PIETRO DELLA VALLE.
Born 1586.—Died 1652.
Pietro della Valle, who, according to Southey, is “the most romantic in his adventures of all true travellers,” was descended from an ancient and noble family, and born at Rome on the 11th of April, 1586. When his education, which appears to have been carefully conducted and liberal, was completed, he addicted himself, with that passionate ardour which characterized all the actions of his life, to the study of literature, and particularly poetry; but the effervescence of his animal spirits requiring some other vent, he shortly afterward exchanged the closet for the camp, in the hope that the quarrel between the pope and the Venetians, and the troubles which ensued upon the death of Henry IV. of France, would afford him some opportunity of distinguishing himself. His expectations being disappointed, however, he in 1611 embarked on board the Spanish fleet, then about to make a descent on the coast of Barbary; but nothing beyond a few skirmishes taking place, he again beheld his desire of glory frustrated, and returned to Rome.
Here vexations of another kind awaited him. Relinquishing the services of Fame for that of an earthly mistress, he found himself no less unsuccessful, the lady preferring some illustrious unknown, whose name, like her own, is now overwhelmed with “the husks and formless ruin of oblivion.” Pietro, however, severely felt the sting of such a rejection; and in the gloomy meditations which it gave birth to, conceived a plan which, as he foresaw, fulfilled his most ambitious wishes, and attached an imperishable reputation to his name. The idea was no sooner conceived than he proceeded to put it in execution, and taking leave of his friends and of Rome, repaired to Naples, in order to consult with his friend, Mario Schipano, a physician of that city, distinguished for his oriental learning and abilities, concerning the best means of conducting his hazardous enterprise. Fortunately he possessed sufficient wealth to spurn the counsel of sloth and timidity, which, when any act of daring is proposed, are always at hand, disguised as prudence and good sense, to cast a damp upon the springs of energy, or to travesty and misrepresent the purposes of the bold. Pietro, however, was not to be intimidated. The wonders and glories of the East were for ever present to his imagination, and having heard mass, and been solemnly clothed by the priest with the habit of a pilgrim, he proceeded to Venice in order to embark for Constantinople. The ship in which he sailed left the port on the 6th of June, 1614. No event of peculiar interest occurred during the voyage, which, lying along the romantic shores and beautiful islands of Greece, merely served to nourish and strengthen Pietro’s enthusiasm. On drawing near the Dardanelles the sight of the coast of Troy, with its uncertain ruins and heroic tombs, over which poetry has spread an atmosphere brighter than any thing belonging to mere physical nature, awoke all the bright dreams of boyhood, and hurrying on shore, his heart overflowing with rapture, he kissed the earth from which, according to tradition, the Roman race originally sprung.
From the Troad to Constantinople the road lies over a tract hallowed by the footsteps of antiquity, and at every step Pietro felt his imagination excited by some memorial of the great of other days. On arriving at the Ottoman capital, where he purposed making a long stay, one of his first cares was to acquire a competent knowledge of the language of the country, which he did as much for the vanity, as he himself acknowledges, of exhibiting his accomplishments on his return to Italy, where the knowledge of that language was rare, as for the incalculable benefit which must accrue from it during his travels. Here he for the first time tasted coffee, at that time totally unknown in Italy. He was likewise led to entertain hopes of being able to obtain from the sultan’s library a complete copy of the Decades of Livy; but after flitting before him some time like a phantom, the manuscript vanished, and the greater portion of the mighty Paduan remained veiled as before. While he was busily engaged in these researches, the plague broke out, every house in Galata, excepting that of the French ambassador, in which he resided, was infected; corpses and coffins met the sickened eye wherever it turned; the chief of his attendants pined away through terror; and, although at first he affected to laugh and make merry with his fears, they every day fed so abundantly upon horrors and rumours of horrors, that they at length became an overmatch for his philosophy, and startled him with the statement that one hundred and forty thousand victims had already perished, and that peradventure Pietro della Valle might be the next.
This consideration caused him to turn his eye towards Egypt; and although the plague shortly afterward abated, his love of motion having been once more awakened, he bade adieu to Constantinople, and sailed for Alexandria. Arriving in Egypt, he ascended the Nile to Cairo, viewed the pyramids, examined the mummy-pits; and then, with a select number of friends and attendants, departed across the desert to visit Horeb and Sinai, the wells of Moses, and other places celebrated in the Bible. This journey being performed in the heart of winter, he found Mount Sinai covered with snow, which did not, however, prevent his rambling about among its wild ravines, precipices, and chasms; when, his pious curiosity being gratified, he visited Ælau or Ailoth, the modern Akaba, and returned by Suez to Cairo. Among the very extraordinary things he beheld in this country were a man and woman upwards of eight feet in height, natives of Upper Egypt, whom he measured himself: and tortoises as large as the body of a carriage!
His stay in Egypt was not of long continuance, the longing to visit the Holy Land causing him to regard every other country with a kind of disdain; and accordingly, joining a small caravan which was proceeding thither across the desert, he journeyed by El Arish and Gaza to Jerusalem. After witnessing the various mummeries practised in the Holy City at Easter by the Roman Catholics, and making an excursion to the banks of the Jordan, where he saw a number of female pilgrims plunging naked into the sacred stream in the view of an immense multitude, he bent his steps towards Northern Syria, and hurried forward by the way of Damascus to Aleppo. In this city he remained some time, his body requiring some repose, though the ardour and activity of his mind appeared to be every day increasing. The journey which he now meditated across the Arabian Desert into Mesopotamia required considerable preparation. The mode of travelling was new. Horses were to be exchanged for camels; the European dress for that of the East; and instead of the sun, the stars and the moon were to light them over the waste.
He was now unconsciously touching upon the most important point of his career. In the caravan with which he departed from Aleppo, September 16, 1616, there was a young merchant of Bagdad, with whom, during the journey, he formed a close intimacy. This young man was constantly in the habit of entertaining him, as they rode along side by side through the moonlight, or when they sat down in their tent during the heat of the day, with the praises of a young lady of Bagdad, who, according to his description, to every charm of person which could delight the eye united all those qualities of heart and mind which render the conquests of beauty durable. It was clear to Pietro from the beginning that the youthful merchant was in love, and therefore he at first paid but little regard to his extravagant panegyrics; but by degrees the conversations of his companion produced a sensible effect upon his own mind, so that his curiosity to behold the object of so much praise, accompanied, perhaps, by a slight feeling of another kind, at length grew intense, and he every day looked upon the slow march of the camels, and the surface of the boundless plain before him, with more and more impatience. The wandering Turcoman with his flocks and herds, rude tent, and ruder manners, commanded much less attention than he would have done at any other period; and even the Bedouins, whose sharp lances and keen scimitars kept awake the attention of the rest of the caravan, were almost forgotten by Pietro. However, trusting to the information of his interested guide, he represents them as having filled up the greater number of the wells in the desert, so that there remained but a very few open, and these were known to those persons only whose profession it was to pilot caravans across this ocean of sand. The sagacity with which these men performed their duty was wonderful. By night the stars served them for guides; but when these brilliant signals were swallowed up in the light of the sun, they then had recourse to the slight variations in the surface of the plain, imperceptible to other eyes, to the appearance or absence of certain plants, and even to the smell of the soil, by all which signs they always knew exactly where they were.
At length, after a toilsome and dangerous march of fifteen days, they arrived upon the banks of the Euphrates, a little after sunrise, and pitched their tents in the midst of clumps of cypress and small cedar-trees. On the following night, as soon as the moon began to silver over the waters of the Euphrates, the caravan again put itself in motion; and, descending along the course of the stream, in six days arrived at Anah, a city of the Arabs, lying on both sides of the river, whose broad surface is here dotted with numerous small islands covered with fruit-trees. They now crossed the river; and the merchants of the caravan, avoiding the safe and commodious road which lay through towns in which custom-house officers were found, struck off into a desolate and dangerous route, traversing Mesopotamia nearly in a right line, and on the 19th of October reached the banks of the Tigris, a larger and more rapid river than the Euphrates, though on this occasion Pietro thought its current less impetuous. The night before they entered Bagdad the caravan was robbed in a very dexterous manner. Their tents were pitched in the plain, the officers of the custom-house posted around to prevent smuggling; the merchants, congratulating themselves that they had already succeeded in eluding the duties almost to the extent of their desires, had fallen into the sound sleep which attends on a clear conscience; and Pietro, his domestics, and the other inmates of the caravan had followed their example. In the dead of the night the camp was entered by stealth, the tents rummaged, and considerable booty carried off. The banditti, entering Pietro’s tent, and finding all asleep, opened the trunk in which were all the manuscripts, designs, and plans he had made during his travels, carefully packed up, as if for the convenience of robbers, in a small portable escrutoire; but by an instinct which was no less fortunate for them than for the traveller and posterity, since such spoil could have been of no value to them, they rejected the escrutoire, and selected all our traveller’s fine linen, the very articles in which he hoped to have captivated the beauty whose eulogies had so highly inflamed his imagination. A Venetian, who happened to be in the camp, had his arquebuse stolen from under his head, and this little incident, as it tended to show that the robbers had made still more free with others than with him, somewhat consoled Pietro for the loss of his linen. As the traveller does not himself attach any suspicion to the military gentlemen of the custom-house, it might, perhaps, be uncharitable to deposite the burden of this theft upon their shoulders; but in examining all the circumstances of the transaction, I confess the idea that their ingenuity was concerned did present itself to me.
Next morning the beams of the rising sun, gleaming upon a thousand slender minarets and lofty-swelling domes surmounted by gilded crescents, discovered to him the ancient city of the califs stretching away right and left to a vast distance over the plain, while the Tigris, like a huge serpent, rolled along, cutting the city into two parts, and losing itself among the sombre buildings which seemed to tremble over its waters. The camels were once more loaded, and the caravan, stretching itself out into one long, narrow column, toiled along over the plain, and soon entered the dusty, winding streets of Bagdad. Here Pietro, whose coming had been announced the evening before by his young commercial companion, was met by the father of the Assyrian beauty, a fine patriarchal-looking old man, who entreated him to be his guest during his stay in Mesopotamia. This favour Pietro declined, but at the same time he eagerly accepted of the permission to visit at his house; and was no sooner completely established in his own dwelling than he fully availed himself of this permission.