For the second cause, the greatness of the Roman Empire appeared the greater for their having so little with which to compare it. The empire of the Ottomans had, it is true, by now eclipsed it; but Spain's was a vague wilderness, inhabited by savages; the Persian of old they only knew through the doctored accounts of the Latin writers; and of the overwhelming antiquity and extent of the Chinese they had no real knowledge at all. All, the Turkish excepted, that were not shadowy to them, were what Rome had obliterated, the moral effect of which, associated, as it must needs be, with the name of the city, endured as the chief asset of the Papal power. If any one then had taken Gibbon's view, that the remains of the Roman Empire were approaching dissolution, it would only have been because he thought that the end of the world was equally near. And this unbroken continuity of power did not merely exist, but was alive with fresh life. Nothing had replaced Rome; there was nothing to replace it; there was no need to replace it, since there was nothing effete nor slack about it, however much corruption was patent to the "Reformed."
The relations between visitors who were "Reformed" and Rome is another interesting feature of the tourist-life of the time when both were militant and a large proportion of tourists anti-Catholic. Much depended on the reigning Pope. In the time of Sixtus V (1585-90) Protestants came in fear, lived in disguise, and sought protection; Englishmen from Cardinal Allen, who readily granted it for a few days, to enable them to see the antiquities. Clement VIII (1592-1605) was much more lenient, yet Moryson thought it advisable even then to pass for a Frenchman, and to safeguard himself through Cardinal Allen, as well; also to leave before Easter, when there was a house-to-house visitation to enquire if all were communicants. Precautions, on the other hand, might be overdone. It was all very well to make a practice, as one did, of going through a church on the way to his morning drink, in case spies were about, but to tell one's host, as a certain German did, on returning home from an afternoon walk, that he had just been to mass, when all the masses were said in the morning, was going too far! And conforming to custom had its own dangers, too, when it formed a habit, as Moryson found, who, on entering a church at Geneva, reached out his hand towards the poor-box in mistake for the holy-water stoop to which he had accustomed himself; all the more embarrassing a mistake for his being in the company of Theodore Beza.
Gregory XV (1621-3)—to return to the Popes—forbade even the other princes of Italy to admit any but Roman Catholics to their dominions; and there were, besides, the already-mentioned prohibitions from the authorities at home. The state of affairs in general may be taken as that suggested by the localisation of Shakespeare's plays. Two-thirds of his scenes are laid abroad, in Italy more frequently than elsewhere outside England: yet his contemporary Italy is practically always the North, the South being reserved for the "classical" period. Nevertheless, it may safely be assumed that the danger was not quite so great as the fear, and that where the former was incurred, the sufferer had only himself to blame. Whether or no the high officials at Rome were faulty in dogma or in virtue, they were usually both men of the world and gentlemen. Montaigne's belongings, for example, provided the searchers with plenty of material for a charge of heresy, but a short conversation overcame all difficulties. And one William Davis, an English sailor[44] who fell ill at Rome in 1598, found by experience that a Protestant who was civil would be cared for in a hospital free and given food and money on leaving. The more usual kind of behaviour has already been illustrated; only it must not be imagined that the incautiousness and incivility which turned the Protestant into a martyr were less conspicuous among other sects. By the law of Geneva a three-days stay was permitted to travellers of every creed. The poet-philosopher, Giordano Bruno, and the Jesuit missionary, Parsons, both rested there; their zeal prescribed the extremes of controversial outrage in return for tolerance and courtesy.
But Rome and its associations have had more than their share of attention. Imagine, then, the traveller started on the invariable excursion to Naples, the equal of Milan as a finishing school, and one of the few cities with underground drainage. Some, but not many, might go on to Sicily; to Syracuse for the feast of Santa Lucia, for choice. But what with robbers and corsair-raids, there was no travelling there without a strong guard, and the towns were so unsafe that Messina seems to have been the first of European towns to evolve a combined bank and safe-deposit under municipal guarantee; established by 1611, when Sandys noticed it. Those who did reach Sicily usually visited Malta as well; small boats with five rowers left about two hours before sunset, and if no Turkish sail was sighted, went on, reaching Malta about dawn.
But the foregoing presupposes the Mont-Cenis route into Italy, and leaves out three towns which must be included: Padua, Verona, and Bergamo. Padua had its university, the most-visited in Europe; Verona, its relics of Roman times, which commanded an attention that they now have to share with the romantic aspects of mediæval history, romance that sixteenth-century people were not inclined to be attracted by, having too first-hand an acquaintance with feuds to look at their picturesque side. Moreover, the visible remains of these feuds, here and in every Italian city, showed a ludicrous side, for in so far as they did not take the form of assassination by the foulest means, they consisted in the two parties of retainers parading the town, armed with an absurd completeness, each one confining itself to certain quarters of the town by tacit agreement in order to render collisions impossible. The habits dramatised in the first scene of "Romeo and Juliet" are those of Londoners, in so far as they are at all contemporary. The third town, Bergamo, thousands pass by now, year by year, within a few miles, never knowing what they miss by not stopping, but then it lay on the north-and-south road as much as any town in Italy, and not even the Frankfort fair surpassed that of Bergamo, August 25 and the following week, when lucky was he who could find sleeping-room in a stable.
Yet however complete was the outfit obtainable across the Alps, there remained other countries which were factors in politics; and which possessed, moreover, histories, courts, universities, and men of learning; fewer temptations, possibly, and more "true religion." Of these France was the one the most easily accessible to a greater number. As to its boundaries, they were somewhat narrower in almost every direction than at present; especially southeastwards; Lyons was a frontier-town. Its attractions lay principally in Paris, the only city north of the Alps comparable to Milan as a centre for the training of a man for a courtly, or an international, life; and in the government, which, in its extreme centralisation and in its idealisation of monarchy, corresponded most closely with the more practicable ideals of the day.
In planning a route through France it was advisable to go straight to Paris, if only for a few days, since to have been in Paris gave one a position in the provinces. As a place to stay at, Orleans was really far more frequently chosen by foreigners than Paris. Its university was as international as any in Europe, and ahead of any other in maintaining a circulating library for students, which lent any book on a receipt being given for it; "an extraordinary custom" says Evelyn. Here, too, began the district reputed best for spoken French, which brought strangers to stay at Blois and Tours and Saumur as well; to Saumur, perhaps, more than to the other two, by reason of the number and quality of its teachers on all subjects; it was a centre for Protestantism and learning in combination. Poictiers for law, Montpellier for medicine; and there is an end of the towns that the student-tourist abided in. For the country in general it should be added that just here, where centralisation and autocracy were developing most rapidly and thoroughly, was reckoned as the most decidedly free region of Europe, "liberty," according to sixteenth-century standards, depending not on administration being either lenient or constitutional, but on the extent to which the individual was not interfered with by social conventions. Political tyranny was not regarded as objectionable on principle, except by authors.
The United Provinces differed in no noteworthy respect from Holland of to-day, so far as territory goes, and during the earlier part of this period attracted but little attention; but as time went on and from imminent destruction they escaped into independence, they drew the tourist, first out of curiosity and subsequently as a State which compelled the study of every one who needed to observe the present and foresee the future. Many minor interests, too, brought individuals thither, as a result of Dutch enterprise. We find, for example, Sir William Brereton surveying the country in order to understand their methods of decoying wild-fowl; and Sir Richard Weston, who introduced locks into English rivers and the rotation of crops into English agriculture, learning both these novelties there. And though no one as yet went abroad to study the possibilities of practical philanthropy, there were many who noted, with an admiration that doubtless bore fruit, their charitable institutions of all kinds, unequalled then outside Rome. In one respect they were ahead of Italy: the suddenness of their prosperity resulted in the latest improvements in laying out towns—wider streets and greater regularity being more in evidence there than elsewhere. So uniform was the appearance of the houses, says one, that they seemed to have been all built by the same workmen at the same time; whereas the Italian towns, even in re-building, made no such experiments, because the old narrow streets formed the best safeguard against the surprise-attack of which they lived in constant dread, especially from the Turks' corsairs. No one town could claim precedence, though Amsterdam, even as early as 1600, struck De Rohan as equalled by few in Europe for wealth and beauty; it was rather the excellence and frequency of the towns that occasioned remark—twenty-nine fine ones within sixty leagues of boundary; together with the number of storks which the municipalities cherished, as animals known to harbour a preference for places where representative government flourished.
As for the Empire, it meant many different things to different visitors. The variety of territory and government was absolutely bewildering, yet certain marked cross-divisions presented themselves, such as the triple division of it into upper Germany, Hansa League (with Saxony), and frontier; the frontier being those districts which were forever either meeting, or fearing, a Turkish invasion. Then there was division according to politics, Catholic, Reformed, Protestant, to be studied by the Average Tourist for purposes of alliance, and a third classification according to form of government, the imperial authority, venerable and increasingly vague; princes; "free" towns. The first system of division has, however, most in common with the greater number of foreigners' interests, and of its three sub-divisions upper Germany was paid the greatest attention, partly because it lay across so many routes, partly because there was so much to see. It gives the dominant note to references to German-speaking countries in the travel-literature of the day, a note of peaceful energy and hopeful prosperity. While not recommended to these travellers' notice by a well-known past such as the greater coherence of France and Italy had enabled historians to evolve for them, those who lingered there, as most did, saw that its possessions, human and non-human, gave it a present interest and a promise not surpassed elsewhere. The Germany of the last fifty years of the sixteenth century is practically ignored by modern English historians: the story of its continual activity and of its continuous relations with England contain none of those sensational hindrances to the advance of civilisation with which historians concern themselves, but the frequent references to those relations by the contemporary historian of Queen Elizabeth's reign, William Camden, bear witness to the current opinion and knowledge which found expression in the number of visitors from all quarters and the attention they devote to it in relation to that accorded to other countries.