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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1806-1807)
Setting out in 1806, the French writer crossed Greece, reached Constantinople, landed in the Holy Land, visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem, then returned by way of Egypt and the Maghreb. His account, published in Paris in 1811, follows almost step by step Nasir's Syro-Palestinian route, but the gaze has changed entirely: where the Persian measures cubits and counts gates, the Romantic seeks ruins, tombs, and emotion. Two opposite ways of keeping a notebook before the same stones.
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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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Alphonse de Lamartine, A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1832-1833)
Twenty years after Mayr, Alphonse de Lamartine landed at Beirut in 1832 with his wife and his daughter Julia, who died there in December. He visited Jerusalem, Damascus, Baalbek and the cedars, called on Emir Bashir, whose cruelty Mayr had reported, then returned by way of Constantinople and, like him, overland through Bulgaria and Serbia. Published in 1835, his Voyage en Orient is the great Romantic account of these places. The contrast could not be sharper: where the merchant counts piastres and days of quarantine, the poet prays, dreams and composes.
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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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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.
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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.
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Hans Christian Andersen, A Poet's Bazaar (1840-1841)
In the spring of 1841 Hans Christian Andersen returned from Constantinople by the Black Sea and the Danube, on the steamers that now plied the river up to Vienna. He did quarantine at Orsova, the frontier town where Mayr had spent twenty-one days in the lazaretto in November 1813, and describes the Bulgarian, Serbian and Wallachian banks. The book, published in 1842, turns the journey into a poetic tableau. What had been for Mayr a dangerous crossing by caravan and boat had become, a generation later, a steamboat cruise; but the lazaretto had hardly changed.
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Gérard de Nerval, Journey to the Orient (1843)
In 1843 Gérard de Nerval spent several months in Cairo, bought a Javanese slave there, then went on to Beirut and Mount Lebanon, where he took a passionate interest in the Druze and the Maronites, before ending his journey in Constantinople during Ramadan. These are three major stages of Mayr's journey, thirty years later. The Voyage en Orient, published in 1851, mixes observation, reverie and legend. The conflicts of the Lebanese Mountain, which the Swiss merchant had seen at close quarters in Emir Bashir's time, became in Nerval's hands material for inquiry and story.
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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, Voyage en Orient (1849-1851)
Five years after Thackeray, Gustave Flaubert and his friend Maxime Du Camp, who is charged with photographing the monuments, land at Alexandria in November 1849. They go up the Nile to the second cataract, climb the Pyramids, then pass through Beirut, Jerusalem, Rhodes, Smyrna, Constantinople and Athens before returning in 1851. Most of Thackeray's Eastern stops are found there, but seen by a man who flees the conventional picturesque as much as he does and seeks raw sensation: heat, grime, almehs, death. His notes and letters, published after his death, have the freedom of an intimate notebook. The Holy Sepulchre disappoints Flaubert as it had irritated Thackeray. See Voyage en Orient.
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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.
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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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Vasily Vereshchagin, Tableaux et croquis de l'Asie centrale (1870)
The great Russian painter, who follows Konstantin von Kaufman's military expedition to Turkestan in the 1860s and 1870s, paints Samarkand, Khiva, and Bukhara before they are absorbed into Russia. His descriptions accompanying the paintings depict a Central Asia still recognizable from Schiltberger's: local emirs, religious fanaticism, Circassian slaves, processions of horsemen. The last years when the steppe still looked like the steppe.
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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.
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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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Lord Curzon, Russia in Central Asia (1889)
The future Viceroy of India publishes in 1889 his account of a journey through the newly conquered Russian Turkestan. Schiltberger had seen Sarai on the Volga in its splendor; Curzon crosses its ruins of sand. A thousand roads the Bavarian had traveled as a captive, the Englishman retraces by trans-Caspian railway. Industrial modernity has replaced the nomadic steppe.
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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.
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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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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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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.