E. S. Bates

“ The camels used for caravan purposes were not the small ones the Arabs were accustomed to, but the large ones, on which alone, at that time, at any rate, was it customary to travel in cradles, one cradle slung each side of the camel. They were comfortable, these cradles; comfortable enough to sleep in, hooded and lined to defend the traveller from sun and weather, with a secret pocket in the seat for valuables. The camels themselves were protected against the evil eye by charms written by dervishes slung round their necks in leathern bags ”

“ Comparison of the fare in the various countries of Europe shows no more striking inequalities of supply than is the case with butter: in Poland so plentiful as to be used for greasing cart-wheels; in France so scarce and so bad that English ambassadors used to import theirs from home; in Spain still scarcer, except in cow-breeding Estremadura. A German, when he wanted to buy butter, was directed to an apothecary, who produced a little, and that much rancid, preserved in a she-goat's bladder for use as an ingredient in salves, telling him there was not such another quantity in all Castile. ”

“ In a country, France, for instance, the tourist always had a consciousness of towns and districts unseen, all of which had contributed to the past, for evidence of the existence of which the imagination looks, however unconsciously; but after two days in Venice, all that is important and visible may seem to have been seen; no suggestion of anything beyond, not even the ruins of a half-buried city, as at Rome. ”

“ Of experience of this, Captain Cuellar's narrative stands out as a quintessential example. It is equally handy for those who wish to prove the Irish the most charming, or the most abominable, nation that ever existed. He found them equally ready to strip him and to feed him, to wound and to heal, to betray and to shelter, to make him at home and to make him work. Compare with this the conclusions of an [177] impartial Italian [68] seventy years earlier. The women he found very beautiful and white, but dirty; the people generally, very religious, yet do not consider stealing a sin. ”

“ Guide-books seem to have been from two to four times the price of Baedekers, a minor item, but considerable, like food and lodging. It may seem, at first sight, as if food and lodging were far from minor items, and that truly, of course, if only the total expenditure is considered. But in considering, as is being done here, relative cost only, that is, the cost of travel in so far as it has altered since three centuries ago, it has to be borne in mind that the average cost of food and shelter never alters; it is only standards of living that alter. ”

“ There was no outlet for its products; the continual state of war kept commerce paralysed; Vienna had little need of it, Constantinople none at all; what the fertility of the soil produced so abundantly was thus available for local consumption only. Especially was this the case with products that needed no human tending; the man who ate a whole penn'orth of fish risked bursting. In Germany prices ruled low, yet so excessive was the drunkenness, and so general, that it was a moral impossibility to live cheaply without cutting one's self off from human society. ”

“ At San Marcellino at Naples, a mass was sung and the nuns prayed, the little golden pilgrim's staff he wore round his neck was blessed, and a vow made by him never to take it off until he had visited the Holy Sepulchre.
Thus he became Pietro della Valle, "Il Pellegrino" (the Pilgrim) ; and started. Venice, Constantinople, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, was his route; but his next letter thereafter is "from my tent in the desert": he has disappeared over the tourist horizon, and become a traveller on the grand scale. But he returns, and has much to say on the way back. ”

“ The proportion of fact that gave them a starting-point may best be put in perspective by pointing out the parallel that exists between travel in Italy three hundred years ago and modern motoring. Nobody who could afford it went without; everybody who could not afford it abused everybody who did; it killed some, maimed others, benefited most, and brightened the life of many a poor rich man who otherwise would have departed this life little better off mentally than his own cows. ”

“ If any one took the average price of meals, say, in Europe then and average prices now, and showed a difference of net cost between them, his calculations must either be based on misleading information, or else would prove that the figure he was multiplying with to equate values was a wrong one. This, of course, refers to necessaries; luxuries must be ruled out for two reasons: first, all attempts to fix a standard or strike an average breaks down for lack of a basis; second, they do not test what any one is called upon to spend but only how much he can spend if he is fool enough to try. ”

“ Lauder wrote a diary: the Duc de Rohan a "letter" to his mother, summarising the valuable information acquired in a virtuous perambulation through Italy, Hungary, Bohemia, Germany, the Low Countries, England, including a flying visit to Scotland; an harangue of flat mediocrity, imitative in character, thoughtful only in so far as, and in the way, he had been taught to be thoughtful. But, read between the lines, it is most interesting; better representing the Average Tourist in his nominal every-day state of mind than any other book. ”

“ Although the latter is nearly as encyclopædic as Plotius, it is so merely in the way of suggestion, discussing only motives and ideas and insisting on his son's freedom of choice, in general as well as in detail; with one or two remarks added that would have scandalised the guide-book writer, but leaven the whole of the letter. It is especially interesting as showing how the idea of travel as a factor in life brought out the best of a man who was a failure at home from a day-by-day point of view. ”

“ Leipzig was in favour for the purity of its German and Munich for pleasure, but Prague was another disappointment in spite of the Emperor living there; few stone houses and the wooden ones rough, and so filthy that the saying ran that the Turks would never take it despite the feebleness of its fortifications, because it was so well-guarded by its stenches; much as a Frenchman remarked at this time of Massa, between Genoa and Pisa, that it had a castle, but its chief defence was its fleas. Vienna was likewise far too well defended to attract visitors ”

“ In this case, an acqaintance with sixteenth-century Christian travel in Mohammedan lands compels the idea that Othello's mind turns at the last to what he knows his hearers would unhesitatingly recognise as his greatest deed, the killing a Turk in Turkish territory; as the greatest possible claim to forgiveness and to fame. Moryson left his sword behind him at Venice, as a thing which it would be madness to use. ”

“ For the former cause, it was bound to be an axiom of history as long as the Bible remained authoritative as a statement of historical fact, that mankind had proceeded from good to bad, and from bad to worse, as time had advanced. And whatever, in the thought of the age, tended to shake this view, was held in check by the discoveries, in different, previously unexplored, parts of the world, of communities which seemed to be possessed at once of a higher morality and also of a more primitive civilisation, than the European. ”

“ And here may follow a few more remarks of theirs, chosen as suggestive of the characteristics of sixteenth-century travel in so far as it differs from our own, not neglecting proverbs:—
A traveller has need of a falcon's eye, an ass's ears, a monkey's face, a merchant's words, a camel's back, a hog's mouth, a deer's feet. And [59] the traveller to Rome—the back of an ass, the belly of a hog, and a conscience as broad as the king's highway. ”

“ Outside Italy a plague-scare occurred more rarely. When it did the healthy but tired wayfarers might find themselves shut out of the town where they looked to find food and rest; perhaps would find the highway itself barricaded [150] by the authorities of a town which was plague-free and determined to remain so, and forced to ride all night by dark and dangerous by-ways [151] —unless they pretended to be an ambassador and his retinue, as some English merchants once did.
Too much stress must not be laid on the troubles of a stranger who fell ill of a less deadly illness. ”

“ Such subjects naturally suggest executions, which formed one of the commonest and principal "sights" throughout Europe. Lithgow landed at the Piazzetta at Venice just when a friar was being burnt alive there for getting fifteen nuns with child in a year. It was in Venice, too, that Moryson saw two young senators' sons, who had had too uproarious a night, have their hands cut off at the places where they had done the mischief, their tongues cut out where they had sung blasphemous songs, and finally beheaded by a sort of guillotine in the Piazza. ”

“ One evening he makes his escape from four men, takes a by-road where the highroad was in particularly bad repute; snow begins to fall, the wind is dead against him; his by-road leads him cross-country, which founders his horse; he sits down on a tree-trunk, back to the wind, and thinks how his brother and four sisters are providing him with nephews and nieces who will never give a guess at the troubles he has gone through in making a fortune, but will take it for granted that they are to have a share of it. ”

“ Aleppo was worth seeing: a pleasant town with its approaches all gardens, like Damascus, and the medley of nations must have been marvellous to watch; a sign of its cosmopolitanism was that Christians were allowed to ride horses there, an unusual privilege in Mohammedan dominion; probably nowhere outside Venice were so many sects represented, whose churches were in what was called the new suburb; two Armenian, a Greek, and a Catholic Maronite were actually side by side, with a Syrian Jacobite church just near. ”

“ The prosperity of the Empire while this was the state of France has been already outlined; what it became, as a result of the civil war, while France was becoming the best organised and most civilised country in Europe, may be guessed from Reresby's description of the district which in 1600 had been the most comfortable in Christendom, that between Augsburg and Frankfurt; villages and [351] towns uninhabited, much ground untilled, no meat to be had, no sheets, sometimes no beds; for drink, milk and water, little wine and that sour and very dear; people so boorish as to resemble beasts. ”

“ During the sixteenth century it became a convention to abuse travel, especially travel in Italy; a convention which may have been more fruitful in England than elsewhere, but certainly was not so to the exclusive extent which modern books in English seem to imply. The difficulty would be to find a nation whose literature at this time does not contain examples of it; even in Poland, where of all places travel was most taken for granted, this topic was one of the first to be dealt with when the vernacular was turned to literary account, namely, in the satires of Kochanowski. ”

“ And one Sunday it befell that, having tasted no more than a few mouthfuls of bread that morning, they trudge twenty-eight miles of that land on their bare feet; and all the day the rain comes down pitilessly, whereby they find the roads turned into lakes, and that so truly that there are times when the water reaches their chests. ”

“ But Rome and its associations have had more than their share of attention. Imagine, then, the traveller started on the invariable excursion to Naples, the equal of Milan as a finishing school, and one of the few cities with underground drainage. Some, but not many, might go on to Sicily; to Syracuse for the feast of Santa Lucia, for choice. But what with robbers and corsair-raids, there was no travelling there without a strong guard, and the towns were so unsafe that Messina seems to have been the first of European towns to evolve a combined bank and safe-deposit under municipal guarantee ”

“ Hence to Rome, the direct way lay through Genoa; a second viâ Milan and Bologna, a day's journey longer but yielding the advantage of seeing those two cities; while the third way, the longest but most comfortable and no more expensive, lay down the Po to Ferrara, thence to Venice, thence by sea to Ancona, by land to Loreto, and so to Rome. The two former routes converged at Florence. Of these two the longer would be chosen either going or returning. Milan must no more be missed than Rome. It was the city of all Europe on which the question of peace and war permanently depended ”

“ And if at times it is hard to find a reflection of their pleasure in what they have written, it is certainly there, if only between the lines, manifesting how this continual variety of human beings is brought into touch, even if unconsciously, with the infinite change and range of the ideas and efforts of millions of persons over millions upon millions of acres, each person and each acre with its own history, life, fate, and influence. ”

“ Foreigners in England are singularly reticent about the inns, except for reviling [245] Gravesend for swindling; which may, perhaps, be taken as confirming Moryson's opinion that the English inn was the best in Europe. As to Ireland, there is the usual diversity of opinion; the absence of inns is accounted for by the traditional idea that the possession of an inn was a disgrace to a town, a slur on the hospitality of its inhabitants; yet the hospitality itself was most uncertain, since the natives were not in a position to believe in the neutrality of a visitor. ”

“ Post-horses were always for hire in Italy, with a bit of fur attached to their bridles to mark their status. The owner gave the hirer a ticket to show his host at the end of the day's journey, who would then take care of the horse until a return fare was forthcoming; no security was asked. It was a novel experience for most foreigners to ride one post-horse all day: in England the stages were ten miles; in France, in the seventeenth century, four or five, so that a traveller in a hurry would change horses as many as eighteen to twenty-two times a day. ”