Jerusalem as seen in Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, 1283
The journey of our 15th-century Castilian traveller continues, as Pedro Tafur leaves Venice and makes his way to Jerusalem, where there will be no shortage of things for him to see and do.
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Sources:
Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Antrim, Zayde. “Jerusalem in the Ayyubid and Mamluk Periods.” Routledge Handbook on Jerusalem, edited by Suleiman Mourad, Bedross Der Matossian, and Naomi Koltun-Fromm, 102-109. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Dalrymple, William. In Xanadu: A Quest. HarperCollins, 1990.
Little, Donald P. “Mujīr Al-Dīn al-ʿUlaymī’s Vision of Jerusalem in the Ninth/Fifteenth Century.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 115, no. 2 (1995): 237–47.
Norwich, John Julius. A History of Venice. Penguin, 2003.
Script:
Last time out, we began on our journey in the company of Pedro Tafur, a seemingly very comfortable fellow from the Castile region of Spain, a nobleman, with the ease and connections which went with that status.
Last time, after all that initial unpleasantness around Gibraltar, a kind of violent false start to the whole effort, we witnessed Pedro having what was ultimately a pretty leisurely time of it. There were mentions of exhaustion, of needing a little rest from the road, or the sea, as will happen when you travel, and there was that horrible storm that beset him, entirely separating his vessel from the other two that had, up to that point, accompanied it. There was also unrest along the way, but it never really spilled over to engulf the gentlemanly Pedro himself.
Mostly, we saw him skipping along the coasts of Morocco, Spain, and Italy, with a little extra Italian time ladled on to enjoy while he waited for the opportunity to depart from Venice by boat and to make his way to the holy land.
That’s where we’ll be making our way today, to a region alive with the religious past, riddled with holy sites, stories, and relics. Right here is where this particular miracle took place, you’ll hear of one such location, there is where that one occurred. There was just so much that had happened, such a rich density of biblical events, saints, and sacred places, that the itinerary begins to look extraordinarily busy, that if you were planning it out for yourself you might think about pumping the breaks just a little and pencilling in a few more blank spots on the schedule. A day here or there with nothing planned.
You don’t get much of a sense of Pedro’s response to all of this—one rarely does in this kind of text—but you do get an idea of his total submersion in this experience, full-day religious itineraries punctuated by the occasional practicality, the costs of entry or related service, and the odd bit of danger too. It won’t all be pastries by the beach, is what I’m saying. There is, I guess I should clarify, a real dearth of any mention of pastries at all, but I hope you’ll enjoy it nonetheless.
Hello, and welcome to Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that follows in the footsteps of those who travelled through that world, and a podcast that is supported by a Patreon, one where you can sustain this castle’s somewhat shaky foundations and enjoy early, extra, and ad-free listening as you do so. You can do that for as little as a dollar a month, or as much as makes sense for you, you can do that at patreon.com/humancircus, and you can do that right now if you so choose.
And now that you may or may not have done that, let’s get back to the story, the story of Pedro Tafur.
When last we saw Pedro, he was in the city Venice. He would set sail from that city in May, “the month when the ships, especially the pilgrims' galleys, ha[d] leave to depart,” and he would depart on Ascension Day, the celebration of Christ’s post-resurrection ascent to heaven.
Pedro had been prepared beforehand. He’d had the time, as you might remember, and even after that leisurely visit to Rome he had 30 days or so in the home of his friend Carlo Morosini, a merchant who had been in Seville and who Pedro had befriended in the house of a Master Don Luis. It was a period which passed “very pleasantly and restfully” in what sounds like a very vibrant place and a strikingly international city, one that was thriving in the midst of what has been called the Golden Age of the Venetian Republic, increasing in affluence as many of its old enemies stumbled and the members of their ruling families fell.
“As her prestige grew, so too did her splendour,” wrote historian John Julius Norwich. “By 1400 … Venice was … generally acclaimed to be the most dazzlingly beautiful city in the world. The Piazza and Piazzetta were both brick-paved—few other squares in Europe could make such a boast—and had become a meeting-place for travellers from three continents. The Basilica of St Mark … was on the point of receiving its finishing touch, that ‘Gothic Crown’ of marble pinnacles… ."
“The Doge’s Palace as we know it today,” Norwich continued, “is, beyond all doubt, the greatest Secular Gothic building in the world; and it is hardly surprising that it should have provided new impetus and inspiration for Gothic palazzi all over the city. …for the next seventy years the momentum would increase, giving rise to that glorious tradition of Gothic opulence … by which Venetian palace architecture is best loved and remembered.”
Into these scenes of splendour, undoubted splendour, no matter what we might make of the claim that this was the most beautiful city in the world, stepped our Pedro.
“[E]ach day I went about seeing many remarkable and delightful things,” wrote Pedro. “Every hour there came news from all countries of the world, for the sea-borne traffic is very great, and ships are continually arriving from all parts, and if one desires to have news of any place it is only necessary to enquire of the ships.”
It was that kind of place, one where you might encounter anyone, within the limits of that time and place, where you might ask to hear tidings of anywhere, again within said limits.
That month Pedro spent there in Venice gave him plenty of time in which to make arrangements for his departure. For himself and his two squires, it was to be 35 ducats to the galley master each for their return journey and provisions, a supply of preserves for morning, afternoon, and evening. But Pedro intended to stay in Jerusalem for a while, so he opted for one-way tickets, costing 20 a person.
Pedro’s passage can be traced along what is now the Croatian coast with stops at Venetian holdings along the way, ones that Venice had been driven from in the mid-14th century but then regained early in the 15th, those lands returned to their grasp first by purchase and then solidified in battle. They stopped in at Zara, or Zadar, a place this podcast has visited in the past when it fell to the Fourth Crusade, the conquest of the city forming an extremely contentious part of the deal to pay Venice for transport. Pedro described the countryside as “mountainous and bare,” its people, the tallest that he had ever seen, and “what a barbarous people they are!” he remarked, offering no further explanation. It was a land of silver, he said, and of some of the world’s best falcons.
Their way took them to the island of Corfu, known to the Venetians as the gate to their city and the end of the Gulf of Venice, Pedro said, though that now refers to a much smaller area at the north of the Adriatic. After two days of waiting on favourable winds, their journey took them past the Gulf of Patras and the way to ancient Corinth, a place of “magnificent buildings,” he wrote, but “much depopulated.” It took them all the way to the southwest of the Peloponnese peninsula, to an island monastery and to what is now the village of Methoni. The area was alive with Venetian trade, much it bound for or from the Black Sea, and as Pedro carried on, it was also alive with Homeric memory, of Cythera, where Paris had seized Helen, and of Crete, once ruled by King Agamemnon, who had then led the Greeks against Troy.
On Crete, they visited Candia, the Italianized name by which the Venetians knew the city of Heraklion. Venice had bought the whole island from Boniface of Montferrat, back when the Byzantine Empire was being divvied up among the invading Latin Christians. That had been in 1204, and since then, the local inhabitants had not always been happy with their lot as Venetian subjects. They had revolted with some frequency in fact, and the most recent occurrence was noted by Pedro as having been punished with a rule that on part of the island no seed could be sown or cattle grazed.
That aside, the island was “very fertile,” Pedro noted, “and well supplied with excellent towns and fortresses.” The city of Candia itself was large and well constructed, with great buildings, abundant water, and beautiful gardens. They spent three days there, but though the labyrinth built by Daedalus was said to be only three miles away, Pedro did not attempt a visit. I guess it is always difficult to fit in absolutely everything you want to do when you’re travelling.
Rhodes was next, and there was the threat of danger there in the harbour from ships belonging to the King of Aragon, but those aboard Pedro’s ship displayed their pennants for Jerusalem, indicating their participation in pilgrimage. They also displayed their weapons, and whichever of those was the most effective deterrent, they were soon left alone to take in the island.
In Pedro’s writing, it didn’t sound like much, a dull “Flat but fortified” not really comparing in characterization to the pleasantness of many his other stops, but the island was notable for the presence of the hospital of the Knights Hospitallers, and that, Pedro said, was “one of the most magnificent houses of piety which [he had] ever seen, and, indeed, in the matter of building and embellishments and supplies it could not be improved.”
Through Rhodes, with its hospital and hostels, flowed many like Pedro and the rest aboard his ship, bound for the holy land, or else returning from it, the different nationalities all having their own places to gather and to eat. Rhodes was also notable for its relics: the basin in which Christ had washed his hands, a large share of the 30 pieces for which he’d been sold, some of the thorns from his crown, and a nail from his cross though none of the wooden fragments that often complete such a list. All these, Pedro says, he had heard were there in the church of St. John, but he had not seen them.
Along the Turkish coast they went, past the lands of various powerful Turkish lords who he alluded to in passing. They saw a city which had, he was told, “been destroyed for the crime of sodomy,” and another, on the island of Cyprus, which he said was “now uninhabited by reason of bad air and water.”
Finally, they made their way to Jaffa, now located within the city of Tel Aviv and the port at which people would then disembark for Jerusalem. Pedro was of course not alone in doing so, and the whole process of pilgrimage was by this point very well established and provided for, the procedures ironed out and agreed upon, the infrastructure for this sort of traveller solidly in place and awaiting his appearance.
Their arrival was immediately noted and word sent on to the Cairo-appointed governor of Jerusalem to secure safe passage. The pilgrims were brought ashore and their names carefully recorded on two lists, one of which was also dispatched to that governor. Donkeys were provided to them for a fixed rate which could not be raised or lowered from two ducats, and the travellers were quickly brought to a hostel that had been founded by Duke Godfrey of Bouillon, a leader of the First Crusade and first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, but only very briefly, just for a under year as the 11th century turned to 12th.
They travelled the next morning to Lydda, or Lod, where St George was martyred and where, by some traditions, he slew the dragon, but they didn’t remain there, instead covering further ground to spend the night near a castle and bring themselves close to their goal. Starting early in the morning, they reached Jerusalem.
The city was in its Mamluk period then, an era for which its leading chronicler was a Muslim qadi named Mujir al-Din, not yet alive at the time Pedro visited. He would be born about 20 years later, in 1456, and write his history of his city and Hebron around 1495, a troubled period for the city, with even more problems ahead on the horizon. “It was a difficult [time],” he would write, “with much strife and many wars and dissension between the military and the judiciary throughout the kingdom of Islam… .” There’d been plague years and ones of drought. There’d been years of rain torrential enough to destroy many buildings and unprecedented quantities of snow. There’d been swarms of locusts, a plague actually, and soldiers had been sent against the looming Ottoman threat, but at the time of Pedro’s visit that was all still comfortably distant in Mamluk Jerusalem’s future.
As for the city as Pedro might have found it, Mujir al-Din, even in his time of troubles, wrote of it with loving admiration:
“Jerusalem in our time is a great city, of solid construction, between mountains and valleys. Part of the city is built on high ground and part in a low valley, and most of the buildings located in the high places overlook those in the low. Some of the streets of the city are smooth, others, rugged. In most places foundations of ancient buildings are found, over which new structures have been erected. Construction is so dense that if it were spaced in the same way as in most of the cities of the kingdom of Islam its size would be twice as large as it is now. It has many wells prepared for storing water collected from the rain.”
Mujir al-Din wrote of a city of cut white stone compared to which “there [was] no place more solid in construction or more beautiful” in all of the Mamluks’ expansive domain. He wrote that, quote:
“Viewed from afar, it is a marvel renowned for its luminosity, as seen from the east by a person standing on the Mount of Olives. If God allows an aspiring visitor to reach the noble Masjid al- Aqsa and the noble tomb of Abraham, from the moment he sees these ennobled places he will receive so much delight and joy as can scarcely be described, and he will be relieved of hardship and fatigue.”
Pedro would have had other “ennobled places” in mind for his own visit, but I think that Mujir al-Din’s words might otherwise have accorded very well with his feelings on visiting the qadi’s city.
After this short break, we’ll go there with him.
…
As it had been in Jaffa, in Jerusalem too all was ready for the pilgrims’ arrival. The travellers were greeted by Christians of various sorts, both Greeks and others, Pedro says. They were taken to the square before the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where they prayed. They were fed with, quote, “an abundance of food cooked in various ways, which the Greeks [made] ready and [sold] to the Christians,” maybe just a factor in translation but an interesting and abrupt move from Greeks among the Christians to Greeks removed from them as a distinct and separate category.
A pair of friars was assigned to the group, to show them the sights and to see them comfortably lodged in a Mount Zion monastery. There, Pedro said, Jesus had appeared to his disciples as tongues of fire at Pentecost, as in the book of Acts of the Apostles. There, he said, doubting Thomas had placed his hand in Jesus’s side. And from there, he said you could see the Dead Sea, the Sea of Sodom and Gomorrah, as he calls it. They spent the night there, surrounded with other acts of biblical significance: the place where Mary had lived, the one where Jesus had eaten his last supper, and so on.
The next morning, they heard mass at the Holy Sepulchre. The pilgrims’ names were checked against that list which had been taken in Jaffa, and Pedro saw a procession of seven kinds of Christians, naming them in his writing “the [Franciscans], the Greeks, the Jacobite Christians, the Armenians, those of Cinturia, India and the Copts.”
That list and its setting cannot help but remind me of the opening scene in William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu in which he experiences something of the same multiplicity of Christianities at the Holy Sepulchre, as Armenians clash with Greeks and Greeks clash with the Franciscans, as painting scaffolding stands unused for years because nobody can agree on the colour, or anything else for that matter. No one seems to be talking with anyone, as far as Dalrymple can tell, to which his guide replies “I think the Copts are still speaking to the Maronites. But apart from that, no.” Dalrymple’s visit was quite a bit after that of our Pedro, more than 500 years after, and in the limited view Pedro gives us there are no signs of this kind of discord.
Pedro’s account of his time in and around Jerusalem moves between two aspects of his stay: the strictly practical elements of their presence there on the one hand and on the other those of religious significance, with a great emphasis on the latter. Each pilgrim paid seven ducats, he says at this point, and along with that earlier two for the donkeys and various other costs, he reckoned the total cost thus far at 12.5 ducats.There is mention of the Greeks providing them with dinner, and of some money in exchange for which they were fed very well. There is mention of this or that holy place requiring some small coin to enter, to the Franciscans, for example, the guardians of the underground vault holding Mary’s sepulchre, to whoever was taking fees at the place where Lazarus had been raised from the dead. There were just so many such sights to take in.
Pedro spiels off a dizzying series of local highlights, giving one an impression of just the sheer busyness of this pilgrimage, the days seemingly crammed with constant movement and an absolute barrage of locations steeped in religious meaning for a Christian like himself.
There was Mount Calvary, where Jesus was crucified, with a richly ornamented chapel atop a great rock and a hole where his cross was placed, along with those of the two thieves who had been crucified alongside him.
“Afterwards,” Pedro wrote, “we saw the place where St. Helena found the Cross, as well as the spot which Our Lord indicated as the centre of the world. Adjoining is the dwelling of the friars, where the relics are kept, and where Our Lord appeared to St. Mary Magdalene as a gardener. At the entrance is a great hall hung with pennons and flags of many kings and Christian princes, and here the knights set up their arms. All these things and many more are to be seen on the way in from this cemetery, and all the holy relics are there, and each one of the aforesaid Christians has a separate chapel.”
There was the place where Jesus was taken in the garden, the one where he fasted, where he ascended, the church that held a stone with an imprint of his foot. There was the place where St Stephen had been stoned and the tree where Judas had hung. There was the way to Bethlehem, with sites that were pointed out along the way: the chapel that stood where the star had appeared to the three kings, and a league on from that, the home of the prophet Elijah. There was Bethlehem itself, a small town at this point, Pedro reports, with only 50 inhabitants, but not lacking in sights to see. “In this place,” he summarized, “there are many holy things.”
They were one day in that place of many holy things, and then they were back to Jerusalem on the next, to the house of St Anna and the houses of St James the lesser and that of the apostle of the same name. The fountain that Mary had caused to spring up. The grave of Absalom, son of David, where certain would-be treasure hunters had cried out and then died. The castle of King David. Pedro mentions more holy sites and then concludes by adding, quote, “and many other holy places.”
Among all of this holy bustle, there was little room in Pedro’s account for the kinds of observations he made elsewhere, but a few did slip in. There were, for example, the trees he saw throughout a certain valley. They bore fruit which looked like citrons, but when touched, however lightly, those fruits emitted smoke that left “an evil smell” on the hand for the rest of the day. I’m curious but uncertain as to what fruit this might be referring to.
There was also the Dead Sea, a bit of a highlight for me when I was in the region many moons ago, but not so much for Pedro, for whom it was associated with Sodom and Gomorrah, and, quote, “three other cities, … which were overthrown for the sin of sodomy. The water is so foul that it cannot be described,” he wrote, “and they say that no fish can breed there and that no birds frequent the place,” which I suppose was a fair impression if you weren’t going to enjoy bobbing about in it for a bit yourself.
Elsewhere, the pilgrims would submerge themselves in the water, but it would be in the River Jordan where a stone cross marked the place where John the Baptist had received that baptism. There, Pedro says, “we all bathed, and a German gentleman belonging to our party perished by drowning. This,” he continues, somewhat jarringly given the drowning that had immediately preceded it, “is a place of the greatest sanity.”
At Mount Quruntul overlooking Jericho, the pilgrims slept and then climbed, but a, quote, “squire of France, going to the assistance of a lady, fell headlong from the mountain and was dashed in pieces on the rocks below, for the place is very perilous to climb.” The party descended after that, and chose an easier path to the summit where Jesus was tempted. I’m sure that unfortunate French squire, who they buried the next morning, would have preferred that they’d opted for the easier route a little earlier. There would, as I said at the outset, be such moments of danger on this excursion, no matter how leisurely it has often seemed.
There was the time when Pedro found a quote “renegade [from] Portugal,” a convert to Islam in other words, and one willing to turn over his clothes and identity for two ducats so that Pedro could enter the quote/unquote “Temple of Solomon,” in fact The Dome of the Rock. It was “a single nave, the whole ornamented with gold mosaic work. The floor and walls are of the most beautiful white cones,” observed Pedro, “and the place is hung with so many lamps that they all seemed to be joined together. The roof above is quite flat and is covered with lead. They say, in truth, that when Solomon built it, it was the most magnificent building in the whole world. Afterwards it was destroyed and rebuilt, but to-day,” he concluded, “without doubt, it is still unmatched.”
Pedro would have been killed if discovered, he wrote. Malcolm Letts, writer of the text's introduction, called the act “an extremely foolish proceeding which might well have cost him his life,” and when Pedro returned to the palace where he was staying that night, he found the friars already in mourning, for he was running late and they feared the worst.
There was also, on this note of danger, the trip that was then taken to the church where Lazarus had returned from the dead, a return on the part of Pedro’s to that church or else just a second mention to expand on the details. There were indeed people taking payment there, Pedro says, “Moors” as he put it, and taking was not quite the right word. They were demanding tribute, and the quote/unquote “Moors” that the governor had sent along to assist the pilgrims refused to pay it, saying that this particular fee was not customary at all.
The whole thing quickly became quite heated, with the governor’s officer being wounded and the two sides clashing in arms. By the end Pedro and the others had bundled the offending parties off to the governor, and those who’d sought to enrich themselves there at the church were whipped and their leader beheaded. Such cash transactions seem to have been common at the holy sites, but clearly there was an order to these things and you couldn’t just set up shop and charge what you would.
As Letts humorously notes:
“These events cannot be said to have damped the ardour of the pilgrims, or even to have affected their spirits. A dead squire, a decapitated soldier, or a drowned German gentleman were matters for comment possibly, but not for concern. Tafur relates the circumstances with complete detachment, and then placidly resumes his sightseeing.”
As for the governor’s knight, he had clearly not been too injured—he continued in his role in regards to Pedro and the other pilgrims, taking them to Mount Tabor and to the valley of Hebron, home to the graves of Adam and Eve.
And as for Pedro, resuming that sightseeing, his exhaustive exploration of the area’s holy sites was coming to a conclusion, but not because he was actually done. He still wanted to see Mount Sinai, but he was told that this opportunity had just passed him by, or departed, in the form of an escort with camels which had taken a Turkish ambassador to the Sultan in Cairo. Presumably this was the same escort with camels that would have taken one such Pedro to Mount Sinai.
Casting about for solutions, Pedro was told that the best way to get to Mount Sinai now was to first get quite a bit further away, to leave for Cyprus and talk to the cardinal there. He, Pedro was told, would be able to arrange everything for him, so that’s where Pedro went, in Rama the next night and reaching the galleys at Jaffa the day after that. His journey would take him up the coast and then to Cyprus. It would see him take on the unexpected role of ambassador and make his way to Egypt, and next time here on the podcast, we’ll follow him on that journey.
Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you then.