Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of Education. E. S. Bates
two Popes, twice to Spain, twice to Poland, once to Russia, twice to Persia: yet of Sir Robert Sherley as tourist, we know next to nothing. So also of Sir Paul Pindar, who says in a letter that he has had eighteen years' experience of Italy; and De Foix, a man greatly gifted, who wished to serve his country as far as possible distant from its Valois Kings, and consequently chose a series of embassies as an honourable, useful form of self-exile. Yet of these last two and others there remains some record by means of men who accompanied them. Part of the travels of Peter Mundy, whose name will often recur, happened in the train of the former; and when De Thou, the historian, paid the visit to Italy which he recounts in his autobiography, it was with De Foix that he went.
Among the exceptions, most noticeable is Augier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a Fleming. After representing the Emperor in England at the wedding of Philip and Mary, he was sent to Constantinople (1556–1562), and afterwards to France. His letters from France that have been preserved are semi-official; of minor interest compared with those from Constantinople, which, not meant for publication but addressed to friends who were worthy of them, in time became printed. They belong to the literature of middle age, that which is written by men of fine character and fine education when successful issues out of many trials have made them wise and left them young. A many-sided man: the library at Vienna is the richer for his presents to the Emperor; many are the stories he tells of the wild animals he kept to while away the hours of the imprisonment which he, ambassador as he was, had to endure; the introducer into Europe of lilac, tulips, and syringa; a collector of coins when such an occupation was not usual as a hobby. His opportunities, indeed, were such as occur no more; in Asia Minor coins one thousand years old were in daily use as weights; and yet Busbecq missed one chance, for a brazier to whom he was referred regretted he had not met him a few days earlier, when he had had a vessel full of old coins which he had just melted down to make kettles.
Turning from the personalities to the causes of travel, we find that the class to which Busbecq belonged, that of resident ambassador, was of recent growth, and that it, and the tendencies of which it is one symptom, are responsible for creating the whole of the motives and the facilities for travel which characterise journeyings of this time as something different in kind from those which preceded them. The custom of maintaining resident representatives was developed in Italy during the fifteenth century, but it did not spread to the rest of civilised Europe till near the beginning of the next; German research, indeed, has even narrowed down the dates within which it established itself as an international system to 1494–1497.[2] The change was partly due to the consolidation of sovereignties, which increased the distances to be traversed between neighbour-princes, partly to the insight of the three great rulers who achieved the consolidations—Ferdinand of Aragon, Louis XI, and Henry VII, who abandoned the idea of force and isolation as the only possible policies, and attempted to gain the advantages, and avoid the disadvantages, of both by means of ambassadors. Henry VII regarded them as in no way differing from spies; the most efficient kind of spies, from the point of view of the sender; and unavoidable, from that of the receiver. The latter's only remedy, Henry VII thought, was to send two for every one received. This alone, regarded, as it must be, considering who the speaker was, as indicating what the practice of the future would be, suffices to explain, even to prove, a great increase in diplomatic movements. But what further compels the deduction is that the foregoing is reported by Comines, who was probably, next to Francesco Guicciardini, the most frequently read historian throughout the sixteenth century.
Side by side with these official spies was the secret service; bound to grow in proportion to the increase among the former, implying a certain cosmopolitanism in its members, which, again, implies touring. This class of tourists is naturally the least communicative of all, but so far as England alone is concerned, if the history of the growth of the English spy-system between Thomas and Oliver Cromwell ever comes to be written, it is bound to reveal an enormous number of men, continually on the move for such purposes, or qualifying themselves for secret service by previous travel. And while there is a certain amount of information concerning tourists and touring to be gathered, in scraps, among State Papers which concern spies as spies, there is a great deal available, often first-hand, from them during this period of probation. Many, also, would be termed spies by their enemies and news-writers by their friends; persons who are abroad for some other, more or less genuine, reason, whose information was very welcome to those at home in the absence of newspapers, and was often paid for by politicians who could acquire a greater hold on the attention of those in power by means of knowledge which was exclusive during a period when the Foreign Office of a government existed in a far less definitely organised form than at present. It was in the course of such a mission that Edmund Spenser saw most of Europe and gained that intimate knowledge of contemporary politics which gives his poems a value which would have been more generally recognised had not their value as poetry overshadowed other merits. The traveller, then, still fulfilled what had been his chief use to humanity in mediæval times, that of a "bearer of tydynges," as Chaucer insists often enough in his "House of Fame."
It is worth while turning back to Chaucer's time to see how far the classes of travellers then existing have their counterparts in 1600, and how far not. Omitting students and artizans, as not varying, the types to be met on the road then may be collected into those of commerce, pilgrimage, vagabondage, and knight-errantry.
With regard to commerce, it may safely be guessed that the absence of the modern inventions for communication at a distance implied, in 1600 as in Chaucer's day, a greater proportional number of journeys in person than at present: and the enormous extension of commerce involved in the discoveries of sea-routes must have involved an increase in commercial traffic within Europe. As for the particular forms of trade that were responsible for taking men away from their homes, within the limits of Europe, it would probably be found, if statistics were possible, that dried fish came first, with wine and corn bracketed second. The Roman Catholic fast-days had produced a habit of eating dried fish which was not to be shaken off, in the strictest Protestant quarters, directly; and it was largely used for provisioning armies.
A PILGRIMAGE SCENE
The second class of mediæval traveller, the pilgrim, is often in evidence about 1600, usually indirect evidence; the pilgrim who is nothing but pilgrim leaves practically no detailed record of himself except when he goes to Jerusalem. Yet Evelyn was told at Rome that during the year of Jubilee, 1600, twenty-five thousand five hundred women visitors were registered at the pilgrims' hospice of the Holy Trinity there, and four hundred and forty thousand men. Also, one who was at Montserrat in 1599, was told that six hundred pilgrims dined there every day, and at high festivals between three thousand and four thousand; while another (1619) learnt that whereas the monks' income from their thirty-seven estates stood at nine thousand scudi (say, thirteen thousand pounds at to-day's values) annually, they spent seven times that amount, the balance being derived from the sale of sanctified articles or from gifts.[3] On the whole, however, a decrease must be presupposed during this period on account of the cessation of pilgrimage among the Protestant half of Europe. Moreover, the kind of journeying which is specially characteristic of this period incidentally tended to further Protestant ideas and discredit pilgrimage. For pilgrimage was, of course, towards some relic. Now relics which mutually excluded each other's genuineness, such as two heads of one saint, were not likely to be met with on the same pilgrim route: the establishment of one such on a given route would hinder the establishment of a second for financial, as well as devotional, reasons. But when a believer travelled for diplomatic or educational purposes, his direction was quite as likely to lead across pilgrim routes, as along them. In which case he would be morally certain to come across these mutually exclusive relics, on one and the same journey, and the doubts thus started might be cumulative in their results.[4] On the other hand the very fact of opposition stimulated pilgrim zeal among the orthodox, as, e.g., to the still flourishing shrine of Notre Dame des Ardilliers near Saumur, as a result of Saumur itself becoming a headquarters of the "Reformed" creed. There abided of course the permanent features of life which make pilgrimage as deep-rooted as the love of children, and one of the epidemics of pilgrimage that occur periodically burst out in France about 1585, so Busbecq writes. Whole villages of