Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s map of Constantinople in Liber insularum Archipelagi
Our 15th-century traveller dodges catastrophe on the Mediterranean and drops in on late-imperial Constantinople, where there's plenty of seafood and the roots of Pedro's family tree.
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Sources:
Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Gregory, Timothy E. A History of Byzantium. John Wiley & Sons, 2010.
Byron, Robert & Rice, David Talbot. The Birth of Western Painting. Routledge, 2013.
Script:
Today we leave the Red Sea behind us, featured in that last Pedro full-length and also the last bonus episode, though certainly not the same Red Sea location.
We leave it, and we journey by caravan back toward Cairo. Was it so very hard this time around, one wonders. This Pedro was now one who knew what to expect and wasn’t crossing an entirely unknown territory for the first time. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Pedro felt a little further from death on this leg of the journey than he had when trekking toward Mount Sinai. This time, he at least had the benefit of a distraction.
As the caravan made its way toward Cairo, carrying goods brought into the Red Sea from the east, he had company. He presumably still had those two squires, the ones who had boarded the boat with him in Venice, but he also now had the very well-travelled Niccolò de' Conti, the northern Italian born visitor to Syria, Iran, India, and Southeast Asia among other places.
For someone like Pedro, who had expressed an interest in going east himself, Niccolò would have represented an astonishing wealth of knowledge and stories, and indeed, Pedro writes, “During the journey I did little else except hear of his doings in India,” some of which Pedro would later record. There were, you will not be surprised to hear, some exaggerations included, whether in Niccolò’s telling, Pedro’s memory, or his later depiction.
He wrote that he was told of a mountain where cinnamon was grown, and of a fruit like a pumpkin with three other fruits within it, each having their own distinct flavour. He was told of a high mountain in India, so very high that the people at the top could know nothing of those at the bottom and those at the bottom did not know of those who lived at the top, keeping corn, cattle, and orchards there on an expansive mountain plain. He was told of crabs which turned to stone when they exited the sea, a story which had evidently circulated for quite a long time, and one which we encountered on the podcast a while back with the 10th-century text The Book of the Wonders of India.
Pedro heard a fair bit about Prester John, which I won’t get into here, having gone on at some length on the topic for its own series. He heard about people who ate human flesh, and about ones who ate raw animal flesh, after which it was necessary to ingest a particular “odoriferous” herb to stave off leprosy. He heard about elephants, asses, and unicorns, by which was probably meant rhinos. He heard about the city of Mecca, about the workings of the Nile, and about various customs and miracles. Niccolò would also tell him about the demons that he’d witnessed aboard certain ships, about those vague black shapes moving up and down the masts which the sailors would sometimes consult as to the waters ahead, alarming but helpful.
Clearly, there were some pretty tall-ish tales mixed in among their conversations, but when Pedro asked about the monstrous folk which he’d heard so much about, Niccolò answered that he’d never seen such a thing, none of those headless people with a face on their chest, nor the ones who lay on their back sheltering beneath a single enormous foot. Demons on the mast were one thing, but Niccolò drew the line at blemmyae, dog-headed humans, and other curiosities of the sort.
Still, even with none of those to talk about, there was still much to speak of, and as Pedro wrote, “with the pleasure of hearing such good things from Nicolo de' Conti [he] did not notice the labour” of their journey at all.
In 15 days he was back in Cairo, and after another 30 more he’d leave for Cyprus and beyond that Constantinople. Today, we will go there with him.
Hello and welcome back to Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast traversing that world in the footsteps of its travellers, and a history podcast with a Patreon, as I relentlessly remind you of each episode, but today I have a different request. If you are enjoying the podcast, please do take a moment to give it a rating on your platform of choice, and please do leave a review or otherwise spread the word to those who you think might be interested. I started off not particularly good at letting potential listeners know I was out here, and I feel like I might have actually regressed in that regard since then, if that’s possible, so it’s something I can always use help with.
All of that said, let’s get back to the story, the story of Pedro Tafur.
This time out, we’re going to be joining him in departing from Egypt and making his way to the remains of the once vastly powerful Byzantine Empire, if not now on its absolute last legs than at least rapidly running out of ones to spare.
We pick him up as he gets ready to leave Cairo, seeing the sights of the city with Nicolo and that friendly interpreter from last time. He has letters with him from Nicolo to be taken to Venice—the Italian traveller would not be going that way—and he has gifts from the interpreter, pretty interesting gifts if not ones that sound especially convenient for travel, even today: “two Indian cats, two parrots, perfumes and other things, including a turquoise,” the last of which Pedro says he still had with him at time of writing. I guess that means that the cats and parrots hadn’t made it, but then this would have been a couple of decades later.
We find him saying goodbye to Nicolo, to that interpreter, and to the sultan, and making his way north to visit Alexandria, the great port where Catherine, whose miraculous body was mentioned last time, had been born and martyred, the wheel on which she’d been broken now said to be stored away in a vault. After that it was Damietta, there to wait for the ship from Cyprus to pick him up. It was time enough to arrange for the crocodile skin that the King of Cyprus had requested, time enough to regret having successfully done so given the incredibly foul smell that it produced, time enough to wish that the, quote, “governor’s pretty daughter” would be coming with him instead. She would not be.
Pedro’s return to Cyprus brought an immediate reminder that this was indeed a “most unhealthy place,” something he evidently thought simply couldn’t be stated often enough. It brought the news that the local bishop and two of his colleagues had just that day perished of illness. Not great news, one would have thought, but for Pedro it meant that the beasts of those three were freely available for his use, an indication that his own party was probably still also three, himself and his two squires.
This time in Cyprus, Pedro would be around to witness the king forced to shelter in his citadel as his people rose in arms and anger against a favourite of his at the court, forcing him to banish the man. It was a judge named Jacobo, who had probably thought that in the king he had made the only friend he would ever really need but clearly had also made far too many enemies in the process for that to matter. Pedro would be there to witness a parade of diplomats streaming through, all hoping to arrange a marriage with the young king: to the children of two different German dukes, to the sister-in-law of the Portuguese regent, or to the daughter of a Sicilian count. Pedro figured that the king’s council liked one of the German proposals best, and for his part, he liked the king—he would have been happy to remain there in his service, but the place itself was, again, just too unhealthy. It was, quote, “almost impossible for a stranger to live in such a wretched country,” and I do want to reiterate that this was Pedro’s view, and I don’t actually have anything against Cyprus myself.
Pedro took his leave from the king and boarded one of two ships bound for Rhodes. It was not a long leg of the journey by the standards of this podcast, but things quickly went downhill. By early afternoon a Turkish galley was sighted, and quickly turned in pursuit of the two ships. They wanted vengeance, Pedro said, for a ship that some Catalans had recently taken, and a chase scene immediately followed.
“We strove with sail and oars, and they likewise,” Pedro would record, “so that there was no flagging of the litany while our hands grew weary with rowing.” Still though, they could not put any distance between themselves and their pursuers, not until a man of decidedly mixed past was called upon. He was a skilled and experienced navigator, but he’d also murdered a captain’s nephew, not the captain of this current ship, at least as I read it, but the captain of a Catalan galley in an earlier event. He’d even been sentenced to hang for the crime, only for the rope to snap under his weight on the fateful day, and Pedro had asked for the man to be given over to him. God, he said, had clearly intervened on the hanged man’s side for him to be alive at all.
The navigator was with Pedro there on one of the ships, and this part is all a bit unclear—maybe he was even one of those two squires who had been with him all along, maybe the whole hanging thing had just happened. Either way, Pedro credits him as the means of their escape. It was under his direction that they dumped their cargo overboard, something that those on the other ship that had left Cyprus with them refused to do. Substantially lightened, Pedro’s ship quickly gained ground, building up a lead that only increased when the Turkish galley caught up to that other ship and sank it with all aboard. He and the rest pressed forward as the sky darkened, putting on as much sail as they could with everyone at their oars, and then, under their murderous navigator’s direction, they parked in a driveway while the cops sped by, pulling off to one side and quieting the oars to let their hunters pass them in the dark.
But Pedro’s man was not satisfied that they were safe. He insisted that they needed to turn out toward the open sea because that other ship was now somewhere out ahead of them. They were going to realize their mistake and would expect Pedro’s ship to follow the coast and come to them. So out into the open sea they went, though not without issues. The wind rose, and waves swept over their little ship fiercely enough to have Pedro writing that he’d rather have “fallen into the hands of the Turks than be drowned at sea.” Tensions rose too, and there were some who wanted to toss one of Pedro’s men overboard—maybe the navigator who’d brought them out into the storm, though it would seem odd for Pedro not to say so and would seem the height of ingratitude to do so. “We defended ourselves stoutly,” wrote Pedro of that moment, and none of them would be thrown to the water.
Reaching harbour at Kastellorizo, they heard that their enemy had been there just a few hours earlier, and leaving for Rhodes they were in constant fear of being found again and still beset by foul weather. But they did make it, and Pedro settled in as the guest of a Castilian-born knight who welcomed him “cheerfully and affectionately” and treated him “very benevolently.” “...had it not been for the company he bore me,” he wrote, “I think I should have died after the hardships I had suffered.” Travel for someone of his status was like that, the staying with various generous individuals I mean, not necessarily the hardships, though there was certainly some of that. His way was smoothed with a letter of recommendation here, a little diplomatic assignment there, friendly hosts from home almost everywhere he went.
Pedro would be on Rhodes for the death of the knightly order’s’ grand master there, and for the election of a new one. Those present from the various nations represented in the order voted for 13 electors, those 13 voted for 7, and those 7, along with the sealed vote of the dead grand master, counted double, chose 1. It was dark by the time that the choice was settled, Pedro noted, but when the selection was announced, he saw many of those around him “turn yellow with envy,” an interesting phrase which opens up the whole question of colour associations and the green-envy connection that I’m more familiar with.
A new ship took him onward, his business with that of Cyprus having been done when he delivered its king’s letter to the old grand master. He arranged to be taken to Constantinople next, but as we’ve seen, the Mediterranean waters could make for a bit of a tough street to go down. You never knew who you might bump into as you sailed past first Samos and then Chios, and in this case it was four ships full of aggressive Genoese. They were out hunting Catalans, would soon be leaving for Alexandria where they aimed to attack two specific Catalan vessels there, but they had time first to order Pedro’s vessel back to Chios, inadvertently also sending it into the path of further misfortune, a storm that would sink the ship and leave Pedro clinging to a bit of wreckage until a skiff ventured out to rescue him.
“I was almost exhausted by the water and the cold,” he wrote, “for it was Christmas.” It’s the kind of slightly unclear connection that crops up at times in this translation, and possibly also in the original, though he may have purely been referring to temperature, but I like the sense of being overwhelmed, exhausted, and just a bit done-with-it-all that it conveys, a feeling that travel can sometimes bring on even if you aren’t desperately needing to be plucked from death in the waters of the harbour, maybe even if you have 20 days with little to do before finding another ship. It wasn’t longer than that, for there was a lot of traffic moving around this part of the Mediterranean, even at Christmas apparently, and his had hardly been a desert island shipwreck.
Journeying on, Pedro was able to play tourist for a while in Troy. He was able to make arrangements with an acquaintance from back in Spain to see him fitted out with a guide and horses. He couldn’t find anyone local who could or would tell him anything about his legendary surroundings, but he was struck by the mix of ancient remnants and newer houses that the landscape offered, the very lived-in village that shared space, and sometimes stone, with this near-mythical ruin, the “great hill which seemed to have been made by the fall of some huge building,” the scattering of so much marble and rock. He seems to have resisted any urge to collect one of those stones for himself.
He was going to Constantinople next, his little tour taking him into the Dardanelles, or Hellespont, the “Straits of Romania” as my translation has it, with shallow water on the Turkish side and deeper on the Greek. Here was the “tower of Vituperio where Achilles was found with Patroclus, or so they say,” he said, “that wish it so.” There was “the city of Gallipoli, a notable place, and a good harbour with an excellent castle.” Then came the Sea of Marmara and the source of Constantinople’s marble, and next came that city itself, or at least Pera, just across the Golden Horn.
Pedro called on one of his many Castilian acquaintances, this one a ship’s captain who he arranged to stay with. He spoke with the podesta of Pera, receiving from him gifts of wine and fowl. And after two days’ rest, he went to call on the emperor.
After this quick break, we will go with him.
…
We have been to Constantinople before on this podcast. We’ve been to see the emperor in his palace, various emperors actually and sultans too for that matter, across a decently long stretch of centuries. We’ve seen it thriving, or thereabouts, and we’ve seen it stumble, fall, and be pillaged, by enemies and by ostensible friends. So as we arrive this time, in Pedro’s company, we should talk a little first about when we are in all of this.
At times on Pedro’s travels, we’ve encountered territory that had changed hands in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade and its participants’ conquest of Constantinople, so we know that we’re past that. We’re closing in on 200 years after the resultant Latin Empire had ended there and Michael VIII Palaiologos had entered the city to renew Byzantine control. But we’re also arriving more than a century after the emergence of the Ottomans, and by this point their actions had been noticed and had greatly reduced the Byzantine possessions. It could not in truth really be termed an empire at this stage, holding sway over very little at all outside the city itself, and that city’s population, diminished by plague around the time of Pedro’s visit, no longer really lived up to the magnificence of the walls that still defended it.
We are only 15 years or so from the final failure of those defenses, in Byzantine terms, and the entry into the city of Mehmed II, “the Conqueror,” Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Pedro, when he sat down to the actual writing, would know of this. By his delightfully simple reckoning, military might in the region had long been summarized with the following triangle: the Tartars beat the Turks, the Turks beat the Greeks, and the Greeks beat the Tartars. But by the time of writing, the Greeks, as he put it, were “altogether undone,” and the Turks had, quote, “avenged the taking of Troy.” Constantinople had fallen, and Pedro considered it something of a miracle that it hadn’t done so before, given the “great neglect of Christian princes and people” in forestalling it and their total lack of effort in avenging it since.
“It is plain, indeed,” he concluded, “that cities are better defended by the miraculous power of God than by the industry and strength of men.” He had clearly lost a considerable amount of faith in that latter category.
Pedro wrote of an old story concerning the building of Constantine’s church, its day and night construction by many hands, and how one day, when it came time to eat, the master builder had ordered a child to remain behind and keep watch over the tools while everyone else left. It was said that a beautiful horseman had then approached the child, telling him to go ahead and eat with the others and promising that he, the horseman, would stand guard in his stead.
The child had gone but then later had been afraid that he would be punished for doing so and had never returned. So the horseman had never left, his watch never having been relieved. That horseman was said to have been an angel, “but now,” Pedro wrote, “ it might be said … that the child had returned, and the angel had ceased his guard, for the city is now captured and occupied.”
All this he would know to write, but he wouldn’t know it back then as he reached the city. He didn’t know, as he went to see that emperor, that it was the second to last of the long, long line of Byzantine emperors, John VIII Palaiologos, then about halfway through his 23 year reign.
“I arrayed myself as best I could,” he wrote, raising the question of exactly what was possible under the circumstances. He’d presumably lost everything he wasn’t wearing when the ship sank at Chios, but hopefully he’d been able to renew his travelling wardrobe a little since then, maybe with the help of that Castilian friend of his. And speaking of Castilian friends, he would be calling on another before he arrived at the palace, an interpreter named Juan who was said to have been appreciated by the emperor for the way he sang him Castilian romances accompanied by lute, not necessarily something that was directly applicable in interpretation but you could see how it would be useful when abroad and looking for work. And maybe it’s not too late for me to pick up a smattering of Spanish for my own job search, maybe mix a little basic lute playing in there too if I can.
When Pedro announced himself in the palace, he was left to wait for an hour or so while John VIII readied himself and gathered his knights around him. Then, he was ushered in, making his reverence to a seated emperor with a lion skin at his feet. John was keen to hear news from Spain, of the goings-on in Castile and the doings of King Juan II, and Pedro answered what he could and also asked his own questions. He said to the emperor that he had primarily come there to learn about himself, for he had been told that he had, quote, “sprung from that place, and from [its] imperial blood.” He had come to investigate his own lineage, and the emperor promised to have the “ancient records” searched to ascertain the truth.
In the days that followed, Pedro would join the emperor out on the hunt, after hares and partridges, francolins and pheasants, and his host’s scholars would indeed turn up information as to Pedro’s heritage. As had tended to happen in Constantinople over the years, it had all started with infighting among the imperial family.
There had once been a young imperial prince who had clashed with his father—“formerly” is when Pedro said this had happened, unable to remember exactly when. The prince had nobly declared that he could not remain in a land in which he might fight with his father, perhaps, more practically, not liking his chances of success if he were to do so. He had left, eventually making his way to Spain.
He had won great renown there, Pedro was apparently told. He had made quite a name for himself in his new homeland under a Castilian king called Alfonso of the Pierced Hand who had conquered Toledo, Alfonso IV, it seems, who was King of Léon in 1065 and king of much more besides by the time he died in 1109. That exiled Byzantine prince was, quote, “said to have been a very noble knight, vigorous, frank, and very discreet,” which I suppose is what you would say if you were writing yourself a royal backstory, though I have no particular reason to doubt our Pedro as to his vigorous ancestor who he has being called Don Peryllan.
Indeed, it seems that the story might be true, or at least there are hints of something of the sort elsewhere. There was a chronicler’s note as to a Don Gonzalo Ruyz of Toledo who was descended from the “third son of the Emperor of Constantinople,” and another chronicler has a man named Don Peryllan in the right time period as a count who was made governor by King Alfonso. So maybe Pedro really was descended from Byzantine royalty, from a prince who sought peace or safety in far-off Spain and was buried in Toledo, where his image adorned a chapel wall with the same coat of arms that was Pedro’s own, give or take some additions from marriage.
And why, Pedro then wanted to know, did the emperor who stood before him not wear those same arms. Well, the emperor replied, to tell that story he’d have to go back to the whole ordeal of the Fourth Crusade, which he then did, speaking of treasonous and thieving Venetians who had driven the Byzantine ruler from the city, looted its relics, and despoiled its magnificent buildings. When Michael VIII Palaiologos had entered Constantinople, ended the Latin Empire, and established his own rule, he had refused to give up the arms under which he had won the throne, the ones still worn by the emperor Pedro now visited. Pedro seems to have been genuinely saddened/aggrieved that the two of them didn’t match.
They still got along though. Indeed, the emperor treated Pedro with, quote, “great affection and as a kinsman, and he desired greatly that [he] should remain in [the] country and marry there and settle down,” a desire in which the emperor was not alone. There were many Castilians in the city, and one Castilian knight in particular had Pedro over for dinner and appears to have tried to arrange Pedro’s marriage to his sister. She was beautiful, Pedro said, and gave him many gifts, including a pair of pavilions. He would later give one of those to his king and the other, at time of writing, he still kept.
The city as Pedro found it was fallen in status and population and had been plundered for much of its relics and riches. Its palace had once been magnificent but now, he said, was in “such state that both it and the city show well the evils which the people have suffered and still endure.” But there was still a great deal to be seen. The visitor wrote of the market before the church of St Mary, where an icon was carried out to be displayed on certain days, days which Pedro says he never missed. He wrote of the old hippodrome, where the people had gone to see games and celebrate holidays in times past, and where a pair of intertwined brass snakes were said to have fountained wine and milk from their mouths. He wrote of the church of St Sophia. For all that the Fourth Crusade had carried from the city, they couldn’t take that with them.
For all in the city that now crumbled, Pedro thought that despite its great age, the church seemed as if it had only just been finished the day before. Its mosaic work on the walls was fine enough that no artist’s brush could rival it. Its delicate stones were finely worked in marble, porphyry, and jasper, and the floor was of great stones, magnificently cut. Up above, the lead-roofed ceiling lofted to heights that he scarcely believed could be held together by physical materials.
“Outside this church,” wrote Pedro, “are great squares with houses where they are accustomed to sell wine and bread and fish, and more shell-fish than anything else, since the Greeks are in the habit of eating them. … Here they have great tables of stone where they eat, both rulers and common people, together.”
As was often the case on his journey, Pedro was treated exceptionally well and he considered assenting to the emperor’s wish that he stay there in that city, for it was “badly populated and there [was a] need of good soldiers,” and powerful neighbours to contend with. But he did not choose to stay, and nor did he take the emperor’s invitation to join him on his trip to see the pope. Pedro was the sort of person, was born into the sort of position, that he received such invitations, and that he evidently felt comfortable enough in refusing them.
Pedro may have liked the imperial family and his fellow Castilians in the city, but it must be said that he didn’t otherwise care for the locals all that much. They were poorly dressed, he observed, “sad and poor, [and] showing the hardship of their lot,” which did nothing to elicit his sympathy. Indeed, he said, that hardship was “not so bad as they deserve[d], for they [were] a vicious people, steeped in sin.” Besides, he had his own other trip to make, and he was not going to see a pope, but rather a sultan.
Next episode we’ll follow him there, visiting a sultan, an emperor, and city rife with misdeeds of all sorts, and I’ll talk to you then.