CHAPTER II.—FROM VENICE TO DAMASCUS.
No commercial arithmetic called a certain Ludovico di Varthema to adventure. Like Dante’s Ulysses, “nothing could quench his inward burning to have full witness of the world.” “Ungifted,” so he tells us, “with that far-casting wit for which the earth in not enough, and which ranges through the loftiest regions of the firmament with careful watch and survey; but possessed of slender parts merely,” he fixed his mind on beholding with his own eyes some unknown part of the world and on marking “where places are, what is curious in their peoples, their different animals, and what fruit-bearing and scented trees grow there ... keeping before me that the thing which a single eye-witness may set forth shall outweigh what ten may declare on hearsay.” It is as if a cavalier of Boiardo or Ariosto had forsaken fairy land and sought novel adventure in the kingdom of knowledge. Varthema set out to see and know; and, although obviously a man of no great fortune, he would seem to have neglected remarkable opportunities of trading and growing rich.
That he was a Bolognese, we learn from the title-page of his volume—the Itinerario. As a citizen of Bologna, the Pope was his overlord; and we find him calling himself, by a pardonable license, a Roman. Whether eager curiosity was the only motive which impelled him to travel, we know not. He lets drop in the middle of his volume that he left a wife and children at home. Marriage in Italy was a matter of family arrangement, with a view to the increase of family wealth and power; and children could readily be left under the care of kinsmen. “The Italians make little difference between children and nephews or near kinsfolk,” wrote Bacon, “but, so they be of the lump, they care not, though they pass not through their own body.” And the family council has parental force in Italy, even to-day. The unsettled condition of every Italian State in the days of that “Most holy Lord the Pope Alexander Borgia,” his crafty, treacherous son, and hardly less crafty and treacherous native statesmen and foreign invaders, often made swift change of residence highly desirable. Of that affectation of the men of the Renaissance—excessive and trumpeted desire of fame, which was a mere imitation of the classics,—there is not a trace in Varthema: he cared as little for bubbles as for baubles. Whatever other motives may have incited him, lust of travel was his predominant passion. What his occupation had been is unknown. On an occasion when it was helpful to him to pose as a physician he did so; and his close observation of the structure and habits of animals and the qualities of plants, suggests the kind of educative discipline which a physician would receive. But since he confesses to having ordered a cold astringent preparation when a warm laxative was required, his knowledge of physic was limited or readily forgotten. Again, since, on one occasion, he takes military service as a Mameluke; professes himself, on another occasion, to be an adept in the manufacture of mortars; and we find him fighting with the intrepidity and skill of a proved warrior against Arabs in India, he may very well have been a soldier before setting out on his travels. In that age of confusion, when the successes of the French in Lombardy broke the balance of power among the Italian States, there was ample opportunity of martial employment. There is not a trace of the accomplished haunter of courts, no love of literature or of art apparent in the Itinerario. Varthema’s birth, upbringing, and “the fate of his bones” are secrets which lie securely hidden in the ruins of time. But his narrative endures—an imperishable monument. It reveals him as a true man of his period. His skill in dissembling, and his insensitiveness at the call of expediency to any obligation of truth or gratitude, contrast with his scrupulous pursuit of truth for its own sake and the accuracy of his observation. His record of travel is one which displays the coolness of his courage no less than its intrepid dash; it reveals a man constant of purpose, and endowed with ingenuity, resourcefulness, self-restraint, prudence, sagacity, and a sense of humour. Here indeed is a rare man!
In the year 1502 there was peace in the Levant. Lucrative trade between Venice and Egypt went on, unmolested by Turkish fleets. At the close of that year, Varthema took sail for Alexandria; the wind was favourable, and he reached the great port on one of the early days of 1503. Alexandria was the chief mart for the interchange of the wares of East and West, and therefore well known to Europeans; “Wherefore,” says Varthema, “yearning after new things as a thirsty man doth for fresh water, I entered the Nile and arrived at Cairo.” “Babylon,” as Europeans called Cairo, was reputed to be one of the most marvellous of cities; but our traveller was disappointed to find it far smaller than he had thought. He declines to discuss the government established there, or the arrogance of its Mameluke rulers; “for my fellow-countrymen well wot of such matters.” Close upon two centuries had passed since a Circassian slave clothed the Imam with a royal robe, usurped his mundane powers, reduced him to a nonentity, founded a dynasty, and ruled by military force from the Taurus and Euphrates to the Nile. This dynasty delegated authority to Emirs and Sheiks. It ruled by means of a soldiery, like itself, of slave origin, cruel, insolent and unbending. Children of Christian descent, brought mainly from the region which lies to the south of Caucasus, were instructed in the faith of the Moslem and trained to physical endurance, boldness, skill in warfare, and contempt of all men save their masters and themselves. These Mamelukes, as they were called, received liberal payment; they were allowed to keep a harem and to rear a family. The land lay crushed and impotent beneath this military caste. Military slaves, they exhibited the vices of slaves in office. As in the time of Ibn Batûta, the Sultan of Cairo ruled; but now ruled over delegates who were frequently rebellious to his authority; yet he and they and all, even to the terrible ottoman Turk at Constantinople, who now held Eastern Europe in bondage from the Danube to Cape Matapan, acknowledged the headship of the Imam at Cairo as legitimate Caliph of the great Abbaside line.
Leaving Cairo, Varthema took ship for Beyrout. Here, he saw nothing noteworthy, save the ruins of an ancient palace, “which, so they say,” was once the residence of the princess whom St. George rescued from the dragon. We find a novel scepticism in this man of the new age. “So they say,” is a phrase of frequent recurrence in the Itinerario. The sceptic’s ears are as open as his brain is active; he repeats all the information given to him, however extravagant and however healthy his doubt; but he is careful to let the reader know that it is mere hearsay; he gives a hint of his own disbelief, and leaves the matter open to sane judgment: the piping times of a merchant in marvels have passed away. When Varthema has his own ends to serve, we shall find him telling a lie with as little scruple as any diplomatist of his generation; but he records faithfully and exactly what he went out to see and the incidents which befell him. We have the testimony of the precise Burton that “all things well considered, Ludovico[15] Bartema, for correctness of observation and readiness of wit, stands in the foremost rank of oriental travellers”; and that great authority writes thus although he only quotes from Richard Eden’s imperfect and interpolated translation of a Latin deformation of the Itinerario; and probably knew of no other copy.
Occasionally Varthema falls into a not uncommon blunder: he exaggerates numbers; but he is always hard-headed, incredulous of tradition, and not at all given to romancing.
A short voyage of two days brought our Italian from Beyrout to Tripoli, whence he took the caravan-route to Hamath, a large city on the Orontes, once an outpost of Judah, retaken by Israel in the wars between the two kingdoms. At Menin, a land of luscious fruits and the serviceable cotton-plant, he found a population of Christian-subjects of the Emir of Damascus and two beautiful churches, “said to have been built by Helena, mother of Constantine.” He went on to Aleppo, and thence eight days of easy travel brought him to a city so ancient that its foundation is lost in unfathomed time. He writes of Damascus that “to set it forth is beyond my power.” Here he remained some months, in order to learn Arabic—a task quite indispensable for farther travel in Mohammedan lands. He tells us of the fortress, built by a Florentine renegade, a man skilled in physic, who cured a Sultan suffering from the effects of poison, and is venerated as a holy man. This transformation of the physician into the saint may have suggested some serviceable play-acting in India, of which we shall become spectators later on.