A Blog Post by Gianluca Ratti

To Egypt, 128 years apart

On September 27^th, 1384, at sunset, the Pola, a large Venetian round ship, placidly approached the Northern Coast of Africa, and set its anchors. In front of it, a city at least one thousand years old: Alexandria of Egypt. For many occupants of the Pola, this was their last stop of this voyage, and just the start of the successive one,  to Jerusalem. This choice was unusual: the Republic of Venice conveniently sailed large galleys from the Adriatic capital towards the Holy Land, making port every night and taking advantage of the ever growing Venetian colonial empire. Instead, many of the pilgrims on the Pola had made a different choice: jump on a large cog, visit Egypt, and then go to Jerusalem. Round ships could transport huge amounts of merchandise, and Alexandria was an important trading centre. As such, routes like this one for trade were common, and this particular  voyage had gone fairly smoothly; the end, in sight.

Spending the night aboard an anchored ship, though, was not pleasant. With the winds picking up, Lionardo Frescobaldi [1] , wrote: “We stayed since sunset to the first light in such affliction that in Hell one would struggle to receive any more of it” [2] . At sixty years old, the Florentine pilgrim was not exactly the youngest onboard, and he had been battling tedious fevers for weeks. His Venetian friend Romigio Soranzo had warned him: “You people from Florence are not used to rough seas like we [the Venetians] are…even while being the healthiest, in a such a journey from here to Alexandria any sailor would find their body broken…we advise you not to take to the seas” [3] . Frescobaldi did not listen and indeed he had suffered his fair share. In the fourteenth century, Mediterranean travel by ship required great patience, especially when dealing with such a delicate phase of one’s journey: the arrival at the Mamluks. At sunbreak, the arrival procedures began, and with them the charades of mutual excitement and suspicion that accompanied new arrivals at the main port of the Mamluk Sultanate. Passengers in the Pola were observed, counted, searched, observed and counted again, both on the ship or, eventually, at port. Crates were opened, baggages came undone: Frescobaldi did not appreciate the thoroughness of the Mamluk official, but these were the rules, and finally the travellers were free to begin the next part of their journey.

The small adventures of Frescobaldi’s arrival are narrated in detail in the piece he composed retelling his travels to the Mamluks. In the late Middle Ages writing about one’s travel became ever more common among those who were able to do it. Indeed, recounting the Jerusalem pilgrimage was a favorite for Italian travellers, so much so that it became a real literary genre, with precise topoi and complex intertextualities. [4] The narratives, though, also give us something else: the impression of the Other upon the writers, and the Other’s way of living. When confronting the complex socio-political reality of the Mamluk Sultanate, this kind of detailed observation can be really valuable, especially if compared with many of the similar types of writing that surrounds it. We can take another example, in comparison, to show how one can find differences and continuities in travel narratives in Mamluk Egypt, and compare the narrative of Lionardo Frescobaldi with the one written by Zaccaria Pagani, travel companion of the illustrious Venetian ambassador Domenico Trevisan. They travelled from Venice to Cairo in 1512 to entertain diplomatic relations with the Sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī. As we will see, while the two travels happen at opposite ends of the Mamluk political chronology (one at the dawn of the Circassian Mamluk dinasty, the second closer to the dusk of the Sultanate as a whole), narratives can recount with surprising similarity the more diverse matters, even when narrating more inconsequential vicissitudes. I have chosen the episode of the travels between Alexandria and Cairo to answer the question: What can late medieval Italian travel narratives tell us about the Mamluk sultanate?

Exploring Alexandria

Domenico Trevisan had been somewhat of a self-made man, but the 1512 embassy to Cairo was really not his first ride. At sixty-six, he had been ambassador to the Maximilian of Habsburg, to Milan, to the Papal State and to Ottoman Constantinople. [5] This new commission brought him to the Sultan of Cairo, hopefully to find common ground on the spice trade from the East, an economic flow from which the Venetians and the Mamluks had gotten great profit, and which in that moment looked to be threatened by Portuguese expansionist policies. On April 17^th, 1512, Trevisan and his entourage (comprising Zaccaria Pagani) had arrived in Alexandria. The Mamluk received him excellently, first accompanying him to show his credentials, and then to his luscious temporary residence, a building so beautifully decorated Pagani describes it as costing the huge sum of seventy-thousands ducats. Pagani then goes on to describe the city: “A city built by Alexander the Great, larger than Treviso, though it is longer than it is wide” [6] , though he adds that Alexandria was in such a state that “The ruin of Candia [Crete] is nothing compared to this”. [7] The reason for this economic and social downturn, Pagani adds, is the practices of the Mamluks, whose main policies are damaging to a flourishing economy. Nonetheless, ancient (somewhat mis-attributed) traces are still visible: “One can still find a large column, outside the walls, where Pompey was decapitated, after he had escaped from Rome to Egypt”. [8]

Figure 1 : A photo of the Column of Diocletian, traditionally identified at the time as the Pillar of Pompey. It still exists in Alexandria today.

Pagani concludes with a description of Alexandria’s ports, with the Old port being the best, and inaccessible to Christian vessels, while the New port is fortified and armed, apt to oversee the arrival of foreign ships.

Did Frescobaldi give a different impression of the city, when he visited in 1384? Well, quite. Frescobaldi’s description of the city begins with an excellent comparison: “Alexandria exists around the port, and it is as large as Florence, a land of merchants, mostly of spices, sugar, silk”. [9] Alexandria is at that moment a bustling mercantile urban center and together with Damascus is second only to Cairo (“the imperial city” [10] ). Frescobaldi does not refrain from recounting traditional Christian stories related to the city, such as the broken columns related to the martyr of Saint Catherine, but he is much more preoccupied to recount Muslim religious practices related to the many mosques, and what that entails for the resident Christian population, for example, in describing a complex social and religious layering in the city.

While the writers of this narratives do have different backgrounds, the image painted by Frescobaldi of a city much richer and at the center of an important trade flow compared to the bleak description of Pagani shows us at least how these types of sources can be used to slowly reconstruct a detailed background of the places that these people travelled to.

Differences and continuities on the Nile

Another interesting aspect in comparing these two narratives is the way they describe their travels from Alexandria to Cairo. We can find relevant differences, but also surprising continuities. Frescobaldi describes hopping on a river boat and travelling southwards on the canal that connected the city to the major left branch of the Nile Delta. He spends the majority of his narrative completely enchanted by the variety of fruits, vegetables and plants that the Delta plain could support, all while passing the old city of Diminos (probably Damanhur) and finally exiting into the river. Frescobaldi then interestingly conceptualizes the entirety of the Nile Delta as an island, “Among the two branches of the Nile, on the third side, the sea…This island measures five hundred miles all around and it is rich and abundant”. [11]

Figure 2 : A modern satellite image of the Nile Delta. Frescobaldi described the two branches of the Nile as the Mediterranean Sea as “surrounding” the Nile Delta plain as if it was an island.

But Frescobaldi is just really fascinated by the incredible variety of wildlife: “We found on the shores of the Nile a snake, the length of eight braccia [470 cm]” [12] and by the seasonal floodings of the Nile, and how these are exploited for cultivation. All in all, Frescobaldi almost encompasses both an ecosystem and a civilization with his brush strokes, but he still seems to do it from a position of calculated stupor.

The narrative by Pagani is quite a bit more practical and tells another side of living on the Nile Delta. He begins with a more traditional comparison to a known place of his own, describing Rosetta as “a beautiful place, without defensive walls, but large and inhabited by as many as in Cividale, or maybe even more, with elegant houses”. [13] In Rosetta, the party of Trevisan visits the governor, who receives him and hosts him until a ship (sailing from Alexandria to Rosetta to enter the Nile with them) has arrived. While the group indeed sails from Rosetta to Cairo Pagani demonstrates a more simple, observational narrative, that does still notice hydraulic infrastructure (“where they would transport water through ingenious contraptions, with the energy of the oxen… as it never rains” [14] ) and the construction practices of Egyptian villages (“They have homes made and roofed with hardened mud; if it rained, they would be destroyed in a couple of days” [15] ).

Some details, though, are strikingly similar. This is not always meant to be a surprise. Pagani notices how many children would roam the villages “roasted by the sheer heat of the sun…naked” [16] and so does Frescobaldi, who observed “so many young boys and girls of fourteen years of age, all completely naked” [17] , and it is not unreasonable to believe that in 128 years the day-to-day living practices of the population on the Nile had not changed much. Maybe more surprising is the attention that both writers dedicate to the “musa”, a term most probably used to indicate a species of the modern-day banana. Frescobaldi writes that they are “similar to cucumbers but sweeter than even sugar”. [18] But they are also “very similar to cucumbers – writes Pagani – sweet like figs and you can peel them the same way”. [19] He adds that they have such a good taste that it would be impossible to describe them, so much so that “people say that it is the fruit with which Adam sinned” [20] , would conclude Frescobaldi in this hypothetical conversation about bananas in the Mamluk Nile Delta. [21]

In conclusion, the attention to details of Italian travellers who witnessed first-hand the world of the Mamluk Sultanate can indeed enrich and deepen our knowledge and understanding of this civilization in several layers, showing their importance as a source for the Mediterranean in the late Middle Ages.

[1] Gabriella Bartolini, ‘FRESCOBALDI, Lionardo’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 1998.

[2] A. Lanza and M. Troncarelli, eds., Pellegrini scrittori. Viaggiatori toscani del Trecento in Terrasanta (Ponte alle Grazie, 1993), 174.

[3] Lanza and Troncarelli, 172.

[4] See for example Franco Cardini, In Terrasanta: pellegrini italiani tra Medioevo e prima età moderna, Storica paperbacks 1 (Bologna: Società Editrice Il Mulino, 2005); Ilaria Sabbatini, L’Oriente Dei Viaggiatori: Diari Di Pellegrinaggio Fiorentini Fra XIII e XV Secolo (L’Aquila: Textus Edizioni, 2021).

[5] Giuseppe Gullino, ‘TREVISAN, Domenico’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 2019.

[6] Zaccaria Pagani, Da Venezia al Cairo: il viaggio di Zaccaria Pagani nel primo Cinquecento, ed. Laura Benedetti and Enrico Musacchio (Padova: Il poligrafo, 2021), 63.

[7] Pagani, 63.

[8] Pagani, 64.

[9] Lanza and Troncarelli, Pellegrini scrittori. Viaggiatori toscani del Trecento in Terrasanta, 177.

[10] Lanza and Troncarelli, 177.

[11] Lanza and Troncarelli, 179.

[12] Lanza and Troncarelli, 179.

[13] Pagani, Da Venezia al Cairo, 66.

[14] Pagani, 67.

[15] Pagani, 67.

[16] Pagani, 67.

[17] Lanza and Troncarelli, Pellegrini scrittori. Viaggiatori toscani del Trecento in Terrasanta, 180.

[18] Lanza and Troncarelli, 179.

[19] Pagani, Da Venezia al Cairo, 67.

[20] Lanza and Troncarelli, Pellegrini scrittori. Viaggiatori toscani del Trecento in Terrasanta, 179.

[21] This discussion also in Pagani, Da Venezia al Cairo, 67.