Famagusta as seen in Konrad von Grünenberg's 1487 Beschreibung der Reise von Konstanz nach Jerusalem
As our Castilian traveller makes his roundabout way toward Mt Sinai, he finds ill-health but lots of help on Cyprus, while around Cairo he's struck by the street food and crocodiles.
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Sources:
Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Excerpta Cypria: Materials for a History of Cyprus, edited by Claude Delaval Cobham. Cambridge University Press, 1908.
Script:
Last time on the podcast, we saw our friend Pedro reach the holy land, saw him take a tour there of Jerusalem, its many, many holy sites, and those in the area: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, of course, and Mount Calvary, but also all manner of other locations associated with biblical deeds and doings, with this saint or that miracle. He was at the Dead Sea, the Jordan River, and Bethlehem. He was sneaking into a mosque. He was witnessing his fellow pilgrims drown in the river or plunge from the heights to their death.
We also saw him remark on a certain fruit that released an evil smelling smoke when touched, and I mentioned that I wasn’t sure which one that was. As a kind listener has helpfully pointed out, the fruit would be the one sometimes known as the “Apple of Sodom” or “Dead Sea Apple,” sometimes known less dramatically as giant milkweed or pillow cotton, among several other names.
Last time, we saw Pedro making ready to leave, to arrange his onward journey. This time, we return to the coast, to Jaffa, and to a ship leaving port and bound for Cyprus, there to see a certain cardinal about getting to Mount Sinai, for medieval travel was not always drawn in straight lines.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that takes those journeys in the company of medieval history’s most interesting travellers. And it is a podcast that is supported by a Patreon, a place where the listening is earlier, more often, and absent of advertising, and a place that can be reached at patreon.com/humancircus.
And now that you may or may not have made your own successful journey and reached that place, despite all the risks of blizzards, plagues, and brigands which stood in your way, we return to the location of our protagonist, our friend the Castilian nobleman and traveller Pedro Tafur. We join him as he departs from the port of Jaffa, destination Cyprus.
The way went quickly by Pedro’s account. By Tyre, Ascalon, and Acre, the latter noted here as the refuge of the Knights of St John after Jerusalem had been lost. By Nazareth, or near to it, for it wasn’t on the coast, and to Beirut, where merchandise was taken on, and where St George was sometimes said to have slain the dragon, where now, he wrote, “they find these creatures in the fields under the stones, like scorpions, and they grow no larger and have no poison.” A blessing from that saint, or so it was said.
Pedro saw “Mount Lebanon, where all the trees are cedars, but they looked like laurels.” He wished to see Damascus too, but the masters of his galley would not wait for him, which was fair, for Damascus was hardly the next village over. He said that he’d gathered a great deal of information about the city, but he left it out for those who’d actually been there to write about it.
Their journey along the coast took them past where Antioch had been, and its ruins were pointed out to him. The ancient city had suffered much and had been shattered and emptied by the Mamluks, was at this point some distance removed from what it had been. Their ship took them past the castle of Colchis—where lived Medea of the story of Jason and the Argonauts—a location generally connected to Georgia, on the coast of the Black Sea, not here on the Mediterranean. It took them past the island of the Golden Fleece, which that Jason had quested after with some difficulty. It took them past the Nur Mountains, or Black Mountain as Pedro and others of his era knew it, where Noah’s ark was said to have rested following the flood, an ark we’ve passed ourselves on previous trips/episodes.
Cyprus, his destination, was going to be next, and the prevailing theme there was going to be ill-health.
It was a particular lake that was said to be the root of the problem, our traveller reports, but he doesn’t really seem to have believed the problem to be so limited. “The Kingdom of Cyprus is for the most part unhealthy,” he says, adding that the city of Famagusta itself was depopulated due to bad air and water, something which he was, by the way, not alone in saying. You find a similar note in the writings of notary Nicolai de Marthono, who’d reached the city about 40 years before Pedro. He’d blamed both the large nearby marshland and the number of courtesans in the city.
“...the air of the city is very bad,” he wrote. “At all seasons of the year there is mortality and men die in great numbers, of the Genoese far more than the Greeks. While I was there for a month or more the new Commandant who came from Genoa died, and many others were dying, which terrified me greatly, and I remained these days in the city in great fear, chiefly because I was separated from my companions, and had no helper or worldly adviser to keep me sound and restore me to my country.”
As Nicolai alludes to, the port city was in Genoese hands when he found it, would be also when Pedro arrived, not yet having been taken by the Venetians later in the 15th century. Pedro mentions how the Genoese had once captured the King of Cyprus along with his wife, and how the present king’s father had been born in Genoan captivity. That was James I who had been captured and then declared king while in captivity, his son Janus who was born a prisoner and succeeded him after being ransomed from the Genoese.
Janus had struggled with failed attempts to retake Famagusta, dealt with repeated epidemics and epidemic locusts, with popular uprisings, and with invasion by the Mamluks who had bundled him off to Egypt, necessitating that he be ransomed once more. He’d died fewer than ten years before Pedro’s visit, leaving his son John II as King of Cyprus and also “King of Jerusalem,” a title then passed down without any actual hold over the city itself. A bit of an aspirational position really, and perhaps a practice I should be applying in my own job applications, King Devon I of Vancouver Island, or something like that, though I feel it would only really gain weight if I could convince future generations to carry it on.
When Pedro came to Cyprus, that apparently most unhealthy of locations, he said his goodbyes to those on board the ship—specifically says having done so, so I suppose he’d made some friends—and he made arrangements for animals to bear himself, his people, and his belongings about the island. They were headed to Nicosia, the kingdom’s chief city and, he said, its healthiest, but Pedro, having only just arrived, found himself stricken and unwell.
“As I was going along,” he wrote, “I was seized with such terrible pains in my head that I thought I was about to die. The pain descended to my legs and attacked the stomach, the belly, hips, thighs and the knees down to the feet, and it lasted all that night and the following day until Vespers. I could not but think that if each separate pain was to endure for three hours I should certainly die.”
Pedro would recover, but it was the sort of start to a stay that might easily colour the rest of your time in a new place and perhaps have you writing, years later, of how wholly pestilential the air was and how horribly sickly the water.
That aside, Pedro’s time in Cyprus would again remind us of his rather privileged position in life. Doors would be held open for him and a leisurely path laid out before his feet. A messenger from the king’s aunt would arrive at his inn summoning him to her presence, and when he had told her of his business there in Cyprus, she would bring him before her nephew, the king, and into the company of the very cardinal who Pedro had been coming to see.
Pedro was able to present his letter of recommendation from the Castilian king, Juan II, and declare his hopes of reaching Cairo and then Mount Sinai, as to which he was promised all the help his hosts could muster. He was also introduced to a fellow Castilian named Mosen Suarez, a man who had supposedly saved King Janus’s life and then been taken with him to Egypt by the Mamluks. Suarez had been released and travelled to Rome, asking for the pope to contribute toward Janus’s ransom payment. He had been rewarded for his service with a permanent position and honoured ever since.
Pedro, now having gotten over whatever travel bug had struck him down on arrival, was, as ever, comfortable in Cyprus. He was four or five days a guest of Suarez in his home, was hearing mass with the king and dining with him and the cardinal, was, at the cardinal’s instigation, being offered an ambassadorship so that he might travel to Cairo on the king’s behalf. It was likely more a service they were doing for him than one that he was going to provide the king, and Pedro gratefully accepted. He stayed in a mountain village until all was ready and a vessel had been prepared to leave the city of Paphos, for there was—in yet another note of disease—plague in Paphos, and the king did not want him lodging there. Finally, when all was ready and the ship “as well victualed as if for the King's household,” Pedro departed.
There would be favourable winds, and they would reach their destination without incident, reaching Damietta, just inland on a branch of the Nile.
We’ve been to Damietta before on this podcast, finding it besieged during the Fifth Crusade, finding it struck by an earthquake and otherwise referenced in the writing of Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi. Now, as Pedro visited, it was described as, quote:
“...abundantly supplied with bread and grapes, and all manner of fruits and sugar. The city is very flat and unwalled and without a castle. It is excessively hot, but the dwellings are very cool. There are so many weasels, both in the streets and houses, that they are more numerous than are mice with us.”
Those weasels aside, Pedro saw carrier pigeons for the first time there, saw them taking letters tied among their tail feathers and remarked at the speedy spread of news and alarm which they allowed. He saw the Nile rise and flood, filling the streets and some of the houses so that fishes swam among them and were sometimes trapped and caught there on the floors. He saw crocodiles, so fearsome that neither human nor beast could escape them. Only buffalo were feared by them, he said, so the locals, for want of a bridge, might mount a buffalo to go safely. He also wrote of how people would hunt crocodiles, harpooning them in effect, and then bringing the body through the streets to collect money from those willing to give, a practice Pedro compared to what people did with wolves back in Castile.
There was mention of the clean shaven holy men, entirely rid of beards, hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes. Some of them were apparently wearing horns or carrying lanterns on poles, while others went about honeyed and feathered or else drawing arrows on their bow as if to shoot. Pedro, perhaps a little bravely, approached some to ask what they were doing, and they said they were off to walk into fire with the quote/unquote “Christian dogs,” that they would see then who would burn first.
There was an unfortunate case of mistaken identity, very nearly a fatal one, but when the witnesses were called, their confirmation that he was not the offending party put Pedro in the clear, free to carry on living and to leave.
Like others before him, and like other travellers on this podcast, Pedro took the river to Cairo, going by boat, remarking on the beating of drums that was supposed to keep away the crocodiles, on the way that nobody trusted it to do so well enough that they would even consider drawing water from the river by hand instead of using a vessel tied to the end a long pole.
With Cairo, came a grain market frequented by many Christians, and Pedro and the others unloaded their goods, whatever those might have been, and spent the night there. The next morning, they hired donkeys along with a guide to see them to the house of the sultan’s chief interpreter, reaching it at midday and handing over a letter from the King of Cyprus along with money in, quote, “accordance with the provisions of his father's will, which directed that sum to be paid to [the sultan] for life, in return for services rendered to the King in prison,” an extension, in other words, of the agreement that had bought his freedom, now carried on into the reign of his son, whose quote, “main business in life,” as Malcolm Letts put it, “seemed to be the raising of the heavy tribute payable to the Sultan which was his inheritance.” A bit like inheriting a heavily mortgaged home I suppose.
Pedro would spend the next few days in that chief interpreter’s house. He got to know him a little, saying he must have been about 90 but was just having yet another child with one of his four Christian wives, all of them having been purchased from the Black Sea trade in the enslaved, a very busy and prosperous trade. He spoke to him of many things and told him that he was from Castile and had been born in Seville. It was a statement that delighted his host, for the interpreter had been there himself, had been brought from Spain to Jerusalem by his father as a Jew, and then converted to Islam after his father’s death, eventually making his way to Cairo and occupying a pretty comfortable position there. It was also a lie, it seems, perhaps one told to elicit that very reaction, for Pedro is thought to have been born in Córdoba.
The elderly interpreter welcomed Pedro in among his family and was also able to help him out here and there with information. He explained to him, for example, that the sultan had already seen his letter—he, the interpreter, had brought it to him—but also that Pedro was supposed to present himself and his business to the ruler as if this weren’t so, as if he, Pedro, had no idea that the sultan already knew what he’d ask and what he’d say.
After this quick break, we’ll be off to see the sultan ourselves. We’ll be seeing the city and Pedro’s departure from it.
…
The sultan in question, the one who Pedro was going to be visiting, would likely have been Al-Ashraf Sayf ad-Dīn Barsbāy, the 39th Mamluk sultan. Formerly enslaved and subjected to that Black Sea trade himself, he was in the last year or so of his 16-year reign, a bit of an outlier in that regard among the infighting-shortened and very fragmentary periods of rule around him. Those often amounted to less than a year, like that of his son who for three months succeeded him.
As Pedro went to see Barsbāy, he and those with him were able to eat and drink along the way to the sultan’s residence. We often think of food to go or carryout as a very modern idea, but there in Pedro’s account we find “men [who went] about carrying portable stoves with ready cooked food, [while] others [sold] fruit, others water, and many things besides.” We find men-at-arms on horse or foot beyond number, for Pedro did “not wish to relate what is hard to credit.” They were the enslaved, or as he would put it “renegade barbarians,” bought from the Black Sea “and in all places where the Christians sell them,” converted to Islam and taught the law, the horse, and how to shoot a bow. They were mamluks, for that was what the word referred to, the freed slave soldiers who were certainly not limited in use and presence to the Mamluk Sultanate but had overthrown the Ayyubids there to take power themselves.
Pedro was taken past gates and squares, horsemen, and attendants with clubs. He was brought into a great square and up to a “large and sumptuous tent with its trappings, where the Sultan was to dine, and where he was to receive the salute, and close at hand a pavilion [that] had been set up, and a high platform with a seat where the Sultan was to alight.”
Pedro mentions returning to that square on a later occasion, absent the sultan and his officials. Only the poor were found there then, sieving the sand in hopes of finding whatever the well-moneyed crowd had let fall.
But this time, Pedro was instructed at each step by that friendly interpreter. On how he should at first not make any display of reverence as the sultan passed but then put on a great show of kissing the ground. Pedro touched the Cypriot king’s letters to his head and mouth and presented them before the sultan, along with the king’s requests, and here we learn what Pedro was sent to say.
The King of Cyprus wanted the sultan to stop sending his mamluks to collect the tribute, as it put the king at great expense. He wanted to instead send the tribute himself, just as he had the money which Pedro brought, and for it sometimes to be in the form of fabrics woven from camel or goat hair. He also wanted permission to sell his salt in Syria without paying the usual duty. And the sultan granted all these requests in what seems to have been a very friendly encounter, with the ruler asking after the king, the cardinal, and Suarez who Pedro had stayed with. He gave Pedro a robe “of olive green and red, worked with gold and lined with ermine.” It was a luxurious sounding garment, though also an “an emblem of vassalage” for the King of Cyprus. His business done, Pedro took his leave from the sultan and left him to dine.
Pedro arranged for the sultan’s reply to be sent to Cyprus by ship, and then he remained another month in Cairo. The city was alive with traders of all kinds. They went about with braziers and hot foods such as dishes of stew, or plates of fruit that helped to deal with the overpowering summer heat, as did the water, carried on camels, donkeys, or backs. They went with mirrors on their breasts offering shaves. “For every requirement,” Pedro says, “there [were] traders in the streets enquiring if anyone [had] need of them.” And there were goods of all kinds which entered the city from Greater India. Pedro highlighted “pearls, precious stones, spices, perfumes, and sweet smelling things, silks, and linen goods,” but, he added, “It is not possible to enumerate all the articles which [were] brought from India and distributed throughout the world, and here [was] the chief market for all those things.”
It was, he said, despite that terrible heat, a very healthy place, the water, air, and meat all being, to his mind, good, his time not having coincided with the kind of plague outbreak that we saw with Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi’s time there. The two visits were, admittedly, some two and half centuries apart, a timespan greater than the lifespan of the city I’m recording this in, and a reminder that the “medieval period,” even this fraction of it, was incredibly long.
During that month in the city, Pedro took advantage of the interpreter’s willingness to be his guide. They went to Matareya, where balsam grew and where Mary had fled with her son. They went to the nearby fig tree there with a chapel-like space in its trunk, and returning to the city, they passed the “gardens and fine houses of the nobles” all along the river. They visited the pyramids, or the “Granaries of Joseph” as Pedro calls them, and the Castilian was certainly impressed. “I never thought that there was such a great building in the world to-day,” he wrote, “nor have I seen the like before or since.”
He was also impressed by the elephants, and he described them mostly by comparisons. Their eyes were like coins, their tails short like a bear’s, their ears like shields, and their heads like very large jars, very specific jars actually, those ones, he told his audience, which hold four arrobas, a unit of measurement. Like many before and since, he was impressed by the dexterity with which they used their trunks, noting their ability to grasp whatever they wished, play tricks, or toss a lance in the air. Strikingly, he also attributed to them the ability to heal wounds under the moonlight.
“This day we returned to our lodging,” he wrote, “having seen many strange sights,” and he elsewhere said something similar, of how he, quote, “marvel[ed] at many things which were passing strange to those of [his] nation.”
When it came time for him to leave the city, he couldn’t quite just go as he pleased. He was, after all, a diplomatic guest, and he also needed help in getting to Mount Sinai and the monastery there. He went off in search of the sultan to ask leave to depart, and on that particular day he had to go and find him on the hunt with leopards, hawks, and what Pedro wrote were five or six thousand horsemen. There outside the city those horsemen engaged in what sounds like an extremely large scale game of polo for the sultan’s entertainment, divided into two teams and driving at the ball with long mallets, trying to get it across a line in one direction or another.
That experience aside, Pedro came away from his outing with permission to go, along with one of the sultan’s interpreters and three camels to help him on his way. He would leave in two days and in the meantime had little rest, for there were, he again said, “so many strange and remarkable things to see.” As for preparations, that friendly interpreter, the one who he’d perhaps bonded with by way of a lie, took care of everything, also extending recommendations to both the interpreter who would accompany Pedro and also the Patriarch of Alexandria, the man with power to appoint the superior at the Mount Sinai monastery and presumably some influence there.
For all of that help, the journey ahead was definitely a hardship for Pedro.
“We departed from Cairo,” he wrote, “and crossed the lifeless desert of Egypt with much labour and in great peril. The heat was such that I was amazed that any man could withstand it. … There is no road in the desert, for the wind effaces it and shifts the sands from one place to another and makes great hills, and people die there, as I have related. They navigate here with the compass as at sea. There is no habitation between [Cairo] and Mount Sinai, and the camels carry everything, as well for the travellers as for themselves.”
The journey to Mount Sinai was a grim and grinding 15 days of excruciating heat, our leisurely adventurer now not having such a great time of it. He was a long way from the more familiar Genoa, Florence, or Rome, and probably felt very far already from Cairo, no matter how strange he’d found so much of that city.
But of course, he didn’t die in the desert. It wasn’t as bad as all that. It had him thinking of the bodies that dried up there and were then ground up into mummia, but he wasn’t ground up as mummia to be put to this or that medical purpose, something I think we talked about in that Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi series. He was safely conveyed to his destination of Mount Sinai, seeing it “very lofty and stand[ing] quite alone, about half a league from the Red Sea.”
For Pedro, and many others of course, it was the location where God had appeared to Moses as a burning bush, where God had told him to strike a rock and made water pour forth, where God had given him the ten commandments, or it was the contested location I should say, as there have been other ideas about that. It was the home of Saint Catherine's Monastery, built in the 6th century around the purported location of that bush and then associated with Catherine when a body, said to be hers, was found centuries later and brought there.
Pedro tells a story of the monastery, locating some earlier version of it at the peak of the mountain and saying that its monks had once abandoned it because of the “great scarcity of bread” and the “great labour in climbing those heights.” They had gone some distance away from that place when Catherine had appeared before them, urging them to return and saying they would find mounds of grain and a conducive place to live and house her body. And so they did, building the monastery on the spot where they discovered that promised grain.
Catherine’s body was said to have been discovered in miraculous condition, would need to be given the centuries that were to have passed since her death, and when Pedro arrived it was stored there beneath the altar but not shown to him. It was not, he was told, customary for it to be displayed, and he could only look at the container in which it rested and ponder that she must have been taller than any woman who walked the earth in his age. A bit of a leap really, but then he had come a long way to see it.
Pedro’s time there passes fairly quickly in the text, not really conveying the importance that so many Christians placed on this as a pilgrimage site, or the personal importance that he clearly placed there, in having gone to such an effort to reach it, diverting his path from Jerusalem back to Cyprus, carrying out the king’s business in Egypt, and making his strenuous way from Cairo, though he may not have anticipated just how difficult that particular portion of the trip would be.
He was close to the Red Sea then, and that’s where he went next, meeting a caravan that was due to arrive and, after four or five days, indeed did, a process that involved more camels than Pedro cared to account for, lest he appear to “speak extravagantly.” All the, quote, “spices, pearls, precious stones and gold, perfumes, and linen and parrots, and cats from India,” were there, ready to be distributed throughout Pedro’s world, some going by way of Cairo and the Nile north to the Mediterranean and some by way of Damascus.
There was also a Venetian traveller there among the caravan, a man well-known for his travels and one who we haven’t yet encountered on this podcast, a man named Niccolò de' Conti. Pedro greeted him delight, expressing his interest in travelling back the way Niccolò had just come from, in journeying on to India. It was something he’d also spoken of to the prior at the St Catherine Monastery and perhaps a desire awakened by all those exotic goods which he’d seen streaming through the markets of Cairo. But neither the prior nor Niccolò were approving of the idea. The prior was “altogether opposed to it,” and Niccolò, an extremely experienced traveller, was even more against the idea. Pedro shouldn’t try it, he was told, and however much he wanted it, he couldn’t do it anyway.
Niccolò related his own story of life abroad and urged Pedro to go no further.
“Now this is my life and the story of my past,” he told him, “and in what concerns you I pray you, in the name of God, and for the love which you bear Him … that you will not embark on such madness, for the way is very long and troublesome and perilous; the country is inhabited by strange races without king or laws or rulers; how can you expect to pass without a safe-conduct, and whom shall he fear who is minded to kill you? Further, the air is strange, and food and drink are different from those in your country. You will meet with bestial people, unable to govern themselves, and although there are monstrous things to be seen they are not enough to give you satisfaction. You will see heaps of gold and pearls and precious stones, but what shall they profit you since the people are beasts who wear them?”
It was all very foreboding, and Pedro, judging the counsel to be offered in kindness and wisdom, allowed himself to be convinced that it was not for him and he should go no further. Having taken in the sites around the Red Sea, including the place where it had parted before Moses, he joined those of the caravan as they continued their journey. Many were going on to Damascus, but Pedro, though he’d previously wished to see that city, went with Niccolò and the rest, making their way to Cairo, back there in Pedro’s case.
Next time, we’ll leave Egypt with him, as he continues his travels.