Travel narratives of the Near East, from Constantinople to Jerusalem

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.

• Ibn Boutlan, Lettre sur le voyage du Caire vers la Syrie (c. 1050)

  The Christian physician from Baghdad, almost a contemporary of Nasir, described, around 1050, his own travels from Iraq to Fatimid Egypt and Syria, through Aleppo and Cairo, in the very years when Nasir was staying there. Comparing the two views of al-Mustansir's Cairo is invaluable: Nasir sees the splendor of Shia power and the honesty of the merchants; Ibn Boutlan notes the theological quarrels and the condition of minorities. Two portraits of the same city, a few months apart, by two observers from different worlds.

• Ibn Joubayr, Relation des voyages (1183-1185)

  The Andalusian pilgrim from Valencia made the pilgrimage to Mecca between 1183 and 1185 and wrote the notebook that would found the classical Arabic genre of the rihla. He passed through the same Egyptian ports, sailed down the Red Sea, and saw Mecca one hundred forty years after Nasir, under the Ayyubids of Saladin. More literary, more brilliant, and also more laudatory toward the restored Sunni power, he completes his predecessor on every point where Nasir remained silent. The two notebooks read almost like a two-voice score on the same Levant.

• Anna Comnène, Alexiade (c. 1148)

  The daughter of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I recounts, around 1148, in learned Greek, the reign of her father. She writes about exactly the generation following Nasir's own, and evokes the Seljuk Turks, the First Crusade, and the eastern Mediterranean on the eve of its great upheaval. A book to read to understand the other side, the Christian one, of the world Nasir crossed: the voice of a learned princess answers that of a fleeing secretary, both born of the same world, but half a century apart, after the crusade had passed through it.

• Geoffrey of Villehardouin, La Conquête de Constantinople, circa 1207 (c. 1207)

  The marshal of Champagne recounts the Fourth Crusade and the capture of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204. The first great prose text in French, written by a direct participant in the sack that Gilles knows through Nicetas Choniates. Worth reading as a mirror to chapter 13 of this volume: the same event seen from both sides.

• Ibn Battuta, Voyages (1325-1354)

  The great traveler from Tangier crisscrossed, over thirty years between 1325 and 1354, the entire Muslim world, from sub-Saharan Africa to China. When he passes through Jerusalem, Cairo, or Mecca, it is three centuries after Nasir, and the world has been transformed: the Crusades over, the Mongols established, the Mamluks in Cairo. The contrast with the Persian's notebook gives the measure of what has changed. Where Nasir describes in a few pages, Ibn Battuta expands into personal adventures, marriages, learned disputes, and princely banquets.

• Ibn Khaldoun, Voyage d'Occident et d'Orient (1380-1400)

  The great Tunisian historian, already famous for his Muqaddima, travels between Tunis, Cairo, Mecca, and Damascus in the years 1380-1400. Above all, he meets Tamerlane in person beneath the walls of Damascus in January 1401, in a conversation that remains famous, in which the conqueror questions him about the Maghreb. The account, in Arabic, is contained in Ibn Khaldoun's autobiography, of which Abdesselam Cheddadi produced a French edition at Actes Sud in 1995. Schiltberger and Ibn Khaldoun speak of the same Tamerlane, seen on one hand by an Arab scholar, on the other by a Bavarian page.

• Jean de Mandeville, Livre des merveilles du monde (c. 1357)

  Compiled around 1357 from earlier sources, the English knight's fictitious travel journal is one of the bestsellers of the fifteenth century. Schiltberger no doubt had occasion to hear it read aloud in Bavaria, and the European culture of Asia that forms the Bavarian's horizon owes it much. Worth reading to understand what Europe believed about the world when a young squire from Munich set out to fight the Turks.

• Bertrandon de la Broquière, Voyage d'Outremer (1432-1433)

  The chamberlain of Philip the Good sets out in 1432 to spy on the Ottomans, traveling from Jerusalem to Constantinople and on to Burgundy, just after Schiltberger's return. His account, published by Charles Schefer in 1892, is the first Western testimony to the Ottoman empire restored after the disaster of Ankara. Where Schiltberger recounts Bayezid in the present tense of the captive, La Broquière describes Murad II as a diplomatic agent aware of the Ottoman threat. Together, the two accounts form the European chronicle of the late pre-Byzantine Orient.

• Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Liber insularum Archipelagi, circa 1420 (c. 1420)

  The Florentine monk sails through the islands of the Aegean and the Propontis at the start of the fifteenth century, while it is still Byzantine. He draws the first medieval plans of Constantinople, which will circulate throughout humanist Europe. Pierre Gilles almost certainly knew these depictions. The passage from Buondelmonti to Gilles spans a century and the Ottoman conquest.

• Peter Füssli, Voyage à Jérusalem en 1523 et lettre sur la chute de Rhodes (1523)

  Four years after Tschudi, another Confederate takes the road to the Holy Sepulchre: the Zurich bell and cannon founder Peter Füssli, a former captain of the Italian wars and a member of his city's Great Council. His account of 1523, drier than the Glarus man's, follows the same pilgrim route through Venice, but it comes with a letter on the fall of Rhodes, taken by Suleiman the Magnificent at the end of 1522: the island where Tschudi had Peter Falck and Melchior zur Gilgen buried is now Ottoman, and its knights have gone. Füssli's two texts were edited together in 1982, and reading them directly extends Tschudi's retrospective aside on Rhodes.

• Pierre Belon, Les Observations de plusieurs singularités et choses mémorables (1546-1549)

  The naturalist Pierre Belon of Le Mans set out in 1546 in the retinue of the French embassy to Suleiman and returned only in 1549. His Observations, published in 1553, lead the reader through Greece, Crete, Constantinople, Egypt and the Holy Land, but with a different eye from Tschudi's: Belon notes plants, fish, snakes, remedies and trades, and describes people more than relics. A generation after the Glarus pilgrim, the eastern Mediterranean becomes a field of learned inquiry, and the road to Jerusalem a path for the curious as much as for the devout. The stopovers at Candia and Rhodes take on quite a different aspect there.

• André Thevet, Cosmographie de Levant, Lyon, 1554 (1554)

  The Franciscan friar from Angoulême travels the eastern Mediterranean in the same years as Pierre Gilles. He visits Chios, Rhodes, Cyprus, Egypt, and the Holy Land, and in 1554 publishes this large volume mixing field observations, ancient quotations, and woodcuts. Thevet lacks Gilles's topographical rigor, but he shares his enthusiasm and curiosity. The contrast between the two works, published seven years apart in Lyon by neighboring publishers, gives the measure of what scholarly travel meant for the generation of Francis I.

• Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, Lettres turques, written in Constantinople from 1554 to 1562 (1554-1562)

  The ambassador of Ferdinand of Habsburg arrives in Constantinople seven years after Gilles's departure. He stays eight years and brings back manuscripts, plants (the lilac, the tulip), coins, and above all four detailed letters describing the Ottoman court, its customs, and the aging sultan. The same city, the same years, but seen from the diplomatic side. An indispensable complement to Gilles's archaeological gaze.

• Nicolas de Nicolay, Quatre premiers livres des navigations et pérégrinations orientales, Lyon, 1568 (1568)

  The geographer from the Dauphiné accompanies the French embassy to Constantinople in 1551. He brings back an illustrated book with sixty engravings showing Ottoman costumes and types with unmatched documentary precision. Here again, Lyon publishes the book some dozen years after the journey. The generation of scholarly travelers who cross paths with Suleiman the Magnificent has left a scattered and fascinating literature, of which Gilles is one of the high points.

• Leonhard Rauwolf, Description véritable du voyage en Orient (Aigentliche Beschreibung der Raiß) (1573-1576)

  A physician and botanist from Augsburg, Leonhard Rauwolf sailed from Marseille in 1573 on behalf of a trading house, lived nine months in Aleppo, went down to Baghdad, then, recalled by the bankruptcy of his backers, made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1575 before returning by way of Venice in early 1576. His account, printed at Lauingen in 1582, is a herbarium as much as a diary; in it one reads one of the first European descriptions of coffee. Like Tschudi, Rauwolf writes in German for readers who stayed at home, but he discovers a Holy Land where the Ottoman administration, still brand new in 1519, has been in place for more than half a century.

• Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Lettres turques (1581)

  The imperial ambassador to Istanbul publishes his four Latin letters from the court of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1581. A hundred and eighty years after Schiltberger, the same Ottoman empire, more powerful than ever, receives another Westerner, this time an ambassador. Busbecq describes the Sublime Porte at its height, in the very years when the Frankfurt printer republishes the Bavarian's account for his contemporaries as a cautionary tale. Reading Busbecq right after Schiltberger means following the Ottoman Empire from its childhood to its zenith.

• George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey begun An. Dom. 1610 (1610-1611)

  In 1610 the English poet George Sandys leaves Venice on a long journey through the Ottoman Empire: Constantinople, Egypt and Sinai, Palestine, then Cyprus, before heading back by way of Sicily, Naples and Rome. His Relation, published in 1615 and often reprinted, describes the Holy Sepulchre, the Christian communities that share its chapels and the pilgrims who came from all over Europe. Less than a century after Tschudi, the setting has changed little, with its Franciscans, its taxes and its escorts, and the itinerary still runs through Venice and Cyprus; but the eye is that of a learned Protestant, attentive to antiquities and more sceptical of relics than the gentleman of Glarus.

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• Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, written between 1640 and 1683 (1640-1683)

  The great Ottoman traveler crosses the empire for forty years and writes ten volumes describing Istanbul, Anatolia, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Egypt, and the Hejaz. His volume on Constantinople, written a century after Gilles, describes the city in the full maturity of Ottoman rule: its mosques, its guilds, its festivals, its monuments. The late Turkish counterpart to Gilles's notebook.

• Adam Olearius, Voyage en Moscovie, Tartarie et Perse (1647)

  The diplomat from Holstein publishes in 1647 his account of the 1633-1639 journey through Moscow, the Volga, the Caspian Sea, Isfahan, and back by way of Baku. Two hundred years after Schiltberger, the same Siberian, Caucasian, and Persian geography, but under different rulers: the Romanovs in Russia, the Safavids in Persia, the Ottomans in the Caucasus. Schiltberger had seen these roads amid the disorder of Tatar successions; Olearius sees them consolidated into modern empires.

• Pietro della Valle, Viaggi di Pietro della Valle il pellegrino (1650-1663)

  The Roman nobleman reaches Jerusalem on 8 March 1616 for the Easter festivities, ten months before Bénard, and visits the same shrines, lodged like him with the Franciscans. But he does not go home: he travels on to Damascus and Aleppo, marries a Syrian Christian, Sitti Maani, in Baghdad, and leaves for the Persia of Shah Abbas in January 1617, just as Bénard lands at Sidon. His letters, published in Rome from 1650 to 1663, then lead all the way to India. The Parisian pilgrim sees the Holy Land as a journey's end; the Roman pilgrim makes it the gateway to an East he wants to understand.

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• Jean de Thévenot, Relation d'un voyage fait au Levant (1664)

  Forty years after Bénard, another young Parisian sets out for the Levant, in 1655. Jean de Thévenot spends several years in Constantinople, Egypt and the Holy Land, where he too receives the knighthood of the Holy Sepulchre. But where Bénard counts indulgences, Thévenot observes customs, coins, coffee houses and caravans with the curiosity of a traveller rather than a pilgrim. His account appeared in 1664 and was often reprinted. He then left again for Persia and India and died on the way home, in 1667. The two books show how, within a generation, pilgrimage turns into a journey of observation.

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• Henry Maundrell, A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter, A.D. 1697 (1697)

  Chaplain to the English merchants of Aleppo, Henry Maundrell sets out in February 1697 with some fifteen companions to spend Easter in Jerusalem. He follows the Syrian and Lebanese coast through Sidon, Tyre and Acre, the very ports where Bénard landed and later re-embarked, before climbing to the Holy City and returning by Damascus and Baalbek. A Protestant, he watches the ceremonies of the Holy Sepulchre with an irony Bénard would not have understood, but he measures distances and describes ruins with an accuracy that made his small book, published in Oxford in 1703 and translated into French as early as 1705, a travelling companion for the next century's visitors.

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• Engelbert Kaempfer, Amœnitates exoticæ (1712)

  The physician and naturalist from Westphalia crosses Russia, Safavid Persia, and the Caspian Sea in 1683-1685. His scientific Latin from the close of the seventeenth century offers the first complete European portrait of modern Persia. Where Schiltberger bore first-person witness to Timurid destruction, Kaempfer describes Iran rebuilt under Shah Abbas, with its gardens, its mosques, its caravanserais.

• Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Relation d'un voyage du Levant (1717)

  The Sun King's French botanist publishes in 1717 his account of the 1700-1702 mission to Anatolia, Georgia, Armenia, and Constantinople. The same places as Schiltberger, exactly three hundred years later, seen through the eyes of a scholar of the nascent Enlightenment. The Caucasus and Anatolia have changed Ottoman rulers, but the names of the cities, the peoples, the religions are much as the Bavarian had seen them.

• Constantin-François Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte (1783-1785)

  Less than twenty years after Niebuhr, the young Volney travels through Egypt and Syria and publishes, in 1787, the very year of the Remarks on Aleppo, a picture that would become authoritative. His pashalik of Aleppo overlaps Niebuhr's line for line: villages abandoned at the edge of the desert, the road to Alexandretta infested with thieves, fallen Antioch, the fevered air of Alexandretta and the refuge of Beilan in the mountains. He adds the carrier pigeons and the famous Aleppo button. But Volney generalizes and judges Ottoman despotism as a philosopher of the Enlightenment, whereas Niebuhr, more modest, tells what he has seen and lets the reader conclude.

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• Volney, Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie (1787)

  The French philosopher traveled through the Ottoman Orient between 1783 and 1785 and published his account in Paris in 1787. He describes Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo, and the Levantine coast with a rationalist and critical eye. The same geography as Nasir's, seven centuries later, under another empire and other dynasties. A foundational text of modern Orientalism, illuminating to read after the Persian because it shows, ten generations later, what the same land had become: an Ottoman Levant, impoverished, numbed, yet still largely recognizable as the one Nasir had crossed.

• Volney, Travels through Syria and Egypt (1787)

  Ten years after Plechtcheïev, from 1783 to 1785, the young Volney stayed in Egypt and then in Syria, where he spent several months learning Arabic in a Lebanese monastery. His book devotes long pages to very recent history: the career and fall of Ali Bey, the rise and death of Sheikh Zahir, and the tyranny of Jazzar, his successor at Acre. What the Russian lieutenant saw with his own eyes, Volney reconstructs as a historian and an Enlightenment thinker. Readers of Plechtcheïev will find in it the sequel and the outcome of a story of which he lived one chapter.

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• Ali Bey el-Abbassi, Voyages d'Ali Bey el Abbassi en Afrique et en Asie (1803-1807)

  Under an assumed name and in the costume of a Muslim prince, the Catalan Domingo Badía crosses Morocco, Egypt, Mecca, Syria and Anatolia. In the spring of 1806, a storm nearly swallows his ship before he lands at Larnaca. From there he makes his way to Nicosia through hills he finds worthy of the island's goddess, notes the richness of the soils and observes a Cyprus still squeezed by its governors. His Travels, published in Paris in 1814, offer a striking counterpoint to Niebuhr's pages: forty years later, the same island seen by a false Muslim who served Napoleon's policy.

• Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1806-1807)

  In 1806 Chateaubriand leaves Paris for Jerusalem by way of Greece, Constantinople and Rhodes, lands at Jaffa and goes up to the holy city, where the Father Guardian of the Franciscans dubs him a knight of the Holy Sepulchre with the sword attributed to Godfrey of Bouillon. The Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem, published in 1811, makes this journey one of the great texts of French prose. Nearly three centuries separate the two dubbings, and reading it one gauges what has changed and what remains: the same roadstead at Jaffa, the same friars to welcome the pilgrim, the same ceremony, but a traveller who looks for ruins and memories as much as for indulgences.

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• Jean Louis Burckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (1810-1812)

  Sent by the African Association of London to prepare for crossing the Sahara, the Swiss Burckhardt chooses Aleppo as his school: he learns Arabic there, lives under the name of Sheikh Ibrahim and radiates from it across all of Syria. Lebanon, the Orontes valley, the Hauran, then in 1812 the road to Cairo, during which he becomes the first modern European to describe Petra. His journals, published in 1822 after his death, extend Niebuhr's gaze exactly: the same patience, the same taste for measured itineraries, the same attention to the sects and tribes that hurried travelers ignore.

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• Alexander Kinglake, Eothen (1834-1835)

  In 1834 the young Englishman Alexander Kinglake left Belgrade and rode across the Ottoman Balkans to Constantinople, then on to Smyrna, Cyprus, Beirut, Nazareth, Jerusalem and, through the desert, to Cairo during the plague of 1835. It is almost Mayr's itinerary twenty years on, with the same quarantines and the same fear of contagion. Eothen, published in 1844, is written with a nonchalant humour that has made it a classic. The Swiss merchant and the English gentleman share a dislike of bombast and a taste for the lived anecdote.

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• Alphonse de Lamartine, Voyage en Orient (1835)

  In the autumn of 1832, three years after Prokesch, Alphonse de Lamartine lands at Beirut with his wife and his daughter Julia, then rides to Jerusalem, escorted like a prince. He looks there less for proof than for emotion: the Holy Sepulchre, the Valley of Jehoshaphat and the Mount of Olives become lyrical meditations under his pen. On the return, Julia dies in Beirut, and the journey turns into mourning. His Voyage en Orient, published in 1835, fixed the romantic image of the Holy Land for generations. The contrast with Prokesch is sharp: where the Austrian major records, measures and compares texts, the poet contemplates and remembers.

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• Alexandre Pouchkine, Voyage à Arzroum pendant la campagne de 1829 (1836)

  In the spring of 1829, Alexander Pushkin sets off without permission to join the Russian army in the Caucasus, at war with the Ottomans. Beyond Tiflis he meets a cart bringing home from Persia the body of the poet and diplomat Griboyedov, massacred in Tehran a few months earlier. He follows General Paskevich's troops to Erzurum, which opens its gates to the Russians, and leaves when plague breaks out there. His Journey to Arzrum, published in 1836, is a dry, ironic narrative, the opposite of the romantic Orient expected of him. It is the same war that weakens the Porte while Prokesch negotiates with the pasha of Acre: two travellers at opposite ends of the Ottoman Empire, in the same spring.

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• Edward Lane, Mœurs et coutumes des Égyptiens modernes (1836)

  The English Arabist settled in Cairo in 1825, then again in 1833, in the time of Muhammad Ali, and published in 1836 the most meticulous description of the Cairo of his century. He too distinguishes, as Nasir had eight hundred years earlier, between Cairo and Old Cairo, the pomp of power and the abundance of the bazaars. It is the same labyrinth of alleys, the same call to prayer, the same spice merchants, but the dynasty has changed many times over and the caliphate no longer exists. Lane completes from within what Nasir had begun: an anthropology of the city as lived.

• John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1837)

  In 1836, the American John Lloyd Stephens follows Laborde's route almost step by step: Cairo, Sinai, the fortress of Aqaba, the Wadi Araba, Petra. He travels in the dress of a Cairo merchant and, at Aqaba, the garrison immediately demands baksheesh: they still remember the shower of gold scattered there ten years earlier by Laborde, and Linant is still known to everyone. In Cairo, Stephens had in fact called on Linant before setting out. His account, published in 1837, lively and ironic, is a great success and launches him towards the Maya cities. To read Stephens after Laborde is to see the same route made more expensive by the passage of the first.

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• Charles Texier, Description de l'Asie Mineure, Paris, 1839-1849 (1839-1849)

  The great nineteenth-century French archaeologist travels through Anatolia and Constantinople on behalf of the Académie. He identifies for the first time a number of ancient monuments previously known only from texts. His multi-volume folio work, illustrated by the best engravers of the age, takes up Gilles's topographical project with the tools of the scientific century. Indispensable for anyone wishing to follow Gilles into modern archaeological science.

• Edward Robinson et Eli Smith, Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea (1841)

  In 1838, the American biblical scholar Edward Robinson travels through Palestine with the missionary Eli Smith, an accomplished Arabist. Bible in hand, compass and measuring tape in their saddlebags, they question villagers about the Arabic names of places and find beneath them a host of forgotten biblical sites. In Jerusalem, Robinson spots on the western wall the springing of an ancient arch that now bears his name. His Biblical Researches, published in 1841, lay the foundations of the historical geography of the Holy Land. Nine years earlier, Prokesch was already practising this surveyor-officer's method: bearings taken by compass, ramparts measured, ancient texts on the city walls debated.

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• Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient (1843)

  Nine years after Macbrair, Gérard de Nerval lands at Alexandria early in 1843 and settles in Cairo, where he rents a house, buys a Javanese slave girl and has the legend of the caliph Hakim told to him. He then travels on to Beirut and Mount Lebanon, at the heart of the rivalries between Druze and Maronites that Macbrair had already seen fermenting under Ibrahim Pasha. His Voyage en Orient, published in 1851, blends reportage, reverie and embedded tales. The contrast is complete: the poet seeks in the East a mystery to love, the missionary a people to save, yet both describe the same teeming city, its cafés, its markets and its alleys.

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• Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848)

  Four years after Ida Pfeiffer, the Englishwoman Harriet Martineau, already famous for her writings on political economy, set out in turn for the East at the end of 1846. She goes up the Nile into Nubia, crosses Sinai, visits Petra, then Jerusalem, Galilee and Damascus. Like the Viennese woman, she travels as a mature woman, not letting the fatigues of the saddle and the tent stop her. But where Pfeiffer prays, Martineau reasons: her Eastern Life, Present and Past turns Egyptian temples and holy places into stages in a history of religions, to the point of scandalising some of her readers. Two women before the same stones, two ways of believing.

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• Gustave Flaubert, Notes de voyages (1849-1851)

  With Maxime Du Camp, Flaubert travels through Egypt, then Palestine, Syria, Rhodes and Constantinople between 1849 and 1851. He reaches Jerusalem in August 1850. His notebooks, published after his death and edited in 1910, were not meant for the public: brief notes, sensations, things seen, with no indulgence for the shrines or for the quarrels of the Christian communities at the Holy Sepulchre. They make striking reading after Bénard, who already described the division of the church among Latins, Greeks and Armenians, but with a believer's fervour. Flaubert looks there for the truth of things and finds above all disillusion.

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• Gustave Flaubert, Voyage en Orient (1849-1851)

  In November 1849, Gustave Flaubert, aged twenty-seven, sails from Marseille with Maxime Du Camp, who has been entrusted with a photographic mission. They ascend the Nile in a cangia as far as the Second Cataract, stop at Philae, Thebes and Esna, then go on to Beirut, Jerusalem, Damascus and Baalbek. The notes and letters from this journey, published after the writer's death, are raw, funny, sensual, with a painter's precision. Fifteen years after Macbrair, Flaubert follows almost the same route, from Cairo to the ruins of Baalbek, but with the eye of an artist who wants to see everything and judge nothing: the reader can set two views side by side, one pious, the other profane, of the same riverbanks.

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• Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853)

  In the summer of 1853, as Énault was embarking at Marseille, the British officer Richard Burton, disguised as a Muslim doctor from Afghanistan, reached Medina and then Mecca with the pilgrim caravan. Two pilgrimages in the same summer, at the two poles of the Mediterranean world: one Christian, open, protected by consuls and steamships; the other forbidden to non-Muslims, carried out under a false name at the risk of his life. Burton's account, published in 1855 and 1856, describes the rites, crowds and roads of the Hejaz with an ethnographer's precision and a marked taste for danger.

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• Ludwig August Frankl, The Jews in the East (1856)

  Three years after Énault, the Viennese poet Ludwig August Frankl, secretary of the Jewish community of Vienna, went to Jerusalem in 1856 to found a modern school there, the Lämel foundation. His book, published in 1858, describes from within what Énault saw from outside: the life of the city's Jewish communities, their poverty, their disputes, their dealings with the consuls and the Ottoman authorities. The Catholic pilgrim stopped at the Western Wall; Frankl entered homes, synagogues and hospices, and gave the Jerusalem of those years a face that Christian accounts left in shadow.

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• Herman Melville, Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant (1856-1857)

  In the autumn of 1856, Herman Melville, worn out by the failures of Moby-Dick and Pierre, sets out alone for the Mediterranean. He discovers Constantinople, goes down to Egypt, where the Pyramids overwhelm him, then lands at Jaffa and spends several weeks in Palestine, from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, before Beirut, Greece and Italy. His journal, scribbled day by day and published only in the twentieth century, follows almost the route of Thackeray, but in another key: where the Englishman jokes before the Holy Sepulchre, the American finds a spiritual desert there. From this journey will come Clarel, a long poem on religious doubt published in 1876. See Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant.

• Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt (1862-1869)

  Suffering from tuberculosis, Lucie Duff Gordon went to Egypt in 1862 in search of drier air and spent the last years of her life there. She settles in Luxor in the "French House" built on the roofs of the temple, learns Arabic, treats the peasants, receives notables and Copts, and writes to her family letters of rare freedom, published as early as 1865. In them she describes the corvée, the taxes and the levies of men that crush the fellahin, as Macbrair had done thirty years earlier under Muhammad Ali. But where the missionary saw souls to be won, she sees neighbours and friends, and reading her one measures all that European arrogance let slip.

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• Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1867)

  In 1867, Mark Twain sails from New York on the Quaker City for one of the first organised cruises: Gibraltar, Tangier, Italy, Athens, Constantinople, Smyrna, Beirut, the Holy Land and Egypt. It is, twenty-three years later, Thackeray's cruise in an American version, with its pious pilgrims, its travellers who break off souvenirs from the monuments and a narrator who refuses to gush on command. Twain slips onto the Acropolis at night, haggles in the bazaar, is irritated by the relics of Jerusalem and contemplates the Sphinx. Published in 1869, the book became one of the best-selling travel narratives of its day and extends, in a louder tone, the satire of the tourist. See The Innocents Abroad.

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• Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)

  In 1867 Mark Twain sailed from New York on the Quaker City, an organized cruise, a novelty at the time, with American pilgrims bound for Europe and the Holy Land. In Palestine the little party rode from Damascus into Galilee, visited the Sea of Galilee and Nazareth, then Jerusalem, before re-embarking at Jaffa. Twain mocks the pious travellers, the guides and his own illusions, and describes without indulgence a poor and dusty land. A century after Plechtcheïev, Nazareth and Jaffa had become stops on a package tour, and the writer's irony replaces the gaze of the officer at war.

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• Edward Henry Palmer, The Desert of the Exodus (1871)

  In 1869, the Cambridge orientalist Edward Henry Palmer takes part in the survey of Sinai carried out for the Palestine Exploration Fund; he then sets off again with the naturalist Charles Tyrwhitt-Drake to cross on foot, without escort, the desert of the Tih, the limestone plateau that Laborde saw bordering the Wadi Araba to the west. Ten months under a small tent, inscriptions copied in the valleys, nights among the Bedouin who call him Abdallah Effendi: The Desert of the Exodus, published in 1871, seeks, like Laborde's introduction, the traces of the Exodus in the landscape, but with the instruments of a new science. The desert Laborde skirted at last becomes a mapped country.

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• Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1873-1874)

  A novelist and journalist, Amelia Edwards arrives in Egypt almost by chance, in November 1873, to escape the rain of Europe. She hires a dahabeah and sails up the Nile beyond Abu Simbel to the Second Cataract, sketching everything she sees. Her book, published in 1877, combines humour, erudition and indignation at monuments mutilated by treasure hunters and visitors. In 1882 she would found the Egypt Exploration Fund, to excavate and protect this heritage. Macbrair had seen the same temples at Thebes, Edfu and Philae; forty years later, Edwards shows what nascent tourism had made of this Nile of missionaries and pashas.

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• Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1873-1874)

  Thackeray stops at Cairo and the Pyramids; the English novelist Amelia Edwards, who arrived in Egypt almost by chance in the winter of 1873, goes much further. On a dahabieh, with a friend and a Nubian crew, she sails up the Nile to Abu Simbel and the second cataract, draws the temples, has sand-buried paintings cleared and is outraged by the plundering. Her book, published in 1877, mixes life on board, landscapes and a scholarship that grows page by page. The journey decides her life: in 1882, she founds the Egypt Exploration Fund in London. See A Thousand Miles up the Nile.

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• Edmondo De Amicis, Constantinople, Milan, 1877 (1877)

  The Italian writer describes Constantinople at the end of the Ottoman era, just before the great urban transformations of the century's close. Bazaars, whirling dervishes, cemeteries, the Bosporus, Hagia Sophia: a vivid and richly documented book that still serves today as a landmark for the Western imagination of Istanbul.

• Samuel White Baker, Cyprus as I Saw It in 1879 (1879)

  A year after the Ottoman Empire ceded the administration of Cyprus to Great Britain, the Nile explorer Samuel Baker lands at Larnaca and travels the island for several months with his wife Florence, by cart and under canvas. He describes the roads, the devastated forests, the peasants, the taxes, the towns of Nicosia, Kyrenia and Famagusta, and judges the new administration as harshly as the old. More than a century after Niebuhr, the question remains the same: why is so fertile an island so poor? Baker's answer, that of a pragmatic colonist, echoes the anger of the Cypriots of 1766.

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• Laurence Oliphant, Haifa, or Life in Modern Palestine (1882-1885)

  In 1882 the British writer and former diplomat Laurence Oliphant settled in Haifa, at the foot of Mount Carmel where Énault's journey ends, and spent his summers in a Druze village on the mountain. His letters to the New York Sun, collected in 1887, describe the German Templer colony, the first Jewish villages, the monasteries, the excavations, the Druze and the Bedouin. Where Énault saw a sacred land frozen in its biblical memories, Oliphant observes a changing country, cleared, settled and coveted. The pilgrims' Carmel becomes in his hands a vantage point on modern Palestine.

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• Guy Le Strange, Palestine sous les musulmans (1890)

  In 1890, the English orientalist gathered the descriptions that Arab and Persian geographers had left of Syria and Palestine from the seventh to the fifteenth century, giving considerable space to Nasir's account of Jerusalem and the Haram. Reading this collection after the Safarnama places the Persian's notebook within the chorus of all those who described the holy city before the Crusaders: Le Strange translates, compares, situates, and lets Nasir's voice be heard among his peers.

• Matilde Serao, In the Country of Jesus (1893)

  Forty years after Énault, the Neapolitan journalist Matilde Serao, co-founder of the daily Il Mattino, made her own journey to the Holy Land in 1893 and drew from it a series of articles, collected in a volume in 1898. The same profession, the same Catholic faith, the same road to Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Galilee. Serao writes with fervour and a keen sense of scene, crowds and colour that recalls her predecessor's. The two journalists, the Parisian of the Second Empire and the Neapolitan of the century's end, form a diptych of pilgrimage as seen by the press.

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• Pierre Loti, Jérusalem (1894)

  In the spring of 1894, after crossing the Sinai on camelback, Pierre Loti arrives in Jerusalem as a pilgrim without faith, come to seek a religious emotion he does not find. Fifty years after Thackeray, he describes the same Holy Sepulchre crowded with rival sects, the same throngs of pilgrims, a grey city under the rain, but in a tone of fervent melancholy that is the exact opposite of the Englishman's irony. Published in 1895, the book forms with Le Désert and La Galilée an Eastern triptych. To read Loti after Thackeray is to measure how the same place can arouse satire in one and nostalgic fervour in the other. See Jérusalem.

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• Pierre Loti, La Galilée (1895)

  In the spring of 1894, after Jerusalem, Pierre Loti headed north and crossed Galilee on horseback, through April showers and fields of flowers. He passed through Nazareth, lingered on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, then went on to Damascus. His book closes a trilogy begun with Le Désert and Jérusalem. Loti looks in these landscapes, without being sure he will find it, for the trace of Christ, and he notes the poverty of the villages and the melancholy of the holy places. More than a century after Plechtcheïev's ride to Nazareth and Cana, the same land becomes the setting for an inner quest.

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• Pierre Loti, Le Désert (1895)

  On 22 February 1894, Pierre Loti leaves the Springs of Moses with a camel caravan, climbs to the monastery of Sinai and goes down towards the Gulf of Aqaba, determined to take the longest route, the one through the desert of Petra, precisely because the guides advise him to avoid it. At Aqaba, the Ottoman administrator bars his way: the tribes of Idumea are in revolt, and Loti must turn off towards Gaza across the desert. Le Désert, published in 1895, is a journal of light and silence, all in shades of sand and granite. It shows what the entry into Petra was worth, won by Laborde through patience and gifts.

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• Gertrude Bell, Syria: The Desert & the Sown (1905)

  In early 1905, Gertrude Bell leaves Jerusalem on horseback, crosses the Hauran and the Druze country, reaches Damascus, Homs and Hama, then lingers at Aleppo before descending by Antioch to Alexandretta, where her book, published in 1907, ends. It is almost Niebuhr's itinerary, in the opposite direction and a hundred and forty years later: the same Bedouins masters of the desert, the same Nusayris, the same ruins of Antioch. Bell, an archaeologist and future player in British policy in Iraq, writes with a sense of dialogue and portrait that makes this account one of the classics of travel in the Levant.

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• T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)

  On 6 July 1917, Thomas Edward Lawrence enters Aqaba with the Howeitat of Auda Abu Tayi and Sharif Nasir, after a long march through the desert that has taken the town from behind: coming from the plateau, they descend the valley of the Itm, Laborde's Wadi Djetoum, while the Turkish defences face the sea. The fortress where Laborde waited for the Alawin chiefs becomes the base of the Arab Revolt, and the approaches to Petra a front line. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, privately printed in a small edition in 1926 and then published in 1935, tells of this land of Edom crossed by dromedary, almost a century after Laborde and Linant passed through.

• Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul, souvenirs d'une ville, Istanbul, 2003 (2003)

  The Turkish novelist, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize, recounts his childhood in republican Istanbul of the 1950s and 1960s. He describes the particular melancholy of a city aware of its fall from greatness. A deep resonance with Gilles's tone: the same awareness of a lost greatness, four centuries later, in another form.