military action had failed to achieve.** While Dubois’s suggestion seems to have remained the intriguing dream of a desk-bound counsellor, Zita Rohr’s essay reminds us of the importance of noblewomen’s roles as regents, co-regents, and agents of cultural transfer, and that mobility could be vital in their performance of these roles. Yolande of Aragon (1384-39), daughter of King Joan I of Aragon and wife and co-regent of Duke Louis II of the second house of Anjou, was born into a society in which queen-lieutenancy and itinerant rulership were the norm, rather than the exception. In her examination of Yolande’s ‘semi-nomadic career’, Rohr shows how the influences and traditions of her natal house ‘were called upon and adapted to the tangled circumstances and aspirations of the second house of Anjow (p. 221). Yolande was far more than a queen who happened to travel. Through her agency and mobility, the Angevin territories experienced an adapted version of the Aragonese model of face-to-face, itinerant, shared rulership. Yolande and Louis’s relationship was, Rohr argues, ‘a complementary and constructive partnership, straight from the Aragonese mould of proactive and practical de-gendered co-rulership’ (p. 239).* It was an arrangement that was, for the most part, adapted particularly successfully to the Anjou’s political and geographical situation, enabling the couple to keep control of their dispersed territories while furthering their interests during the intense dynastic struggles of the Hundred Years War.
Migration and Return: Peoples and Objects on the Move
No volume on mobility in the Middle Ages would be complete without some attention to the phenomenon of migration. To an early twenty-first century audience, migration may seem a uniquely contemporary topic. We read daily of group migrations forced by war, unrest, economic necessity, and environmental change, of the opportunities and anxieties surrounding economic migration, and of attempts to document and control it. Far too frequently, we must also address the disasters and incidents of exploitation that disproportionately affect migrants, from the sinking of poorly-maintained vessels to forms of slave labour. Human migration is a phenomenon that binds the present to the past, and indeed the presentist approaches to migration studies noted at the beginning of this introduction have, in recent years, given way to increasing levels of attention to the causes, processes, and effects of migrations large and small in other historical periods, including the Middle Ages.** In fact, the expectations sometimes placed upon medieval research in this area — that the history of migration will somehow provide answers to a question that preoccupies today’s politicians — sometimes seem rather weighty.” Nonetheless, the current trend towards the historicization of human migration is welcome. The study of the conditions attendant on migration, of its experience and effects throughout history, provides a valuable corrective to ahistorical and presentist discourses that either ignore or manipulate this phenomenon’s long and complex past.
A volume of this type is not the place for extensive historical surveys or theoretical discussions of medieval migration; these are more fully and effectively dealt with in the dedicated monographs, essay collections, and journal special issues here referenced. Instead, the articles in the present section take specific examples of longer-term movements of groups and individuals who may be considered to have migrated, in the sense of one of the term’s two main meanings: to move from one region and settle in another, or to change loca-
tion periodically (OED). The articles both problematize the study of migration in the medieval period and offer new perspectives and methodologies for its investigation. The authors all address, directly or indirectly, a number of common problems in medieval migration studies. Evidence of whether groups or individuals intended to relocate for shorter or longer periods, or whether they harboured hopes of return, is often lacking. Documentary sources regarding movements are often absent or oblique. Scholars cannot study the travelling humans directly, but examine them through the prism of writings by or about them, or the material and immaterial things that moved with them: clothing, valuables, language, and customs. As these articles show, evidence such as material culture, language change, and onomastics can be critical in tracing and understanding medieval migrations, but is not always easy to interpret.
The articles in this section take different approaches to these problems. In ‘Slavs but Not Slaves: Slavic Migrations to South Italy in the Early and High Middle Ages, Zrinka Nikoli¢ Jakus turns her attention to two neglected issues: the question of the migration of Slavic peoples from the Dalmatian coast to Southern Italy in circumstances other than servitude, and the question of the migration of other groups to Southern Italy prior to and during the period of Norman expansion. Scholars in this area are faced, on the one hand, with the problem of a lack of documented medieval migrations between the seventh and twelfth centuries and, on the other, with a range of types of evidence for Slavic customs, Slavic personal names and toponyms, and traces of the Slavonic languages in local dialects. Drawing on these, Nikoli¢ Jakus identifies the circumstances in which Slavic communities might have moved to the peninsula, discusses evidence for the social functioning of one known Slav community in relation to other communities, and outlines their eventual integration as a better known group of migrants, the Normans, took and consolidated control in the region.
Among the Slav migrants discussed by Nikoli¢ Jakus, intention is largely a matter of hypothesis. Some military personnel may have moved to take part in Byzantine-Muslim wars and eventually settled, whereas in other cases the wholesale establishment of Slav communities, with their own methods of social organization, suggests ‘organized colonization’ (p. 286), possibly precipitated by military assaults on their homelands. Rafat Quirini-Poptawski, in contrast, looks at the end of a period of organized colonization by the Genoese in Pera, on the Black Sea, through the prism of some of the migrating community’s most prized objects: its church decorations. When the Ottomans finally conquered Constantinople in 1453, the Genoese colony of Pera across the Golden Horn considered itself under threat, and soon evacuated the most precious objects from its eighteen churches and monastic foundations, many in a two stage journey via the island of Chios. Quirini-Poptawski thus investigates a provisional evacuation that happened in a moment of insecurity and indecisiveness and became, de facto, a permanent move. The extraordinary documents that Quirini-Poplawski discusses provide us with new perspectives on processes of colonization and decolonization and open up new questions. We might wonder whether the combination of Latin and Greek, religious and secular elements that he notes in their church decorations is suggestive of a distinctive, transcultural identity. Documents concerning items transferred from Pera to Genoa suggest, too, that particular importance was attached to the idea that these might one day return to a revived colony. Quirini-Poptawski’s article is a useful reminder of the fact that a deeper understanding of the experiences of migration and return can be achieved through attention to material culture. Indeed, material culture can sometimes be a better witness than narrative sources shaped by the faultiness of human memory, by conscious and unconscious rewritings or by the desire to legitimize or conceal intentions. There is undoubtedly more work to be done on the cultural roles that material culture performed for displaced peoples throughout the Middle Ages.”
Objects take on a wholly different significance in Gemma Watson’s article, ‘A Herald and his Objects in Exile: Roger Machado and his Memorandum Book, 1484-85*. Through an inventory of his objects, Watson explores an otherwise undocumented period in the life of Machado, a Portuguese migrant whose travels did not end, she argues, when he settled in fifteenth-century Southampton. Watson points out that the inventory, in Machado’s memorandum book for 1484-85 — the period of the Buckingham Rebellion against Richard III — contains only portable goods, thereby bearing a remarkable similarity to inventories produced for mobile households in the late medieval and early modern periods. Placing this evidence within the context of Machado’s networks and other documented activities in England and overseas, Watson suggests that we need to add a hitherto unknown period of exile to the biography of this rather enigmatic, peripatetic figure. Watson suggests that Machado, accompanied by his wife — visible only through the presence of her clothes in the inventory — followed Henry Tudor into exile in France, acted as agent for other exiled rebels, and used his international connections in the wine trade to earn his living during the period. On his return to England, Machado’s services to the new king Henry VII were rewarded through the prestigious position of Richmond Herald. Watson shows that, through consideration of the practicalities of life on the road and the evidence to be found for these in unlikely places, there is scope to significantly enhance our understanding both of the mechanics of political exile and of a major historical event like the Buckingham rebellion.
Absences, Challenges, Possibilities
Gaps and imbalances of coverage are, of course, inevitable in a volume of this kind. To select a maximum of fourteen papers from the over nine hundred presented, many of which touched on the theme of travels and mobilities, was no mean task. The decision was taken to sacrifice, to some extent, coverage for consistency of focus on European travels and mobilities — a large enough subject in itself. The operation of disciplinary networks also had a role to play in dictating the volume’s boundaries; the absence of Byzantine articles here, to take just one example, testifies to the existence of separate publications networks for different subsets of medieval studies. Other gaps reflect imbalances in the coverage of the Congress itself, imbalances which, in turn, reflect the trends and challenges in contemporary scholarship in the field. Among the articles that follow, relatively few deal with the earlier part of the medieval period, while a number break the traditional bounds of the end of the Middle Ages in pursuing the threads of their arguments well into the sixteenth century. While not just Roht’s essay, but also those of Metzler, Watson, and Quirini-Poplawski shed light on the travels and mobilities of female as well as male subjects, women are unquestionably less visible in this collection than men, and less visible than many would wish.
In different ways, these imbalances reflect similar problems and throw down similar challenges to medievalists. Given the lower levels of documentary evidence surviving from the earlier Middle Ages, how do we shed light on mobilities, particularly those of a quotidian nature or among lower status communities? What other kinds of evidence can we bring to bear, and how can we look at our existing evidence differently, in order to avoid retreading the same ground with the same few early medieval travellers for whom we have detailed travelogues or records? The Congress and collection also raise questions about how we might extend our analysis of female mobilities in the Middle Ages. Rohr’s investigation of Yolande of Aragon makes excellent use of the copious materials available concerning the well recorded itineraries of a medieval queen to consider the relationship between her travels, her gender and gendered rela-tionships, and power. This kind of work, which does not just document women’s mobilities but considers deeply their social, political, and cultural roles, could be extended. The less documented lives of women of lower status present greater challenges, however. Nonetheless, articles such as Metzler’s and Watson’s gesture towards under-explored possibilities: the women’s clothes in Roger Machado’s inventory that hint at the unacknowledged life of undocumented wife-in-exile; the disabled women and girls whose cures are recorded in miracle collections.”
These lacunae and challenges notwithstanding, the articles in this collection raise a number of important issues and questions, many of which recur across the volume’s sections and prove pertinent to the wide range of periods, geographical regions, and political and cultural conditions addressed here. Again and again the articles gathered here demonstrate the integration of mobility into medieval everyday life at different levels of society. Mobility is a part of life for King Stephen, Yolande of Aragon, and Ivan Baboni¢; for Hosler, paradoxically, it is King Stephen’s everyday mobility — the need to move around his country to rule — that puts paid to ideas of longer distance travel overseas.
Jakobsen intentionally redirects our attention away from the much discussed long distance travels of Franciscan and Dominican missionaries and towards the integration of mobility into their daily lives and the relationship of mobility to institutional infrastructure. Metzler utilizes narratives of exceptional incidents in the lives of disabled people to shed light on their mobility in daily life and here, too, social infrastructure and material equipment is of critical importance. Rither discusses the relationship between the routine mobility of mercenaries and their gendered identities, while Schuh turns our attention away from the long distance journeys across Europe of famous scholars in search of an outstanding education and towards increased levels of local and regional mobility that one sees in the wake of the establishment of new educational institutions.
Articles in this collection are also linked by their concern for certain important broader questions of significance to all of us. Several, for example, call into question the usefulness of binary distinctions between home and away, or the self and the foreign. Moving away from home carries the risk of a feeling of alienation, no matter how far the distance actually travelled. Several articles here touch, explicitly or obliquely, on factors that might contribute to or moderate experiences of alienation. Nordeide points out that, for papal envoys to the far north in the later Middle Ages, travel would have involved an unsettling negotiation between the familiar and the strange.”
The success or failure of this negotiation depended on a complex interplay of factors including the formation of the individual traveller and the wider political context of his journeys. Similarity and difference in environmental situation, architecture, and food inevitably contribute to an individual traveller’s senses of familiarity or foreignness, but, as both McCleery and Nordeide’s articles underscore, their effects could depend very much on the strategies employed by individual travellers who encountered them. The same articles, too, problematize the binary of ‘home’ and ‘away’. For Cardinal Nicholas Breakspear, born and brought up in England, educated and entering holy orders in France and eventually living in Rome, the categories seem particularly inapposite. The essential mobility of McCleery’s objects of study, Portuguese medical travellers, also undercuts the very category of ‘Portuguese’, while the travellers’ self-descriptions and letters reveal the fluidity of the concept of home in this period of Portuguese expansion. As such seemingly fixed categories are called into question, many of these articles refocus attention on a distinct but connected issue: the implications of mobility for individual and group identities.
These essays have much to teach us concerning the ways in which mobile groups and individuals in the Middle Ages encountered and addressed the experience of displacement, and its implications for their identities. Nikoli¢ Jakus highlights the Slavic modes of social organization and community identity that Slav migrants brought with them to their new homes in southern Italy, providing an oblique glimpse of the persistence of group identities as well as evidence for their eventual absorption within and impact upon the majority culture and language. A number of the articles also show peripatetic and displaced people forming, performing, and attempting to change or preserve mobile identities in different ways. Rohr shows how not only are Yolande of Aragon’s status and power were maintained and extended through her itinerancy, but how, in uniting the traditions of her natal and marital houses she forged a distinct identity through her mobility.
Fischer demonstrates how, through its Chronicle, the Teutonic Order both constructed Prussia as a /ocus of pilgrimage and moulded an ideal crusader identity to appeal to nobles across Europe. Riither finds mobility equally bound up with identity formation amongst the German landsknechts. These continually mobile German mercenaries created alternative social groups and hierarchies that closely paralleled their counterparts in settled society. In the landsknecht songs, certain of their portable objects emerge as not just practically useful but important markers of identity.
This relationship between mobility, identity, and objects recurs across several essays in the collection. Schuh also points out the practical adaptations mobile scholars made to the more normative paradigm of status enhancement through property and possessions, sometimes investing their financial resources and identities in valuable but portable collections of books. Quirini-Poplawski’s investigation of the doubly-displaced Genoese colonists’ return from Pera to Italy in the mid-fifteenth century from the perspective of their holy objects alerts us to the significance of the relationship between a moving community’s objects and its identity. The Genoese-Peran colonists’ portable objects functioned as links with a ‘lost’ place and were invested with the transcultural religious and civic identities of the Genoese colonists. Taken together, in fact, these articles repeatedly gesture towards individual and group identities inflected by mobility throughout the Middle Ages. Lost, lovingly conserved, or remoulded by people on the move, medieval group and individual identities are no more static than medieval people.
Finally, while it cannot be said that geographical mobility parallels social mobility, a pattern of relationships between the two phenomena does indeed emerge from this collection. If ‘social order by inequality’ (‘Soziale Ordnung durch Ungleichheit’ or ‘Harmonie durch Ungleichheit’) was the basis of medieval life, then travel could be an attempt to disrupt that order, and thus that inequality.** Kekez finds a persuasive correlation between Ivan Baboni¢’s mobility and his own and his family’s political influence. Jeroschin’s Chronicle of Prussia, according Fischer’s exposition, offers to the young nobility of medieval Europe the opportunity of self-transformation through travel into a truly noble pilgrim-warrior: it is mobility that makes the man. Riither uncovers persuasive evidence that, for German mercenaries, the promise that their mobile life as landsknechts might correlate with an increase in their social status or provide a means of sidestepping a hierarchical way of life was a big attraction.
In tracing the ‘lost’ years of herald Roger Machado, Gemma Watson links the changed status of this Herald directly to his willingness to take his portable goods into exile in the service of Henry Tudor, the future Henry VII. Mobility could give medieval people the capacity to refashion themselves socially, culturally, and economically.
Conclusion
Overall, the aim of the present volume is to provide, as best as we can in thirteen articles, a flavour of the work on ‘mobility’ contributed to the International Medieval 2010 and, at the same time, an overview of the key directions, topics, and concerns that preoccupy medieval research on mobility, travel, exploration, and migration. Inevitably, a volume of this kind has to be selective. Yet the collection features men and women from across Europe, travelling regionally, across borders, and intercontinentally, from a broad range of social groups, religious and secular, of different ages, the able-bodied and those with disability, with and without the intention to return. While it is undoubtedly true that mobility among certain social and economic groups, in certain periods, was sometimes conceived of in political and theological discourse as potentially transgressive, threatening, or disruptive — the students, mercenaries, mendicants, and rebels of this collection — the traveller could also be a normative or even ideal model. In the pages that follow, then, we will see how between the seventh and the sixteenth centuries, men and women, nobles, burghers and beggars, scholars and monks, and professionals of different types travelled, with varying degrees of toleration, approbation, admiration, or disapproval, across the seas and roads of Latin Europe and sometimes beyond.
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