Download PDF | Rosamund Allen, ed., Eastward Bound: Travel and Travellers, 1050-1550, Manchester University Press, 2004.
270 Pages
Contributors
ROSAMUND ALLEN studied English at Royal Holloway College and has taught in the University of London since 1965, at Bedford and Westfield Colleges, and now in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. She has published on the Middle English mystics, medieval romance and Lawman’s Brut and Malory. She is currently working on metre in Middle English texts.
NIALL CuristT1e received his undergraduate degree in Arabic from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, in 1995. In 1999 he completed a PhD in medieval Islamic history from the same institution, concentrating in particular on Levantine responses to the early crusades. He is currently a Research Associate and Sessional Lecturer at the University of British Columbia, and is continuing research on Muslim responses to the early crusades, focusing in particular on the presentation of the Franks in Muslim sources and (with Professor Deborah Gerish of Emporia State University, Kansas) comparative study of medieval European and Islamic calls to holy war.
SUZANNE CONKLIN AKBARI was educated at Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities, and is currently Associate Professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She has recently published a book on optics and allegory, titled Seeing through the Veil (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), and is currently at work on Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450. She has published articles on western views of Islam in Scripta Mediterranea, Islam and Christian—Muslim Relations and The Dante Encyclopedia, and on western views of the Orient in The Postcolonial Middle Ages (ed. Cohen, 2000), Chaucer’s Cultural Geography (ed. Lynch, 2002) and Orientalism and the Jews (ed. Kalmar and Penslar, 2004).
CATHERINE DELANO-SMITH graduated, and gained her D.Phil., from the University of Oxford. She is editor of Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography and Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. She was formerly Reader in Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham. Her book on Western Mediterranean Europe: A Historical Geography of Italy, Spain and Southern France since the Neolithic (London and New York: Academic Press, 1979) was followed by publications on prehistoric maps and on a number of aspects of the history of pre-modern cartography. She has co-authored Maps in Bibles (1991, with Elizabeth Ingram); English Maps: A History (1999, with Roger J. P. Kain) and Plantejamentos i objectivos d’una historia universal de la cartografia: Approaches and Challenges in a Worldwide History of Cartography (2001, with David Woodward and Cordell Yee). She has an essay ‘Map signs on printed topographical maps c. 1470-c. 1640’ in David Woodward (ed.), The History of Cartography, volume iii: Cartography in the European Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
EvELYN Epson is a Professor of History at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia. She is the author of Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed their World (1997). She is currently working on a book on the transformation of the world map between 1300 and 1500.
BERNARD HAMILTON is Professor Emeritus of Crusading History of the University of Nottingham. His recent publications include: Prester John, the Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes, edited with C. F. Beckingham (1996) and the collected studies Crusaders, Cathars and the Holy Places (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999) and The Christian World of the Middle Ages (Stroud: Sutton, 2003). He is now preparing a monograph, The Crusades and a Wider World, for London Books. ANpREw JoTiscHky is Senior Lecturer in History at Lancaster University. He is author of The Perfection of Solitude: Hermits and Monks in the Crusader States (1995) and The Carmelites and Antiquity: Mendicants and their Pasts in the Middle Ages (2002), and articles on aspects of the relations between Franks and Greek Orthodox Christians in the Crusader States.
ANNE Simon is Senior Lecturer in Mediaeval German at the University of Bristol. Her research interests include medieval German travel literature, especially that on pilgrimage to the Holy Land; the history of the book; and the relationship between text and image in the late Middle Ages. Her major publications include Sigmund Feyerabend’s ‘Das Reyfbuch def Heyligen Lands’: A Study in Printing and Literary History (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1998) and, with Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, Festivals and Ceremonies: A Bibliography of Works Relating to Court, Civic and Religious Festivals in Europe, 1500-1800 (London: Mansell, 2000).
Barry TayLor is curator of Hispanic Collections, 1501-1850, at the British Library, London. His publications include Cultures in Contact in Medieval Spain: Historical and Literary Essays Presented to L. P. Harvey, edited with David Hook (London: King’s College, 1990); Latin and Vernacular in Renaissance Spain, edited with Alejandro Coroleu (Manchester: Department of Hispanic Studies, 1999), and over thirty articles on Don Juan Manuel, Juan de Mena and wisdom literature in Old Spanish, Old Catalan and Latin.
SHAwKaT M. Toorawa is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania (where he received his PhD), Duke University and the University of Mauritius. He is a co-author of Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition, edited by Dwight F. Reynolds (2001), and author of Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur and Arabic Writerly Culture: A Ninth Century Bookman in Baghdad (forthcoming from RoutledgeCurzon).
ROSALYNN VOADEN works primarily on late medieval women visionaries and saints’ lives. She is the author of God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (1999), and is currently at work on a study of holiness in the domestic setting entitled Household Saints: Holiness and Domesticity in Late-Medieval Europe. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Yale Guide to Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition. She teaches at Arizona State University.
ELKA Weser recently finished a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies at New York University, where she wrote a dissertation comparing late medieval travel accounts of Muslims, Christians and Jews. Her article ‘Construction of identity in twelfth-century Andalusia: The case of travel writing’ appeared in The Journal of North African Studies, and she is now researching the relationship between British colonialism and the translation of medieval pilgrimage accounts into English around the beginning of the twentieth century. She teaches at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.
Introduction
Rosamund Allen Pilgrymes and palmers pligten hem togidere For to seken Seint Iame and Seintes at Rome; Wenten forp in hire wey wip many wise tales, And hadden leue to lyen al hire lif after. (William Langland, Piers Plowman, Prologue, lines 46-9)" (Pilgrims and those standing in for pilgrims, making a mutual contract to go to visit Compostela and the shrines in Rome, set off on their route with many learned instructions, and so were authorised to tell lies for the rest of their lives.) HIS SATIRICAL comment on pilgrimage from Piers Plowman reflects William Langland’s deeply conservative mind. He did not approve of social or geographic mobility; travelling to obtain pardons whether in person or by proxy was unnecessary and provoked tall tales. Langland would have disapproved of many of the narratives in this book, tales about and by travellers who often claim to be eyewitnesses but who are often recycling accounts by classical or medieval writers.
Like Langland, the modern reader has difficulty with a first-person account which is plainly not based on factual personal observation.” But the medieval veneration for sources, written and oral, accepts the probity of an inherited account and seeks only to pass on the information. Miracles, marvels and monstrous creations, all must exist as all things are possible under God. The travel accounts which we may read as entertainment were directives to wisdom.’ The kind of ‘knowledge’ we use for the London taxi driver’s familiarity with actual places had its medieval equivalent in the shipmaster’s knowledge of the coastal waters he navigated,* and the local guides’ familiarity with terrain across deserts and round the established pilgrim route for the holy sites. Pilgrims relied on personal direction rather than maps for finding their way. Written descriptions of the sites did exist, but were as much advertisements as route guides.’
Accounts of what could be seen in the orient (as far as the writer was concerned at least) form a different type of narrative, though as The Book of Sir John Mandeville shows there is much blending of genres. Billie Melman comments that travel writing is diverse, and has also changed over time. She surveys two dominant models for writing of the Middle East from the western (British) perspective, ‘the pilgrimage[,] and the domestic ethnography focused on Muslim everyday life’. Pilgrimage remains the dominant mode of travel even after the Reformation, and in modernised form continues, despite political turmoil, though since the eighteenth century it has co-existed with interest in Islamic private life and with narratives of exploration of the ‘wilderness’ hinterland of the Arabian peninsula.° Unlike that of the modern vacation traveller, the pilgrim traveller’s imperative was not release from pressure of work but release from the pains of impending infernal torment.
Those who were already too old or sick when the horror of coming doom took hold would enlist professional pilgrims, the ‘palmers’ whose palm was the badge of Holy Land pilgrims. For the medieval pilgrim the journey usually began soon after Easter and lasted a great many months. The crusades were also first ‘proposed as a devotional act of pilgrimage’ and were continually being declared, ‘at least one crusade summons being directed at each generation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’, to reinforce and then restore the holy places and to tap the resources of Egypt.’ Sanudo was preparing a crusade proposal as late as the fourteenth century (see Chapter 7). Merchants travelled even more extensively, and merchant explorers like Marco Polo were (apparently) absent for years.* St Brendan fictitiously travelled west from Ireland into the Atlantic,® Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), grandson of John of Gaunt, promoted Atlantic exploration by the Portuguese, the Canaries were explored and exploited from the fourteenth century, even as the hinterland of Africa and the sources of the Nile were beginning to be discovered. But the majority of travellers went eastwards, as pilgrims, missionaries, crusaders, envoys and merchants, towards what the mappamundi presented as the centre of the world: Jerusalem.’°
A minority went further east, as ambassadors, like Clavijo, on embassy to the Great Khan Timur (Tamerlane), or as merchants on the trade routes for silk, spices, pearls, perfume and other luxuries. Pegolotti’s advice on travelling to Cathay for silk was to grow a beard, take a native speaker and travel in a caravan of sixty men for safety.” Today’s eastward-bound travellers are urged to be careful about finance, exchange rates, insurance, dress codes and, sadly, disease, terrorism, scams and theft and personal safety, yet one third travel without advance planning.” Those who do not travel simply to ‘party’ relish differences in climates and cuisines of the lands visited, and phrase book to hand savour the food, sites and relics. Medieval travel was not undertaken lightly; it was dangerous, painful and expensive, and it had an objective — pilgrimage, trade, learning, crusade or warfare — and an end product — salvation, wealth, knowledge, prestige, conquest or restoration.
Even Tafur (Chapter 11), who sought to gain chivalric prestige from his lengthy travels, did so for social advancement —and he obtained some slaves as well. Modern ideas of travelling to ‘broaden the mind’ do not operate to any noticeable degree in this collection.” Indeed, it appears from previous travellers’ accounts, written and oral, and from diagrams and maps (Chapters 6 and 7), that many travellers to Jerusalem had already formed a clear idea of how the Holy Land would look and what they would find. And they found what they expected to: a familiar narrative of biblical texts extended over and buried within the very ground they trod. Jewish pilgrims to the Land of Israel (Chapter 2) found the tombs of the patriarchs, and Christian pilgrims (Chapters 9, 10, 11) identified places with the life and death of Jesus. Both sets of shrines were mainly managed by people of a different religious faith from the pilgrims’ own: Muslims, and eastern-rite Catholics, Greek Orthodox Christians and Coptic Christians. The medieval travellers in this book are more conscious of difference in dress and religious belief than of language, foodstuffs and culture.
They are impressed by luxurious clothes, furniture and buildings as an index of status. Yet pilgrims’ awareness of the Other is secondary to the impact on them of the long-distant past: like a transparent membrane, the historical plane overlies the geographical, and they find themselves closer to the long-dead founders of their faith than to the local inhabitants with whom they negotiate for food, shelter and access to the shrines. These travellers are concerned about identifying the Other, not always to marvel at difference but to define more securely their own belief system, which had been their main motive for leaving the safety of the familiar home or conventual routine.’ Nor, despite misunderstanding of the Islamic faith, was there ‘a developed hatred of Islam and all things Muslim’, though the travelling friars (Chapter 4) are on missions to convert Muslims and non-western-rite Christians, and they meticulously identify those who are in fact Christians in Arab garb.
Clothing is identity: Clavijo on embassy to the Mongol Great Khan is impressed by the sumptuous attire at his court (Chapter 11); disguise will enable him to gain access to otherwise prohibited sites (Chapter 2). Medieval pilgrims had to take with them enough to support their expenses for food, footwear and appropriate clothing. They might appeal for funding to their parish, and the ‘overdraft’ would be paid in the prayers for benefactors offered at the destination shrine and in a vicarious share of the pilgrims’ reward for suffering Christ’s own pains on the journey. They also needed the equivalent of passport and visas, and had to obtain royal permission to cross the sea and permits to enter hostile territory. They needed money to pay to visit shrines, but were supposed to be exempt from certain tolls. Such permits and freedoms could not, however, be relied on.
Travellers’ torments from hostile climates and lack of means of subsistence are not prominent in their accounts, though the impetuous Margery Kempe does expose herself to privation and infestation with vermin. But their immediate responses do not go unrecorded. Encina and Tafur (Chapter 11) and Hans Tucher (Chapter 10) are aggrieved at being exploited by the locals. Margery Kempe (Chapter 9) is distressed over money after giving away hers and her companion’s in misguided charity. Like us they are anxious about their safety — about brigands and shipwreck, disabling illness and being stranded. The Bedouin are a threat, but Tafur feels a momentary pity for their miserable lifestyle (Chapter 11). Strange surroundings may seem familiar if they recall a known significant moment in religious history, or are made imaginable by comparing them to known landmarks such as European cities or buildings. Even the totally exotic is not necessarily frightening: unfamiliar animals and plants provoke wonder, and suggest the possible existence of huge variations in human physicality, wholly extraordinary and monstrous forms of human life, men with eyes in their shoulders, huge lips or one huge foot. The variety in God’s universal creation presents a careful balance of opposites (Chapter 8). Such marvellous forms of creation were thought to exist in what was once called ‘the Orient’, the lands on the edges of the mappaemundi where the ‘wonders of the East’ were drawn. As people gained knowledge of the East and failed to find them in India the monstrous races were relocated (Chapter 1) to ‘Africa’, itself then thought to extend into the Indian Ocean (Chapter 5).
The writer known as ‘Mandeville’ (Chapter 8), having described the Holy Land and access to it, moves from instructions for alternative routes to Jerusalem by an abrupt transition to the lands east of Israel as far as India, where he locates the monstrous forms. Like so many, he bases his ‘observations’ on learned sources and on actual travellers like Friar Odoric of Pordenone. Travellers from the regions of Syria, Iraq and Iran, on the other hand, are the most factually accurate of the medieval travellers in this book. From the other side, they observe the distinctions between their own culture and that of the ifranj, the ‘French’ crusaders. Usamah Ibn Munqidh (Chapter 4), a trouble-seeking character, records his outraged impressions of the invading Franks and their females, but is more tolerant of the many other women he encounters. ‘Abd al-Latif, with prodigious intellectual energy, travels to learn and later to teach law, medicine and theology (Chapter 3) and rejects the spurious. These men observe the ordinary vagaries of human nature, the common disasters of plague, warfare and brigandage. Unlike Tafur, eyeing the private parts of Greek women in the Constantinople baths and exciting his readers’ imagination, most medieval travellers record their experiences to edify others. Those who record their visits to the Jewish shrines in the Land of Israel (Chapter 2) do so for the 4» INTRODUCTION spiritual benefit of their successors. Hans Tucher (Chapter 10) aims to provide a guide for Christian pilgrims; Ludolf von Sudheim and Margery Kempe follow a tradition in which a clearly measured out and described account of the holy places becomes for the devout reader a virtual pilgrimage in itself. Reading and absorbing others’ accounts of the world beyond home (even though we and Langland would call them ‘untrue’) gives them an imagined reality: in this way they endorse the truth and power of the Creator, with whom all things are possible."® This book examines the ways in which medieval travellers engaged with their world. In ‘The Impact of the crusades on western geographical knowledge’ (Chapter 1), Bernard Hamilton provides an overview of the knowledge of the Middle East in the period after the seventh century.
The rise of Islam prevented eastward travel but Arabs allowed pilgrims access to the Holy Land, and these pilgrims supplied information on the shrines in the Holy Land and on Egypt. Few left written records, however, and Africa and Asia were known of through late classical, romance and biblical accounts, partly fabulous. There were marvels in India according to Honorius Augustodunensis, writing in the early twelfth century of lands from Africa to Asia. More accurate knowledge of the Holy Land was available after the First Crusade; more pilgrims visited and described the shrines on the pilgrimage route. William of Tyre was born and died in the Crusader States, about which he supplied for his patron a detailed and widely circulated history, but he knew little of Asia. Burchard of Strasburg travelled from Cairo to Damascus as ambassador to Saladin in 1175-76, and reported on Muslim culture and the animals of Egypt. The legend of Prester John, an oriental Christian and supposed conqueror of the Persians, produced the hugely influential ‘letter of Prester John’ which told of the wonders of the East, using information from apocryphal, classical and perhaps oriental sources. Actual events in Africa and Asia were known to Muslim and Jewish travellers, but not available to readers outside those language communities. With the Muslim reconquest of the Crusader States in 1187 the pilgrim routes altered in the thirteenth century and more accounts of the area were written. Jacques de Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn, who took part in the thirteenth-century Fifth Crusade, brought knowledge of the Coptic Church and of Nubia and Ethiopia back to Rome, and Joinville, biographer of Louis IX, recorded a report of an expedition to find the source of the Nile (though his account of the Mongols in Asia was mixed fact and fantasy). Contact with Asia along the spice trade routes produced reports of Genghis (Chingiz) Khan in the west by 1219-21, though it was assumed that the Mongols were Christians until embassies by Dominican friars arrived. Vincent of Beauvais incorporated the resulting History of the Mongols in his Speculum maius. Franciscan missionaries to the Mongols included William of Rubruck, who found neither Prester John nor the monstrous creations of fable.
Trade and clerical activity continued in Asia throughout the midthirteenth-century contest for power between Mongols and Mamluks, and the pagan (later Muslim-convert) Mongols in Persia restored access by Christians to India and even China by sea. By the end of the crusading era a factual account of Asia had been produced by Jordan Catalani, who describes Indian culture and reports at second hand on the flora and fauna as far east as Cambodia and the East Indies, relocating Prester John as King of Ethiopia and the monstrous races to the Horn of Africa. The Hereford mappamundi of c. 1300 locates them in India and Africa. The newly accurate information about Asia and Africa was put to the practical purpose of preparing (unrealised) plans for crusades in the fourteenth century. Fantasy is absent from the factual narratives of Jewish travellers described by Elka Weber in Chapter 2. From Spain, France, Italy and Germany they travelled to the Land of Israel as pilgrims and traders, describing the holy shrines they visited, usually in Hebrew. They used their scriptures to interpret what they saw (as Anne Simon also demonstrates for the Christian pilgrims in Chapter 10). In the commandment of 538 BCE three or more annual visits to Jerusalem were required, but after its destruction in 70 CE, Byzantine rule, and later Muslim rule, permitted only one visit, to mourn that fall, for which a ritual developed. By the fifteenth century, Jews, Christians and Muslims travelled for their respective festivals in spring and early summer. Jewish pilgrimage was less on a set pattern than Christian: many visited the Patriarchs’ graves, though Benjamin of Tudela in the late twelfth century also saw Christian and Muslim sites. Pilgrims had additional interests: Meshullam of Volterra may also have been on a business trip, and Isaac Chelo sought rare Hebrew books in Jerusalem. The Jewish pilgrim Jacob haCohen even quotes Pliny on crocodiles. Predecessors provide advice on the route to follow, and biblical events determine the sights to seek, which have intrinsic significance as a teaching aid, their ambiance created by use of Arabic terminology to engage reader response; the pilgrims’ personal reactions are not explored. Genuine sites, some not shown to Christians, are sought out, even by the paradoxical expedient of disguise as Christian or Muslim.
The importance of the sites is shown by God’s miraculous interventions to protect them. Many Jewish holy sites were also venerated by Christians and Muslims; there was mutual tolerance of other faiths and admiration of their architecture. Tolerance also marks the travel narratives in Shawkat Toorawa’s account of medieval Islamic travelling scholars (Chapter 3), despite the personal and political dangers they faced. Toorawa extends the previously categorised forms of Islamic travel (for knowledge of Islamic traditions, pilgrimage to Mecca, exploration and trade) to include travel with or because of patrons and travel by non-Muslims in Islamic territory. Early travelling poets and court attendants initiated a system of patronage whereby scholars and writers travelled to seek patrons among caliphs, regional governors and wealthy people, who gained in prestige as patrons even if they were themselves illiterate. Poets moved to seek better takings, climates or political safety. The highly learned and hardworking ‘Abd al-Latif travelled in his youth to obtain instruction and knowledge and in maturity to obtain or please patrons. His studies began with oral and written information and religious texts and extended to science, medicine and law, which he taught from dawn till dusk in Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo, pursuing his own studies and writing at night. He died in Baghdad at the age of sixty-nine. Toorawa concludes by proposing a taxonomy of medieval Islamic travel. Niall Christie’s Muslim traveller, Usamah Ibn Mungidh (1095-1188), of Bedouin origin, travelled widely throughout Egypt, Syria and the Holy Land (Chapter 4).
Exiled from Syria, he went from Damascus to Egypt and back. He composed poetry now lost and collected an anthology of his poetry at the court of Qara-Arslan, and spent two years in Saladin’s court. His remarkable propensity for getting himself embroiled in politics wherever he went gave him much experience of the invading ifranj and the Muslim rulers he served. He records in his ‘memoirs’, the Kitab al-I‘tibar, his scornful impressions of the crusaders, their inadequate medicine and their dissolute womenfolk, and often misunderstands their humour. He describes his far more complimentary impressions of other women, including many, especially those in his household, who are active in a variety of roles, supporting their sons and charges, asserting themselves politically, socially and in combat, preferring death to dishonour. The vigour of his style enhances the assertive roles of the many women he met on his travels. Andrew Jotischky’s travellers in the Islamic states (Chapter 5) are teachers like ‘Abd al-Latif, but their aim is to convert. Franciscan and Dominican missionaries founded convents throughout the Near and Middle East and beyond. In the Crusader States they encountered Christians of other rites as well as Muslims, and extended their mission to them. Their experiences were recorded by their biographers and in their own accounts; some were martyred. One significant ministry was the visitation of Christian prisoners of war, and after the fall of Acre friars readily obtained travel permits from the Muslim authorities for the Jerusalem pilgrimage, but had to pay tolls to enter cities and visit shrines, and needed to avoid attacks by brigands and even their own guides. Writing in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, the Irishman Symon Semeonis, James of Verona and Niccolo da Poggibonsi furnish detailed accounts of differences they encounter in dress and religious practice from the ‘norm’ they know at home. They follow a tradition of reporting established in the twelfth century and adopt the papal practice of associating ‘schismatic’ Christians with Muslims: papal injunction requires the friars to preach to eastern-rite Christians as well as Muslims, though they themselves were more tolerant than the papal admonitions.
How the friars and other pilgrims reached the Holy Land, before full knowledge of Ptolemy’s Almagest and Geography was regained, is the subject of Catherine Delano-Smith’s ‘The intelligent pilgrim’ (Chapter 6). Biblical narrative provided a prospective pilgrim with an outline of what he would see, as it did for Weber’s Jewish pilgrims. The medieval mappaemundi (unlike late Roman topographical maps) were not route plans. They were summaries of sacred history and Christian doctrine, which gained prominence as pilgrim numbers increased from the tenth century, and fell out of use by the late fifteenth century as increasing knowledge of the Far East made them too inaccurate. A mappamundi was a learned encyclopaedia for devotional reflection in closet or monastery, and contemplation of Jerusalem positioned at its centre might substitute for actual pilgrimage. Regional maps of Palestine, updated from travellers’ and crusaders’ reports, would serve a potential pilgrim better for locating places. Knowledge of Arabic texts had already enabled Roger Bacon to produce a superior world map constructed from tables of latitude and longitude, and the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (or Cotton Tiberius) map (c. 1050) is based on a lost Roman map: it combines classical and Christian information. Sanudo’s grid map of Palestine is considerably clearer than Burchard of Mount Sion’s account and accompanying map in a later copy. Local plans of Jerusalem from the crusader period replace the stylised earlier plans in symmetrical circular form with pictures of the holy sites. Actual plans of the sites dated back to Adomnan and Bede in the seventh and eighth centuries, and later Christian and Muslim travellers carefully recorded measurements of the sites, with maps to aid future pilgrims.
For the journey itself, however, not maps but group guides and written accounts were their route finders. Even mariners did not have Mediterranean charts before the early twelfth century: as late as 1483 Felix Fabri was amazed to see a portolan chart covered in rhumb lines.” As Evelyn Edson shows in Chapter 7, in the fourteenth century, maps based on or influenced by portolan charts were produced in close collaboration between the Venetian Marino Sanudo and the Genoese mapmaker Pietro Vesconte, a collaboration so close that the extent of Sanudo’s own contribution to the maps, particularly that of the Holy Land, is still uncertain. These maps aimed at physical accuracy and in some manuscripts were supplied with gridlines. They were not devotional aids like the mappaemundi nor guides for potential pilgrims, but were part of Sanudo’s impressive plan to regain the Holy Land after the fall of Acre in 1291, presented to the Pope as ‘two books’, one of which may have contained the maps. According to the plan, supplies to Egypt would be cut off in a blockade of Alexandria by experienced mariners supplied with ships, food and materials. The regional maps of the Eastern Mediterranean are to aid the attacking forces. Thus, although the pictures in the Jerusalem city map illustrate Jesus’s life, the water supplies of the city, vital in time of siege, are closely detailed.
The inclusion of a world map sets the scene. Two manuscripts include marine charts identical to those made by Vesconte at other times. They are navigational aids for the crusade, giving distances and directions as Vegetius had advised in classical times. However, Sanudo’s crusade campaign, fuelled by his religious fanaticism, and adapted to changing political circumstances, never bore fruit. He researched the depicted locations, and his distances were accurate, derived from portolan directions: the crusaders could have planned their route from these to minimise danger and achieve victory. Sanudo died still believing in his proposal. Another form of travel which remained unrealised is represented in the travel accounts of the Far East. These include the Itinerarius of Johannes Witte de Hese,”* and the famous Book of Sir John Mandeville discussed by Suzanne Conklin Akbari in Chapter 8.
The author, writing in French c. 1360 and using the pseudonym ‘Iohn Maundevylle, knight . . . of Seynt Albones’, was an armchair traveller drawing on a variety of sources. Even more than Witte’s book, The Book of Sir John Mandeville was instantly popular, and was translated, adapted and re-issued until the mid-seventeenth century, and unlike Witte’s, Mandeville’s Book remains popular as fantasising fraud. Akbari shows how the Book presents people “on the edge’ of humankind and of the mappaemundi. Bodily ideals are found in temperate zones, the monstrous races occur in climatic extremes, with a full range of human diversity in between. The Book of Sir John Mandeville presents ‘a kind of virtual journey which arouses the reader’s wonder at the diversity within unity of God’s creation. The Mandeville-author’s classification of geographical, cultural and bodily difference constructs a balanced order of creation, following Pliny, rather than the theological explanation of ‘monstrosity. Bartholomaeus Anglicus in De proprietatibus rerum added an astronomical dimension to the medical opinion that the temperate body is the ideal, and favoured the northern climate; the Mandeville-author adopts Bartholomaeus’s system of complementary opposites: heredity and climate determine physiology, as is seen in the contrast between western European and Indian physiques. Far from denigrating those ‘on the margins’, the Mandeville-author expresses wonder at the differences encountered in his ‘virtual journey’ eastwards.
Amazement and puzzlement are compounded in his attitude, epitomised in his account of India, which he terms ‘Albanye’ because of the inhabitants’ unexpected paleness. England is India’s ‘contrarie’, and its lushness, complementary to the lush lands of ‘Prester John’, produces natural explorers who seek to dominate others. The Mandeville-author departs from his source, Friar Odoric of Pordenone’s account written thirty-one years earlier, by viewing England and India as microcosms of the world, producing a new opposition of north-west/south-east, and thus the Orient replaces the south as the extreme of heat. England, seen as the epitome of normality, makes the world-view Anglo-centric from an extra-terrestrial vantage point where the ‘traveller’ is both a close eyewitness and a distant assessor of terrestrial diversity. Although some claim that Margery Kempe was another armchair traveller, Rosalynn Voaden sees her in Chapter 9 as indeed adopting the spiritual discipline of pilgrimage, inspired by narratives of Christ’s life and the allure of travel drawn from her location in Lynn (King’s Lynn) on the Norfolk coast. At home and on the travels which formed her as a holy woman Margery was vilified, especially for her loud ‘roaring’ grief at Christ’s passion.
Her various pilgrimages and the new religious ideas entering England from northern Europe through the port of Lynn give Margery’s spirituality a continental basis. Unlike the friars and Jewish pilgrims to Jerusalem, Margery as a woman of forty ran additional physical as well as financial risks in travelling so far. Her role model, Birgitta (Bridget) of Sweden, went there in her late sixties. After travelling from the Netherlands and apparently, and without comment, crossing the Alps in winter, Margery took ship at Venice for Jaffa. On this outward journey she may have learned of the Beguines of Liége and Marie of Oignies, and on her return via Assisi she may have heard of Angela of Foligno. But Margery entirely avoids the sin of curiositas, and does not describe the world she traverses: suffering, not scenery, is her narrative. Unlike Marco Polo and the Mandeville-author, she places herself strongly before the reader, filtering her experience of the Holy Land through her emotional responses to the sites. Her return home is unremarked — there was no literary model for this, nor for her later travels in northern Europe in 1433. For these later travels we have authentic-sounding details of the experiences of the now sixty-year-old Margery, short of money, injured and without a clear destination. She did visit two shrines, but the focus of the pilgrimage was Margery herself and her persecutions. She often travelled alone. On her return, she dictated her Book; its shape and her self-presentation throughout was largely formed on her northern pilgrimage experience. Hans Tucher, one of two pilgrims leaving the north for the Holy Land in Anne Simon’s account (Chapter 10), also records his own reactions, notably his responses to the Other. Ludolf von Sudheim in Westphalia and the nobleman Hans Tucher of Nuremberg wrote in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries respectively. Both were impressed by the stench of the Dead Sea, though their record of this unhappy experience is derivative on earlier accounts, and Tucher himself echoes Ludolf closely. Like many western pilgrims, they view landscape through Bible narrative, but both also observe the societies they encounter.
Ludolf travelled between 1336 and 1341 and his Latin account, first published around 1468, is the earliest pilgrimage report 10 dD printed in Germany; it became very popular. Like Sanudo, Ludolf hints that the Holy Land should be regained through a crusade. He uses written and oral sources which he regards as reliable and outlines the procedures for going on pilgrimage, from obtaining papal permission to possible routes and attendant risks; the trials of pilgrimage enact a form of imitatio Christi.
The point of departure, unusually, seems to be Genoa rather than Venice, and Ludolf’s route jumps from Alexandria to Tripoli and back down the coast to Cairo via Bethlehem and Jerusalem, an uncommon route dictated by the destruction of Jaffa, but which nevertheless recalls to readers both Old and New Testaments. Ludolf’s description of the Jerusalem shrines echoes the history of salvation from Abraham to Judgement Day. This route is encyclopaedic rather than a prescription for travel, though Ludolf describes the elite classes on Cyprus and disastrous wranglings in Acre, and is aware of the trade routes from India. Besides classical authors, he uses sailors’ accounts.
This digest of information includes miracles and fabulous beasts and is not coloured by subjective response; unlike Margery’s, Ludolf’s focus is the landscape that validates the biblical past, which the reader will then invest with pious devotion. Despite his interest in the crusades, he is tolerant of Muslim belief. Hans Tucher spent ten months from 1479 to 1480 on pilgrimage to the Holy Land with Siebald Rieter; his very popular account was first printed in 1482. It is in two parts, covering the trip to Jerusalem followed by an account of the desert of Sinai and Cairo, with historical and practical information, derived from both earlier sources and oral report. Unlike the Spaniard Tafur, he structures his account round specific dates. Completing the survey of travellers bound for the East, Barry Taylor in Chapter 11 looks at four journeys (two beyond the Holy Land) undertaken by Spanish travellers. Clavijo travelled from 1403 to 1406 in an embassy to Tamerlane’s court in Samarkand and wrote, or collaborated in, a narrative of the long journey. Thirty years later, Pero Tafur travelled via Rome and Venice to Jerusalem and Egypt, returning via Constantinople, Venice, Germany, Poland and Hungary, reaching Sardinia (where the extant account ends) in 1439. His aim was to acquire knightly prowess by learning of other states.
Less familiar are Tarifa and Encina, pilgrims who travelled independently to Jerusalem in 1518-20 and 1519 respectively, joining company in Venice. All four travellers visited Venice, about which Tafur wrote a long account, while the court poet Encina described its wonders in his Tribagia, a narrative of his voyage in arte mayor metre.” Tafur’s narrative survives in a single incomplete manuscript, but the other three accounts each survive in more than one manuscript, and Tarifa’s and Encina’s were printed in 1521. Tafur’s anecdotal narrative is the most subjective of the four. All four refer to Christian relics, and both Clavijo and Tafur recount the political history of the states they visit. Even Clavijo includes marvels and the monstrous races, however, and is «ll ROSAMUND ALLEN naively surprised at many of the sites he actually observes. Tarifa is more discerning, and attributes information about marvels to a traveller’s report. Unlike Egeria long before (and Ludolf nearly a century earlier), Encina observes directly and does not see the landscape as corroboration of biblical history.
He is severely critical of extortionate traders, of the state of buildings and of eastern-rite religion, and includes a poem to the Pope urging renewed crusade. Clavijo maintains a diplomatic objectivity. All four travellers write in diary form. All indicate spatial measurement, referring to famous European buildings for comparison. These writers are aware of classical models and earlier travel writings but provide eyewitness accounts which include dress, marital customs and exotic (but real) animals. All travelled with a practical objective which they accomplished, but they returned home unchanged by their travels.
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