Lost Europe
Travel narratives of the Europe that was
Europe had its explorers too. In 921-922 Ibn Fadlan, envoy of the caliph of Baghdad, described the Volga Bulgars and the Rus' merchants; around 965 the Andalusian traveller Ibrahim ibn Yaqub visited Prague and the Slavic lands. In 1287 the monk Rabban Bar Sauma, who had set out from the Beijing region, met Philip the Fair in Paris and Edward I of England in Gascony. To these visitors from elsewhere, Europe was a distant, cold and strange land.
In the early modern period, travel across Europe became an art. Montaigne crossed Switzerland, Germany and Italy in 1580-1581, noting baths, inns and customs; envoys of the Holy Roman Empire made their way to Constantinople through a Hungary and a Balkans torn by war; the Grand Tour took young aristocrats as far as Rome and Naples. Later, the Caucasus, the Carpathians and Albania drew those who sought an older Europe on the continent's margins. Read today, these narratives show a continent of empires, principalities, languages and borders that have vanished, and that only travellers took the time to describe.
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Our titles on this subject
Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme
Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.
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Michel de Montaigne, Journal de voyage en Italie (1580-1581)
Three quarters of a century after Dürer, Montaigne crosses Switzerland and Germany on his way to Italy and stops for a week in Venice in November 1580. He finds the city less marvellous than he had imagined, observes its institutions, its policing and its courtesans, and receives a book of letters from Veronica Franco. The journal, partly dictated to a secretary, was not rediscovered and published until 1774. In it we find what Dürer described from the inside: a city that welcomes the stranger with curiosity and a little mistrust, and a traveller from the North who measures, with irony, what he has gained and lost by leaving home.
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Thomas Coryat, Coryat's Crudities (1608)
In 1608, an eccentric from Somerset set off on foot across France and Italy, spent six weeks in Venice, then returned to England through Switzerland, along the Rhine and across the Low Countries. His Crudities, published in 1611, offer one of the liveliest English descriptions of Venice: Saint Mark's Square, the gondolas, the courtesans, the Doge's Palace, and the Italian use of the fork, which he reports as a curiosity. On the Rhine he travels almost the same river as Dürer, from Mainz to Cologne, and then crosses the Dutch provinces. His jesting, boastful tone sometimes recalls Dürer's letters to Pirckheimer a century earlier, when the painter mocked the friends he had left behind in Nuremberg.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Voyage en Italie (1786-1788)
In September 1786, Goethe slipped away from Karlsbad in secret and made his way south to Italy. He spends just over two weeks in Venice, climbs the campanile of Saint Mark's, watches the boats, discovers the sea, hurries through Palladio's churches and the paintings of the Venetian masters, and attends the pleadings in court and the popular theatre. It is the founding account of the German journey to Italy, that of a Northerner who comes in search of a personal renaissance. Almost three centuries earlier, Dürer had already taken this road and felt the same thing, in rougher language: in Venice he is treated as a gentleman, and he fears becoming, at home, a mere parasite again.
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Victor Hugo, Le Rhin (1838-1840)
Hugo travelled up the Rhine in the late 1830s and drew from it, in 1842, a book of letters to a friend. He stops at Aachen before the tomb of Charlemagne, contemplates the unfinished cathedral of Cologne, marvels at Bacharach, Sankt Goar and the ruined castles, and blends legend, history and European politics into the landscapes. It is almost exactly Dürer's route of 1520: the same toll towns, the same chapel of Charlemagne where the painter saw Charles V crowned, the same Cologne where he obtained his pension. Where Dürer counted the florins paid to the customs men, Hugo dreams before the ruins of a vanished Middle Ages.
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Eugène Fromentin, Les Maîtres d'autrefois (1875)
A painter and writer, Fromentin set out in 1875 to see the paintings of Belgium and Holland on the spot, and published the following year this book, which became a classic of art criticism. He follows Rubens to Antwerp and Mechelen, stops at Bruges before Memling and at Ghent before the Ghent Altarpiece of the Van Eycks, then reaches the Holland of Rembrandt. It is one of the rare accounts that look at these cities with a painter's eyes, as Dürer did in 1521, when he noted in Ghent the picture by Jan and in Bruges the Madonna of Michelangelo. Three and a half centuries separate the two travellers, but the same question guides them: how did these masters do it?