Florence in a 1493 woodcut from the Nuremberg Chronicle
Pedro Tafur, a 15th-century Castilian, makes his way around Spain and Italy with lengthy stops in Genoa, Venice, and Rome, and generally has a pretty pleasant holiday.
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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. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Verità, Marco, Laura Speranza, Simone Porcinai, and Daniele Angellotto. “The Sacro Catino in Genoa: Analytical and Technological Investigations of a Unique Glass Vessel.” Journal of Glass Studies 60 (2018): 115–28.
Script:
With spring now solidly here and starting to tip its way toward summer, some of you will be starting to think of holidays abroad, a little vacation perhaps, maybe even not so little. Possibly, a Mediterranean one. Maybe you, like me, will not actually be making that trip in person yourself, but today we make one together, our own Mediterranean holiday, following in the steps of a 15th-century guide.
Our journey will seem comparatively leisurely at times when taken alongside some of the hardships we’ve encountered—we’re not going to be shivering in the stone cracking cold of the steppe or suffering under the desert sun. Our protagonist will at times face adventure, difficulty, risk of death—though not so much here in the first episode—but at others his experience is every bit that of the privileged man of a noble house which he was, aiming for a pilgrimage but certainly enjoying the tour beforehand.
He was, it must be said, an enthusiastic tourist, and I suppose he had the advantage of cultural familiarity over many of the travellers we have covered. At least in this first episode, he’s very comfortable in making his way along the Spanish coast and about the cities of Italy, generally very pleased with what he saw. We’ll see if he keeps that same enthusiasm as his story takes us a little more outside of that comfort zone of his.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that follows that explores that world through the stories of those who travelled through it, with the occasional pause for some other period-appropriate topic. And it is a podcast that is supported by a Patreon, at patreon.com/humancircus, where you’ll find extra, early, and ad-free listening, and for as little as a dollar a month can help the podcast, and myself, thrive in days to come. Today, I would like to especially thank listener and Patreon supporter, Kristoffer Lövgren, for doing so. Thank you very much.
That said, let’s get back to the story. This time out, it’s a return to travel after a few episodes in a row that looked elsewhere. This time, that traveller is Pedro Tafur.
Pedro Tafur was born in Córdoba, Spain around the year 1410. His Córdoba then, was that of the Kingdom of Castile, that of Juan II, King of Castile and Leon. The city was nearly two centuries removed from Muslim rule, but that was not true of all of Spain. The Emirate of Granada was still going strong, and its final Nasrid ruler would only surrender toward the end of that 15th century. The story Pedro told would begin in 1435. For Malcolm Letts, writer of the introduction to the text I’m reading, that placed Pedro in a pretty dark time.
I should say here that sometimes I do end up reading quite old translations of these texts. Sometimes there simply aren’t newer ones around, or they’re not accessible to me. In this case, what I’m reading was digitized from The Broadway Travellers series and published in 1926, and you get a good dose of the flavour of that time, of that perspective on the medieval period, in Lett’s introduction.
“When [Pedro] was abroad,” wrote Lett, “the art of printing was still unknown. The New World was undiscovered, and scarcely a hint of the new learning was to be observed even in Italy. It was an age of disorder and darkness, of warfare and private feuds, of poverty of mind and expression which it is not now easy to realize. It is doubtful if any thought of change was in men's minds, although the world was changing steadily before their eyes.”
I am not so certain as Lett that the people of the 15th century were somehow incapable of conceiving of change, that they were beset by this horrific “poverty of mind and expression” of which he speaks, or that it was wise to speak of other eras as ages of warfare when your own was just a handful of years removed from WWI. It is, however, an evocative way to start things, and it does remind us that yes, this was a time divided from that of our last traveller, the Portuguese Fernao Pinto who lived in a solidly post-Columbus world. When Pedro went abroad, he was not thinking of voyaging to India, Malaysia, or China, did not have thoughts of turning instead toward Brazil. It was strictly the Mediterranean for him, broadly speaking, along with central and western Europe.
Pedro begins the record of his travels with departure from Sanlúcar de Barrameda in the southwest of Spain, a city that was not yet, at that time, a port of great importance for the departure to the Americas, that had not yet seen the coming and going of Columbus or Magellan. Pedro left that port having recently recovered from illness, his destination Gibraltar, and immediately the action began. These things, as I sometimes note—or, at least I think I have—are not paced out like novels.
He was joining the Count of Niebla there, and at this time, it would have been the second Count of Niebla, Enrique Pérez de Guzmán, to whom I believe Pedro was related, and what this count was up to, there with his reported 1200 horsemen and 5000 on foot, was an assault on Gibraltar, for he had been informed that there were only 10 Muslims defending its fortified walls, that it would be easy pickings.
Pedro described Gibraltar, as he knew it, this way:
“Gibraltar is a very strong fortress and famous all the world over,” he said. "It stands at the mouth of the Straits where the Atlantic Ocean joins the Mediterranean Sea, and it is a very fruitful place. The town commands the entrance to the mainland which is very narrow, and it is about a league from there to the top of the rock. It is very well walled, with orchards, vines and excellent water, and it lies very low on the edge of the sea. Behind it stands the rock which is so high that it seems to reach to the clouds. It rises straight up, and although it looks formidable from the west, it is seen to greater advantage from the east.”
The Gibraltar that the count proposed to take had been held by Muslim rulers for more than 700 years, with just a couple of decades of Castilian occupation there in the early 14th century, and it had been through some things. This assault, this event in which Pedro was about to participate, would become known as the “Seventh Siege of Gibraltar,” giving one some idea of just how much it had been through.
Interestingly, that previous Castilian occupation had come when the count’s ancestor had captured Gibraltar, something which surely motivated him to try and match the achievement now, about 130 years later. But this time the planning and preparation seem to have been inadequate, the execution disastrous.
It began after mass with the different groups going to their stations, for it was to be a multi-pronged affair. The count, who Pedro seems to have been with, landed at low tide and approached the wall, but immediately, 15-20 of them were killed, making it highly unlikely that only 10 men were responsible, and it only got worse. They had not, Pedro noted, brought the artillery along with them, so there was little they could possibly do about the wall. Nor, it seems, did they pay sufficient attention to the rising waters, for in that they were soon submerged up to their knees.
The count gave the orders for retreat, but it was not an ordered maneuver. He was there on the shore, rounding everybody up and was still there on shore when all the other boats left, leaving only 10-12 knights and the very last vessel to take them away. This itself would not have been so very bad were it not for the fact that nobody on the retreating boats had thought, or been told, to provide them with covering shot, encouraging the defenders to come rushing forth on the offensive.
Other tellings of the unfortunate assault have ships depositing men ashore and then abandoning them to slaughter by the defenders’ projectiles. They have the count taking his ship in to attempt a rescue. In either case, his was the last ship in to shore, and in either case, it all ended the same, with his ship being capsized and those aboard drowning, including the count himself, whose body would be recovered by those he’d sought to conquer and hung from their walls on display. Gibraltar was going to last a while still, before finally falling to the “Eight Siege of Gibraltar” in 1462, an effort that would involve the count’s son, Juan Alonso de Guzmán.
As for Pedro, his first venture out from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, or at least his first recorded in this text, had not ended well. He returned to gather some things, to be received, as he put it, with “less lightness of heart than at [his] departure,” and then to put himself aboard a carrack, one of three that had come from Genoa. This time, he would be stretching his legs a little further than Gibraltar.
The ships made their way, via Cadiz, to the Barbary Coast, as he knew it, to coastal Morocco and to Asilah, where King Sebastien of Portugal would stop in the next century, on his way to defeat and death at “the Battle of Three Kings,” on his way to entering legend as a “hidden” or “sleeping” hero-type, one day to wake in Portugal’s hour of need. His story, and that of that battle, showed up in the very early days of the podcast.
After three days, the ships entered the Strait of Gibraltar, but they were put off by the appearance of two large vessels, taking them for Catalans, and they put in off Ceuta, waiting for the menace to pass in that place which is still, rather oddly, a Spanish holding there on the Moroccan coast. Pedro, for his part, found it to be an excellent location, with productive soil, rugged mountainous country, a good harbour, much land, and abundant fruit and water, along, in the nearby mountains, with lions, “porcupines, apes, panthers, bears, and pigs without number.”
Exiting the strait, they made their next stop at Málaga where the ships’ merchants went ashore to unload their cargoes and take on others, where carracks took on merchandise bound for Cadiz and then Flanders, there to likely be buying Flemish woolens, likely bringing spices and silks, high value stones or worked metal, and items needed for the textile trade such as dying products and the alum that would help the colours stick. There was a scarcity of bread in Málaga, Pedro said, but no lack of flowers and fruit. He was impressed, but, as he had said of Ceuta and would say again, quote, “if it belonged to us it would be better,” for Málaga then fell within the Emirate of Granada.
Pedro, it must be said, seems generally to have been impressed with the towns and cities of the region, to have found them each to offer something pleasing, which is fair. Cartagena was next, and it too was excellent with, in his judgement, one of the world’s finest harbours. I’m no judge of harbours, but it does look very nice in the photos.
The Genoese ships went as far along the coast as Valencia and then turned toward open water, passing Ibiza, Mallorca, and Minorca. Violent storms swept two of the ships away bare-masted, but Pedro’s made it through to Nice where they paused to repair the sails. It was Christmas Eve, and Savona was coming next, another “pleasant city,” and after that, Genoa, with the coast between the two the “most beautiful sight in the world,” according to Pedro.
The ship arrived in a most pleasant and excellent harbour, just the one ship, for the fate of the others was still unknown. Those aboard went first to a church, fulfilling a vow they had made when in the heart of that storm before they did anything else in the city. Pedro would spend 15 days there in Genoa, a much needed rest for someone who was, as he put it, “overcome with fatigue, and unhappy, and sea-sick, and quite out of conceit with [him]self.” And he had quite a bit to say of the city in which he rested, as well as its people.
It was ancient, and was said to have been founded by a Trojan prince fleeing from the destruction of his city, a pretty common origin story. The city seemed, Pedro said, very much the work of one who had suffered defeat and the loss of their home, for it sat securely on its mountain over the sea, its houses were like towers of four to five stories or more, and its streets were narrow and difficult to access, easy to defend.
The city was richly supplied, and you’d think its soil fruitful and seas teeming with large fish, but its resources were in its people, who worked industriously at home and on their ships. They travelled the world, in the sense of that time and place, importing large amounts of provisions and possessing holdings which included a Cypriot city, Greek islands, Pera opposite from Constantinople, Kaffa on the Black Sea, and fortresses on the Azov. They were without vice, he said, taxing those who dressed more richly than necessary and taking a rather harsh approach to adultery. That, Pedro wrote, combined with their strong morals, allowed for the city of seafarers to function as it did, not fearing what long separation would do to their homes and families.
One item that really stands out for me here in Pedro’s account is the fact that the church of San Lorenzo contained not just your average relic, a saintly finger or two, but the holy grail. All those questing stories from Arthur through to Indiana Jones, and there it was, safely ensconced in a Genoese church. It was made of a single emerald, he wrote, and was indeed marvelous.
It’s something that I was unfamiliar with, but it’s certainly not unique to Pedro’s writing. The object in question is what’s known as the Sacro Catino, the “sacred basin,” and it is green, though made of molded green glass, not as was once thought, emerald. It was indeed long kept in that church in Genoa after having been looted from Caesarea in 1101 and brought back by a returning crusader. It was taken from the city by Napoleon and returned broken, but it can now be seen in its restored form there at Genoa’s Treasure Museum of St. Lorenzo Cathedral.
As for its origins, Napoleon’s scholars had it as Byzantine glass, manufactured in the Eastern Roman Empire. Others have since argued for Syria or Alexandria in the first century, for Fatimid Egyptian glass, or for something from the 9th or 10th century. The item has undergone chemical analysis, the specifics of which, I must admit, do not mean a great deal to me but do point, along with manufacturing and colouring technique, to a very broad area of origin: Mesopotamia, at some time in the Parthian, Sassanian, or early Islamic periods, a range of a good millennium. Even with the colouring technique apparently suggesting that it’s probably not from the Islamic period, that still gives you something between 250ish BCE and 650 common era. Pedro’s emerald basin was not, it seems, the holy grail, but its actual origins remain a bit of a mystery.
As for our traveller, he was moving on from Genoa, and after this short break we will follow him.
…
From Genoa, Pedro Tafur was proceeding south along the Italian coastline, arriving next at Porto Venere, south of Cinque Terre, and another location that Pedro would not be alone in finding very pleasant. I haven’t been to that town, but looking over the photos I would certainly not say no. At the time that Pedro passed through, however, Porto Venere was in a situation of some unrest, the people having risen up against the Duke of Milan and the King of Aragon, having done so that very day apparently but not bothering Pedro or his fellow travellers.
Genoan Spezia was next and then Livorno, known in the past in English as Leghorn, which I did not know until seeing it in this translation. Pedro has it as belonging to Pisa, but it appears to have sold a full three times since that sale, finally belonging at the time of his arrival to Florence. And there would be trouble in Livorno too, but again not for Pedro himself.
The vessel he was on was seized by the Count of Modica and the Genoese were sent aboard the count’s 14 galleys, but Pedro himself was treated exceedingly well, was, quote, “showed much honour,” a reminder of his noble status. Pedro was free to backtrack northward and reach by river the inland city of Pisa, “at one time,” he said, “very powerful and rich” with many possessions, both mainland and island, including Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica he said, or rather he said that “they sa[id]” it was so, and he could have gone on beyond that, adding possessions on the Tunisian coast and among the crusader states.
Pedro also included a story of divergence for the rival cities of Pisa, Genoa, and Florence, a bit of an origin story, though not exactly all the way back to the cities’ origins. It concerned the taking of Jerusalem and the rewards each of the three Italian cities had taken from it. There had been three to match those three cities, and after dividing them, the story went, they had drawn lots. The “holy grail” had gone to Genoa, as you already know, there to stay but for its ill-fated Napoleonic sojourn. The treasure had gone to Venice, forming the, quote, “foundation of all its wealth.” But as for Pisa, Pisa had got the columns and those columns had “lost all their virtue” with the loss of the holy city. Whether for lack of its columns’ virtue or not, Pisa was certainly not by this point as powerful as it once had been, was, by Pedro’s time, subject of Florence, where he was headed next and where his Mediterranean tour returned to more glowing reviews.
It was true, he admitted, that the Florentine villages were depopulated by the war with Pisa, but the countryside was fruitful, something Pedro always looked for, and the city itself, in his words, “both great and rich, and exceedingly beautiful within and without. It is situated in a plain with extensive suburbs on either side. A river runs through the centre which reaches to Pisa. But I will not write much of this city,” wrote Pedro, “as I shall speak of it later.”
So it went in the text, but we have the advantage of being able to peek ahead, to fast forward all the way to “later.” There we find Pedro “eight days marvelling at the city, which [was],” quote, "one of the most wonderful in Christendom, wonderful alike in size, as in wealth and government.” Its houses were delightful, its streets and inns excellent. It was clean and well-ordered with superb churches and monasteries, and hospitals that Pedro thought equal to any in the world, where all were treated equally well, regardless of station. Its great church was adorned with marble statues and mosaics, not to mention the banners of all the cities which Florence governed, an intriguing touch for a church.
“In what [effort] will so wise a people not do well?” Pedro asked. “Indeed,” he carried on, “Florence has ever produced great and valiant men in science, and it is so to this day.”
Pedro Tafur was clearly very fond of the city, as many were before him and many more have been since.
Our traveller was headed across the alps next, proceeding northwest to Pistoia and then northeast to Bologna, finding it, quote, “very large, well populated, and supplied with all the necessities of life, for which reason it [was] called Bologna the Fat,” a delightful nickname which I wasn’t previously familiar with. Pedro approved of the streets, homes, inns, and churches. He noted the use that was made of the river, the water mills which ground wheat or spices, scoured arms, made paper, cut wood, and spun fibres.
He spent 15 days there in Bologna, taking a pleasant rest and taking in the winter festivities. He petitioned Pope Eugene IV, who was there in the city, for license to go to Jerusalem and received from him a plenary, or full, absolution. He sold his horses, which I didn’t know he had until he sold them, and he continued his journey by river to Ferrara, the waterway at first as narrow as a boat’s width, often frozen at night and needing to be broken up by villagers in iron-keeled icebreakers with iron-tipped poles. He made his way to the sea, and to Venice.
In that city, he cashed in his bills of exchange with a Mr Morosini. As many travellers do, he visited St Mark’s, or San Marco’s, worshiping there before staying the night at a notable inn called the Sturgeon. These accounts can be tremendously vague at times whereas to other details, the name of Pedro’s lodging, they are absolutely minute in their focus. And in this case, a cool thing about this detail is that you can actually stay in the same inn, or at least in the place that is selling itself by its centuries-long connection to that name, on that site and in the same building, it seems, give or take the odd bit of rebuilding or repurposing since. If you have done so, do let me know how it was. Maybe you share a bit in common with our traveller.
What you likely don’t share is the experience of discovering that the boat you wanted to take to your next destination wouldn’t leave for another three months. You may for example have found, to your dismay, that the bus you wanted out of Istanbul had just left and wouldn’t be going again for another 24 hours, but three months was something else. It wasn’t until Ascension Day in the month of May that pilgrim ships would depart for Jerusalem, Pedro’s friends in the city explained to him, so he had time to kill.
He thought of visiting the courts of the King of France and “the emperor” in the meantime, as one does, but his friends talked him out of it. He should instead travel south, they insisted. He could see Rome, spend Lent in the city, and then see Napoli and the King of Aragon, whose court was there. He could fit it all in and still have 20 days before his boat would set sail. Pedro agreed that his travel agents’ counsel seemed excellent, and he resolved to follow it.
That meant Rome, first of all, where did indeed spend Lent. It meant doing a lot of the things which people still do when they visit that city, and it meant being a little awestruck by what he saw. He wondered at the crumbling majesty of those structures which were remnants, even in his time, of a long gone world, ones that had him struggling for words.
“[I] visit[ed] the sanctuaries and ancient buildings,” he wrote, “which appeared to me to be very wonderfully made, but not only am I unable to describe them, but I doubt whether I could appreciate them as they deserved. Therefore I may be pardoned, such is the grandeur and magnificence of Rome, if I fall short in my account, for I am not equal to so great an undertaking in view of the extent to which these ancient buildings have been destroyed and changed, and are decayed. Nevertheless, to all who behold them it is clear that they were once very magnificent, in spite of the tumults which they witnessed after the beginning of the downfall of Rome, in the discords between the princes who were her citizens, the destruction wrought by powerful kings who fought against her, and the hand of time which consumes everything.”
Struck by these lingering reminders of past greatness, Pedro marvelled at the walls that wrapped around them, “so built,” he said, “and of such height, that they appear[ed] to be fresh from the hand of the master-builder, and where they [were naturally] broken down, there the tyrants entered the city from time to time, for the work [was] such that they def[ied] wilful destruction. Small wonder, then,” wrote Pedro, “that they [had] survived, having been left as the ancients built them.”
The churches impressed Pedro, with their relics and history, the chapel with what he said were the first two bells ever made, anywhere in the world, which they were not. The Colosseum impressed him too of course, for it was, quote, “unmatched in the whole world for size and magnificence, and although most of it is in ruins the greatness and the marvel of its building may well be seen.” However, the Pope’s dwelling absolutely did not, “a mediocre place,” he wrote, “and when [he] was there it was ill-kept,” as were significant portions of the city, depopulation having left areas that “look[ed] like thick wood, [where] wild beasts, hares, foxes, wolves, deer, and even, so it [was] said, porcupines bred in the caves.”
Pedro wasn’t enamoured with absolutely everything about Rome. He certainly doesn’t seem to have thought much of the people. None of them could tell him anything of all the works of the ancients that surrounded them. They were better informed “as to the taverns and places of ill-fame.” “In such a multitude there must be some who [were] virtuous,” he allowed, but as to the majority, well, in an interesting way to put it, they “never dine[d] in their houses even by a miracle, and, indeed, their dresses and bearing, both indoors and out, show[ed] clearly what they [were].” Evidently, Pedro did not approve of what they were.
Pedro’s great tour took him to Viterbo, another “very pleasant city” whose warm waters were said to have cured disease. It took him to Perugia, to a dizzyingly thick array of cities, castles, and towns, to Gubbio, where a finger of John the Baptist was kept, and where a generous count provided for Pedro and asked that he be remembered in his prayers. “But this good count [is] now dead,” Pedro then wrote, much time since having passed.
He went to Urbino, to Rimini, on the coast, and by boat to Ravenna, one-time capital of the Western Roman Empire, ancient and very large, he said, but underpopulated. With a good wind, he reached Venice, never, one cannot help but notice, having reached Napoli or the court of the King of Aragon, though perhaps he simply didn’t write about it. In any case, he had already seen quite a lot of Italy and was probably quite satisfied.
From Venice, his story and travels would take him over the seas, and we will be following him, next time, on the continuation of his Mediterranean tour. Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you then.