Our 15th-century traveller returns to Venice and goes overland into central and western Europe, making friends and catching up with some old ones along the way. He'll heal at the thermal baths, and there's talk of Bruges, Antwerp, medieval trade and textiles, and the fairs.
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Sources:
Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Script:
Pedro was leaving Constantinople, was saying goodbye to the Sea of Marmara and to the Dardanelles. He was anchoring at the Turkish island of Tenedos and then at Mytilene, where he bumped into the Emperor of Trebizond’s brother, busily gathering ships with which to force his way home. He passed the city of Salonica, a Venetian possession then, that had been lost to the Ottomans by the time of his writing.
There was a terrible storm on the way to Crete that had all aboard promising pilgrimages to east and west if only they would be allowed to sail on alive, a storm that had their ship covered in birds at one point, hoopoes which perched on their shoulders to shelter from the winds. They reached Crete with sails torn and anchored near to land, attracting the attention of a hermit there who rowed out and found them all sleeping.
They spent a very pleasant three days with the surprisingly sociable hermit, and Pedro, not for the first time I believe, swore that he had dealt with quite enough terror at sea and would have remained on dry land forever if only they had landed on the mainland. But they had not, and on the fourth day, they left.
Along what is now the Croatian coast, there was talk of women who had disappeared while washing linens. The cause had been unknown until one day when the women were in the water and a monster had emerged. It was, quote, “half fish from the middle downwards, and having human shape above, with wings like a bat,” a kind of bat-winged merperson it sounds like.
This creature had seized one of the washers and tried to pull her below the surface, but the rest of the women, along with others who’d heard the screams, had attacked the monster, wounding it badly and dragging it ashore where it died after three hours. The body was cut open and salted to be sent to the pope, and a picture was made of it which was to have been carried all over the world. Pedro missed out on all of this, but it had apparently happened quite recently.
Arriving in Venice, they saw ships waiting to sail, including ones with banners of pilgrimage, and they asked why all appeared to be in such readiness. They were informed that it was Ascension Day and that after mass all who were going to the holy land would be boarding their ship to leave. It had been exactly two years since Pedro had done the same from that place.
It was a day of festivities, the area before St Marks crowded with “a great concourse of people.” There were grand celebrations and displays of wealth. The money changers displayed their gold and silver, and the men and women their “jewels of great worth.” The doge with all the clergy went forth on a richly decorated ship, hung with cloth of gold and carpeted with fine tapestry, rowed out on a sea so thick with ships that the water could scarcely be seen. Orations were made, and a priest gave his blessings. Then the doge drew a ring from his finger and threw it into the sea, a ritual that seems not entirely Christian, or perhaps one might better say that it speaks to the many traditions, old and new, that Christianity can contain. “This,” Pedro informs us he has heard, “is an ancient ceremony for wedding the sea to the land to placate its fury, since their city is founded in the sea, and from the sea they draw all that they have.”
Pedro found some Castilians in the crowd, because of course he did, like Australians abroad bumping into one another. His fellow Castilians, who he listed by name, were preparing to make pilgrimage, and he was able to advise them as to the city of Jerusalem along with what to do and how much to expect to spend. He saw them off to their ships—a falling out had seen them put themselves aboard separate vessels—and he took care of some difficulties of his own.
His goods, a category under which he included those three enslaved from last time, had been confiscated, for only Venetians were allowed to bring merchandise from the Black Sea into the city. But he had help from a group of knights who he’d encountered. Like him, he now tells us, they wore the device of Emperor Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor, then about 70 and in what must have been the last year or so of his life, maybe less. Pedro’s belongings would eventually be returned. Those knights who aided him would walk him back to his lodgings, send him sweets, wine, and meats the next day, and for the rest of his days there, “gave [him] a hearty welcome,” every time they met, “as if they had been [his] close kinsmen.” Pedro tended to land on his feet that way, in regards to the people around him and the support they provided him on his travels.
Today, those travels continue, including a visit to somewhere that has, I believe, often come up as an important trading partner but not as an actual destination.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that is in fact about “journeys in the medieval world,” or at least, most of the time. It’s a podcast with a patreon, where you can keep this ship afloat for as little or as much as you want to put in per month, and where you can enjoy early, ad-free, and extra listening in the process. Most recently, that extra listening was a mini episode on something I came across in reading about slavery on the Black Sea for Pedro’s last outing. If you’re interested and able to do so, you can come aboard at patreon.com/humancircus.
And now, back to the story, back to the story of Pedro the 15th-century Spanish traveller. Today, we do not quite wrap that up, but we come close as we follow him into western Europe.
We rejoin our traveller in Venice, joining Pedro there for a second time. He wondered again at its watery system that made for the, quote, “finest fortress in the world,” and at its extraordinary wealth and the abundance of its markets. The fruit which came from Spain could be found there in that city just as fresh and cheaply had as in Pedro’s own homeland. “Likewise,” he said, “[was] to be had whatever comes from Syria and, if one desires it, from India, since the Venetians navigate[d everywhere].” To that city, Pedro proclaimed, came “the products of the Levant in as great a profusion and abundance as they [did] those from the West, so that the whole world seem[ed to him] to be in their possession.”
We rejoin Pedro up as he departs that place. He left the possessions and the enslaved people he had brought with him, mentions leaving them in the care of a Venetian merchant and friend of his. He mentions taking a little money for the way ahead and bills of exchange which he arranged for certain merchants in Flanders. Like with bringing a cheque or, one would have said not long ago, a traveller’s cheque, the money could then be had from those merchants when he reached that place.
Pedro travelled southwest from Venice, stopping in at Ferrara where the Byzantine Emperor and the pope were then to be found. The emperor, to whom he brought letters from the man’s consort and brother, was like an old friend to him now, indeed apparently greeting him as “kinsman and a native of his country” and insisting he visit him every day that both remained there.
The emperor was staying in a palace belonging to the Marquis of Ferrara, and Pedro takes a moment to describe the marquis. He was French, Pedro tells us, and like others of his lineage he followed the tradition of placing a loaf upside down on the table before turning it over, a tradition that he apparently didn’t so much follow as he was bound by it. There’s an anecdote about how he once made two requests of the French king, that he be given arms and that he be released from this whole business of the inverted loaf. The king was to have granted him the arms readily enough but told him that he could do nothing to help him with his other request. The poor man would have to continue placing his loaves upside down.
It’s an interesting tale, and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. But there are plenty of references to upside-down loaves being bad luck of one kind or another, supposedly associated with the loaves turned over to signal that they were reserved for the executioner, or with the idea that the devil was flying overhead when you did it, or else, later on in parts of England, with causing shipwrecks or with turning someone out of their house. Perhaps this was a kind of curse upon the man’s lineage, that he was made to carry out the unfortunate practice.
Pedro also said of the marquis that he was “small of stature and very fat” and in addition “very merry and handsome of person and very amorous.” And by “amorous,” he meant that the marquis was about 80 years old but was known to have around 10 or 12 concubines in his palaces, something Pedro evidently viewed as having been a source of some trouble.
The marquis had been married to a German duke’s daughter, and the daughter had had an affair with his son by another marriage, daughter and son surely having been much closer in age than the married couple. They’d been found out and the marquis had then let quote/unquote justice run its course, refusing to intervene on their behalf and allowing them to die. He’d gone away on pilgrimage then, returning to marry the daughter of another German duke, so that, quote, “nothing can be looked for but another mischief greater than the first.”
Pedro went with the Byzantine emperor to see the pope, as one does, saying that they were in council for three or four hours discussing “certain differences of faith between the Greeks and the Latins,” a very lively topic with a lot of potential ground to cover. While there, he saw two messengers arrive with other business for the pope, “one from the Duke of Burgundy, craving licence to hear Mass after noon, and the other from the Duke of Germany, craving leave to hear Mass before midnight.” You get the picture of the pope enduring constant bother over such matters, though he surely had those around him who could address them themselves.
The pope in question was Eugene IV, and Pedro found him at rather an interesting moment. He’d been closing in on 50 when he’d become pope in 1431. By the point when Pedro reached him in Ferrera, he was busily setting up a rival ecumenical council to the one at Basel or else he had already done so, and this was something that the Council of Basel would not take easily, something that would see them declaring him a heretic and putting forward the antipope Felix V in response. Like I said, interesting times.
Pedro spent 20 days there in Ferrara, resting and preparing to journey onward, buying beasts for himself and his party. They were travelling on, spending three days in Parma, where he saw the Duke of Milan’s captain trooping through with 20,000 armed men, all on their way to assault Bologna and all very impressive to Pedro. “It was a most remarkable thing to see a body of men so finely armed and mounted,” he wrote, “and so well found in everything necessary for war, and, what was best of all, with such a discreet and able captain at their head.” Discrete captain aside, the city additionally boasted the best cherries he’d ever tasted.
He was in Milan itself next, “an immense city,” he said, “and one of the greatest in Christendom. Indeed, in the opinion of many,” he continued, “it is the greatest.” Pedro wrote of how much more interesting it was to see a city on a working day than on a holiday, how you got to see it going about its regular business that way when all of its workings were to be examined. It was a much grander sight than a city in its holidays, no matter the proud celebration and civic display those may involve. In particular with Milan, he picked out the streets and houses of the armourers as most remarkable, along with those of the spear makers, saddlers, and tailors, whose crafting of uniforms and materials for war he singled out. They all knew every lord and leader of armies in Italy, he said, and could provide them with anything they needed.
“I departed from Milan and set out for Germany,” Pedro wrote, “and as I came to no city worthy of mention I have nothing to relate.” A bit harsh, one thinks, until you find his explanation that, quote, “I found many places burned and destroyed, which had been laid waste by the great Italian commander, Facino Cane,” the man in question a condottiero or military/mercenary leader who had died some 25 years earlier.
Through the Alps he went, still then an imposing task. He wrote of peril in the passes due to August snow melts, of oxen that would lead the way, bearing the brunt of that danger, and of the firing of shot to preemptively bring down any snow that was ready to slide before it could come down and bury you. It was difficult, but this didn’t mean that they were camping out while in the mountains. Far from it, they were stopping at inns and small hamlets all along the way. At one point, they climbed to a hermitage that Pedro describes as lying almost in the sky, and the monks there talked of even higher peaks which they had, they claimed, never once seen for the mist that constantly shrouded them. Even if that does sound like a bit of an exaggeration, it is a nice little detail, adding a pleasing sense of the scale of those peaks.
After this break, we’ll rejoin our traveller on the other side of the mountains.
…
Pedro reached the city of Basel, where that ecumenical council was gathering. He reached the powerful river that carried boats with such rapidity that it made one giddy to behold, the waters that frequently swept in massive chunks of ice which battered buildings and bridges. He spoke of the city itself, as to which he found a great deal to admire.
“It [was] well walled and delightfully built,” its houses several stories tall with high chimneys and pleasant windows looking down onto the paved streets and abundant drinking troughs. Its people were handsome and wealthy, and it was fully supplied with all that the region produced, including “excellent wines and other beverages.”
Clearly, the city met with Pedro’s approval, but he was still quite quickly leaving it. He was visiting a certain cardinal who was staying nearby, close to some thermal baths and a monastery. He writes here that he’d been carrying an injury which had worsened with travel, very possibly that arrow wound in the foot from last time, and seeing his condition, the cardinal had arranged for Pedro to be treated by a noted physician. Between the medical care and the healing baths, he soon recuperated, and he seems to have made a friend in the process.
There were many others to be found there at the baths, a “great [crowd] of people, both sick persons and pilgrims who had come there under vows from afar.” The lady from Cologne fell under that second category.
Men and women both would bathe there together naked, and there would be games played and meals eaten in the water, an incredibly relaxing time all round. That lady from Cologne was there on a pilgrimage taken on behalf of her brother who had been made prisoner in Turkey, and she was there with her maids. Pedro writes of throwing silver coins in the water that those maids would dive under for and pick them up with their mouths. “One can,” quote, “well imagine what it was they held in the air when they put down their heads,” he says. And after that somewhat out of place observation, he comments on the great singing voices found in those parts, how even the common people sang like trained artists.
Travelling on with that unnamed lady of Cologne, their combined party went by boat, putting ashore at one point for the vessel to be lowered by ropes down a waterfall and then taken on. On, to six more days in Basel, on past people washing gold from the mud and sand of the river, and on to the city of Strasbourg, otherwise known in Latin then as Argentina, “as if to say the town of silver.” It was, he said, one of the most delightful cities in the Christian world, and, like Basel, skillfully built and lined with fine streets that were level and well paved. Their tour took them to Mainz, with its “comely inhabitants” and “very fine” churches,” to Koblenz, and it took them on toward Cologne.
The whole way, he wrote, on both sides of the river were “such stately towns, and so many castles, and so much beauty that a man [could] hardly dare to describe what he sees. Towns and castles [were] all crowded closely together and the towers [were] adorned with lofty crosses and gilded weather-vanes.”
And the whole way, he was in the company of that lady he had met at the healing baths near Basel. He was even staying in her house and being shown much honour for the eight days he was in the city, but after that his travelling companion dropped from the narrative without any further mention. Pedro was busy with comments on the fair held during his visit, how it brought goods from all over to that city, including, most pleasingly to him, the English horses of various kinds. Though he seems to have not made use of them, he also had some interesting things to say about the running of the area’s excellent inns.
Quote:
“It is customary for a number of gentlemen to bind themselves together to found an inn, each one putting down a sum of money, and receiving a share of the profits in proportion to his contribution. They then choose as host a man of parts and of noble birth, for they say that a good host befits good guests.
It happens not infrequently that a gentleman, desiring through age to retire from the world, comes to an innkeeper and bargains with him for the rest of his life. He has a room, a bed, two large and two small meals, and money for Mass, and having paid his due, he lives without care for the rest of his days. There are other matters of note in connection with the inns here,” Pedro concludes, “[but they] would take too long to relate, for, as I understand, there is much traffic in them and careful management, and the entertainment is excellent.”
I do wish he had found time to say a little more on the workings of those inns, but perhaps I will have to look for that elsewhere.
As Pedro travelled on, he was received by a succession of dukes, duchesses, and counts, mentioning his interactions with them only in passing. He had a little more than that to say of the Bastard of St Pol, to whom he ascribed every virtue, and to whom he brought greetings from a man who owed him a duel and who Pedro had seen departing for Jerusalem. It might have been better if the man had actually shown up to kill or dishonour his comrade before undertaking that pilgrimage, the Bastard wryly remarked.
At a town outside of Brussels, Pedro and a friendly knight found that there was simply no wine to be had with dinner at all. He suggested that they carry on to Bruges, where they were sure to find something to drink, an amusing anticipation of many a road trip movie set-up to come. But the knight had other ideas, for he knew a nearby abbess who would surely have wine a-plenty. An inquiry was sent by messenger, an invitation was received and gladly accepted, and dinner was saved.
In Bruges, it strikes me that while I’ve fairly often spoken of this region in passing, or the ships coming up from Spain or the trade in textiles, I’m not sure that we’ve actually visited—though maybe that’s just my increasingly terrible memory talking.
The city of Bruges, as Pedro found it, was a, quote, “large and very wealthy city, and one of the greatest markets of the world.” He sets it up in a kind of one-on-one rivalry for trading supremacy, Venice in the east, by this framing, and Bruges in the west. For his part, Pedro gave the nod to the latter, saying that though Venice was rich in trade, the only ones engaged in it there were its inhabitants, while Bruges might welcome in some 700 ships in a single day, or at least, he is good enough to admit, he had heard it said. “Goods [were] brought there from England,” he wrote, “[from] Germany, Brabant, Holland, Zeeland, Burgundy, Picardy, and the greater part of France, and it appears to be the port for all these countries, and the market to which they bring their goods in order to sell them to others, as if they had plenty at home.”
Bruges was wealthy and industrious, perhaps, he theorized, because of its baron soil. Its cloth, wool, and carpets poured forth into the world, along with many other necessities. Its people, and those of the region, were, he said, “exceedingly fastidious in their apparel, very extravagant in their food, and much given to all kinds of luxury.” He wrote of how “the goddess of luxury [had] great power there, but it [was] not a place for [the poor], who would be badly received.” For those who did have the money though, anything might be had.
It was a place where a merchant arriving from abroad could find facilities in which to sleep, eat, keep their goods, stable their horses, and safeguard or change their money, much like at the caravanserais we’ve encountered elsewhere. If applicable, they might stay at or near the consul-managed national halls and attached quarters, of which there were 16 by the end of the medieval period. It was a place where Pedro saw, quote, “oranges and lemons from Castile, which seemed only just to have been gathered from the trees, [and] fruits and wine from Greece, as abundant as in that country. [He] saw also confections and spices from Alexandria, and all the Levant, just as if one were there; [and] furs from the Black Sea, as if they had been produced in the district. Here was all Italy with its brocades, silks and armour, and everything which is made there; and, indeed,” he concluded, “there is no part of the world whose products are not found here at their best.” It was also a place from which the Duke of Burgundy had recently needed to flee for his life, losing a lord and loyal supporter to the angry rebelling citizenry.
In Sluys, it was the many ships of many nations that Pedro noted, the way you could see German sloops, Italian galleys, and all manner of whalers, barques, caracks, and other vessels. It looked as though half the world had taken arms and arrived to invade that harbour, but Pedro praised the way business was carried out in peace and varied people would eat at a common table without conflict.
In the northern French town of Arras, it was again textiles that dominated his observations, the woven cloths and tapestries that made it rich, but on his intended route through Normandy and on to see Paris, there was plague, its severity driving him back to Flanders. As you might remember, he’d made arrangements to have money with bankers there, but he wouldn’t be able to withdraw it in Bruges, for he returned to find that they’d already left for the fair at Antwerp.
Ghent impressed him, it’s fair to say, for he would write that it was, quote, “one of the greatest cities in the Christian world,” a set of superlatives he may have said before. But if Ghent impressed him, then the market at Antwerp was something else entirely.
As he’d already noted of other locations in the region, he was struck by the city’s international character, the way he saw Germans, English, and French; Italians from Venice, Genoa, and Florence; Hungarians, Prussians, and Spaniards, who were as or more numerous there than anywhere else. It was, to his thinking, the greatest fair in the world, “and anyone desiring to see all Christendom, or the greater part of it, assembled in one place [could] do so [there].”
“Here,” he wrote, “[were] riches and the best entertainment.” While pictures, cloth, and gold work were sold in the churches and monasteries, other goods went in the street or in the great stables at the gates of the city. “There [was] nothing which one could desire which [was] not found [there] in abundance,” concluded Pedro, and “I do not know how to describe so great a fair as this. I have seen other fairs, at Geneva in Savoy, at Frankfurt in Germany, and at Medina in Castile, but all these together are not to be compared with Antwerp.”
So what was it about this region that had produced such successful trade fairs? It was, as we’ve seen just in Pedro’s observations of his time, the cloth, the textile industry which had long driven growth and developments in trade and finance there. It’s a topic that Janet L. Abu-Lughod writes about in her excellent Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350.
The region boasted, quote, “a terrain and soil favourable to sheep raising, an ancient tradition of craftsmanship [with their cloth] known in Roman times, a propitious location at the edge between continent and sea, and most importantly, a high population density that ‘forced’ residents to supplement agriculture with other production.”
Their merchants were buying wool in London and selling cloth for English and Irish markets in the 10th century. Their cities were becoming specialized centres of textile production by the 11th, with increasing productivity linked to new looms. Their cloth was carried east to Novgorod over the Baltic, south into France, or out to Cologne and other German towns. By the early 12th century, their merchants were trading with Italians at the fairs of northern France and linking with the wider markets that those Italian traders had access to. By the late 13th, multiple factors including political ones and the development of new Italian galleys brought those same Italian merchants directly to places such as Bruges, helping to make it the city that Pedro had found. But changes were coming to that city, had come already actually, at the time of his visit.
The entrance to its harbour had silted up, necessitating the opening of others, first nearby and then more distant, and then the transfer of port function for larger ships to Antwerp. The access to fine English wool had dropped off with the interruptions of intermittent conflict and development of England’s own textile industry, and the quality of the product had dropped with it as replacements were sought. The centrality of the city to world trade systems had meant it was hit hard by the rounds of Black Death through the 14th century and on into the 15th, one of those recurrences the one that had forced Pedro to reconsider his trip to Paris. And that centrality would not persist indefinitely. The business of the city was increasingly Italianized and, as is often the case of the multinational corporations of today, they eventually took their capital elsewhere, moving on to sunnier prospects and the promise of higher profits.
Our story will also be moving on, though you shall have to wait until next time to ascertain whether the prospects are actually any sunnier or the profits any higher. Until that time, thank you for listening, and I’ll talk to you then.