The Travels of Ludovico di Varthema: In Egypt, Syria, Arabia Deserta and Arabia Felix, in Persia, India, and Ethiopia, A.D. 1503 To 1508. Ludovico di Varthema
which the pretension was advanced are calculated to throw a doubt on its truth, it is not im- probable that Varthema had been brought up to the profession of arms, or had at some antecedent period served as a soldier, since he incidentally remarks, in a subsequent chapter, (p. 280), that he had been pre- sent at several battles in his time. This conjecture is
INTRODUCTION. xxiii
further supported by the particular attention which he pays to the military organization and peculiar weapons of the different people described in the course of his narrative. The only additional intima- tion which he lets drop of his private history gives us to understand that he was a married man, and was the father of several children (p. 259).
The motives which led him to undertake this journey are briefly set forth in the dedication of his Itinerary. He had an insatiable desire of becoming acquainted with foreign countries, not unmixed with ambition for the renown which had been awarded to preceding geographers and travellers; but being conscious, withal, of his inaptitude to attain that object by reading, " knowing himself to be of very slender understanding" and disinclined to study, he "determined, personally, and with his own eyes, to endeavour to ascertain the situations of places, the qualities of peoples, the diversities of animals, the varieties of the fruit-bearing and odoriferous trees of Egypt, Syria, Arabia Deserta and Felix, Persia, India, and Ethiopia, remembering well that the testi- mony of one eye-witness is worth more than ten thousand hearsays." His surprising travels in search of this knowledge are recorded in the accompanying- narrative with an ingenuousness and honesty, and his personal adventures with a ready wit and humour, which do credit to his head and heart; the remark- able success of his book is attested by the successive editions which were called for in the course of a few years after its first publication, and its translation
xxiv INTRODUCTION.
into several European languages; but what reward was reaped by the enterprising traveller himself, be- yond the barren honour of knighthood conferred upon him by Don Francisco de Almeyda after the battle of Ponani, and subsequently confirmed by Don Emanuel of Portugal, we have no means of ascer- taining. As far as we know, the copyright of his Itinerary, secured to himself and to his heirs for ten years, officially granted at the special mandate of Pope Julius II., by the Cardinal Chamberlain of the Court of Rome, as appears from the document at- tached to the first edition of 1510, was the only recompense bestowed upon him by his admiring but parsimonious countrymen.
Turning from the author to the author's book, I do not see how I can better introduce it than bv rapidly leading the reader over the route pursued, halting here and there to illustrate the traveller's journeyings by brief sketches of the history of the countries visited, and the different people with whom he came in contact. The antecedent investigations of Dr. Vincent and Dr. Robertson, and the very recent researches of Mr. R. H. Major, who in his able Introduction to India in the Fifteenth Century has done much towards exhausting the subject of the ancient intercourse with India prior to the discovery of the route viâ the Cape of Good Hope, must be my excuse for not venturing to supplement their learned essays in that line,—a task, moreover, for which I am utterly unqualified. With this candid admission, I shall now pass on to the narrative under review.
INTRODUCTION. xxv
Varthema appears to have left Europe towards the end of 1502, and reached Alexandria about the beginning of the following year, from whence he proceeded by the Nile to Cairo. In his brief re- marks on that city, he corrects the exaggerated idea of its extent which seems to have prevailed in the West even after his time; for we find Giovan Leoni Africano enumerating it as "une delle maggiore e mirabili citta che siano nel mondo."1 His summary account of the people and government is surprisingly accurate:— "The inhabitants are Moors [Arabs] and Mamlûks. The lord over them is the Grand Sultan, who is served by the Mamlûks, and the Mamlûks are lords over the Moors." Egypt, at the time, was governed by the Borjeeh Mamlûk Sultan, El-Ashraf Kansooh el-Ghon, whose territories comprised Syria as far as the Taurus in Cilicia on the north, and the Euphrates on the east. Already, the Turks under Bayazid II. had attempted to wrest Egypt from the hands of the Mamlûks; but their invasion in 1490 resulted in nothing beyond the annexation of Tarsus and Adana. It remained for Bayazid's second son, Selim L, surnamed El-Yauz, about thirty years later, to put an end to a military dynasty which for up- wards of two centuries and a half had usurped the authority of the 'Abbaside Khalifs, whose representa- tive in the person of El-Mustansik bTllah must have been residing in Egypt, in comparative obscurity, at the period of our author's visit.
From Egypt Varthema sailed to Syria, landed at
1RAMUSIO, vol. i. p. 83.
xxvi INTRODUCTION.
Beyroot, and travelled by Tripoli to Aleppo. He notices the concourse of Persians and other foreigners at the latter place, which, until the route viâ the Cape of Good Hope became the great highway to and from India, was one of the principal stations of the overland transit trade between the Mediterranean on the one side, and Persia and the Persian Gulf on the other. Passing through Hamâh, the Hamath of Scripture, and Menîn in the vicinity of Helbon, still famous for the quality of its grapes, he arrived at Damascus, where he appears to have sojourned several weeks, and to have made good use of his time in acquiring some knowledge of colloquial Arabic. Here, he became acquainted with the Mam- luks of the garrison, and by means of money, accord- ing to his own statement, induced a captain of that body, who was a renegade Christian, to attach him to a company under his command ; but he cautiously reserves, what is highly probable, that a profession of Islâmism was exacted as a necessary condition of his enrolment among the Mamlûks. Whether on assum- ing the new name of Yûnas, (Jonah,) he underwent any more special initiation than that of repeating the simple formula, " There is no god but the God, and Muhammed is His Apostle," does not transpire ; but the sequel of his narrative proves, that he had been tolerably well instructed in the outward ceremonies of Islâm, and by practice, combined with an inquir- ing disposition, and a great facility in adapting him- self to circumstances, eventually attained as correct an insight into the doctrines of the Koran as is pos- sessed by the generality of Mussulmans.
INTRODUCTION. xxvii
This is not the place to discuss the morality of an act, involving the deliberate and voluntary denial of what a man holds to be the Truth in a matter so sacred as that of Religion. Such a violation of con- science is not justifiable by the end which the rene- gade may have in view, however abstractedly praise- worthy it may be; and even granting that his demerit should be gauged by the amount of knowledge which he possesses of what is true and what false, the con- clusion is inevitable, that nothing short of utter igno- rance of the precepts of his faith, or a conscientious disbelief in them, can fairly relieve the Christian, who conforms to Islâmism without a corresponding per- suasion of its verity, of the deserved odium which all honest men attach to apostasy and hypocrisy.
Forming one of the Mamlûk escort of the Hajj Caravan, Varthema set out from Damascus on the 8th of April 1503 on the march towards El-Medinah. Among the few Europeans who have recorded their visits to the Holy Places of the Mussulmans, he is still the only one who has succeeded in reaching them by that route. Joseph Pitts of Exeter in A.D. 1680, Ali Bey in 1807, Giovanni Finati in 1811, Burckhardt in 1814, and Burton in 1853, all pene- trated into the Hijâz and returned therefrom by the lied Sea. In this respect, therefore, our author's narrative is unique; nevertheless, we have the means of testing its authenticity by the Hajj Itinerary from Damascus compiled with so much care by Burck- hardt. This has been attempted in the annotations on the text of the present edition, and the result is
xxviii INTRODUCTION.
alike confirmatory of Varthema's intelligence and accuracy. A journey of thirty days through a desert, which Sir John Maundeville and other travellers long after him would have filled with images of their own marvellous imaginations, is recounted in the sober colouring of a tourist of our own times, enlivened ever and anon with vivid sketches of the wild country and tribes through which the Caravan wended its soli- tary way. His