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Abstract
The Roman aristocrat Pietro Della Valle, who defined himself as a pilgrim and as a citizen of the world, can stand as a paradigmatic case of the emergence of the modern curious traveller out of a religious tradition of pilgrimage. Della Valle did indeed travel to the Holy Land as a pious Catholic, in the second decade of the seventeenth century. However, his pilgrimage was from the start conditioned by antiquarian and romantic concerns, and he eventually extended his journey beyond Ottoman lands towards Persia and India. This article will elucidate how the pilgrim fashioned and transformed himself around a multi-faceted idea of travel in his letters at different stages of his journey, and as a member of a learned academy upon his return to Italy. Looking back at his visit to the Holy Land as part of a project of aristocratic self-fashioning, it will argue that the transformation of a religious pilgrimage into a complex experience involving religious and political schemes, scientific erudition and love did not open a chasm between piety and worldly learning, but instead widened the scope of curiosity in more exotic and cosmopolitan directions. The case of Della Valle exemplifies how early modern European Christian identities, in this respect often at odds with late antique and early medieval antecedents, were frequently built around the idea that religion and knowledge of the world were largely complementary, in a manner that facilitated new attitudes of cultural accommodation that placed increasing emphasis on the universality of learned civility over strictly religious experiences.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Richard Calis, Theodor Dunkelgrün, Jaś Elsner, Sundar Henny, Richard Oosterhoff, Zur Shalev, and two anonymous readers for opportunities to present this work and for useful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. For an illuminating example of this recent historiography, which we may define as revisionist, see Henny and Shalev, “Jerusalem Reformed.”
2. Luther, “Address,” 299: “If any one wishes to go on a pilgrimage or to make a vow for a pilgrimage, he should first inform his priest or the temporal authorities of the reason, and if it should turn out that he wishes to do it for the sake of good works, let this vow and work be just trampled upon by the priest or the temporal authority as an infernal delusion, and let them tell him to spend his money and the labour a pilgrimage would cost on God’s commandments and on a thousandfold better work, namely, on his family and his poor neighbours. But if he does it out of curiosity, to see cities and countries, he may be allowed to do so.”
3. For the survival of early modern pilgrimage, see Noonan, The Road to Jerusalem. For a suggestive analysis of the impact of the polemic in the French case see Williams, Pilgrimage and Narrative. See further Gomez Géraud, Le crépuscule du grand voyage, and Tinguely, L’Écriture du Levant.
4. The baroque is particularly difficult to define, as it usually involves both the description of a particular cultural moment around the first decades of the seventeenth century (evoking the notion of the “spirit of an age”), and a particular mode of representation, one which might be defined as aesthetics of conflict, although this might mean different things according to the genres involved. Despite its plurality over time and in different regions, its origins can be plausibly associated to Counter-Reformation Catholicism and its various art forms and moral and political thought (including the “reason of state of the self” brilliantly defined by the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián in his first published work, El Héroe of 1637). For a growing emphasis on early modern cultural encounters for an expansive definition of the baroque see also Lyons, “Introduction: The Crisis of the Baroque.”
5. The classic studies are Ciampi, Della vita, and Bietenholz, Pietro Della Valle.
6. Bellori “Vita,” xviii. Bellori’s biographical account of Della Valle, apparently commissioned by Nicolas-François Parisot de Saint-Laurent, who was at the service of Louis XIV’s brother Philippe d’Orléans, was first published as preface to the second (posthumous) edition of the Viaggi, parts I and II (devoted to the Turkish Empire and Persia), Rome 1662. I quote Bellori according to the only modern complete edition of the Viaggi.
7. Bellori, “Vita,” xviii–xix. Here the word peregrinazione, which occurs twice, may be translated as travel (the first time) or as pilgrimage (the second time).
8. Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:291–2. Alas, the doctor fell ill and, in the end, could not accompany Della Valle. I quote Della Valle according to the printed text of the first edition. Only the volume devoted to Turkey was published during Della Valle’s lifetime, although apparently, due to a scarcity of paper, the actual distribution of the book was delayed until after Della Valle passed away in 1652. Persia, divided in two volumes, appeared in 1658, although it was apparently also quite ready by 1652. The third part, devoted to India and the return to Italy, saw light in 1663.
9. Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:474: “io marciava in tonica pellegrinesca con una prosopopeia da impazzire, per farmi guardar più dai barbagianni.” The description is good-humoured, but also renders the expression “sacred pilgrimage” slightly ironic.
10. Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:479–86.
11. The rumour that Della Valle was no ordinary pilgrim seems to have been prompted by his large entourage (“il venir io accompagnato più che da pellegrino”: see Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:500). However, the idea seems to have gratified his aristocratic sense of self-importance, whilst allowing him a rhetoric of modesty: he was not the son of a king, after all!
12. Salvante, Il “Pellegrino,” 392.
13. We can be certain Della Valle carried Belon’s volume with him in 1615 because he often comments on particular passages in his unpublished travel diary. See for example BAV, Ms Ottob Latino 3382, 15r (https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Ott.lat.3382). Della Valle might have used the Latin translation by Charles de l’Écluse first published by Plantin in Antwerp in 1589, and issued again in 1605.
14. Bellori, “Vita,” xvi.
15. Nestorian, the denomination used by Della Valle and most European observers after the name of the fifth-century Archbishop of Constantinople Nestorius, whose Christological teachings were considered heretical by Greek Orthodox, Latin, and other Eastern churches following their condemnation at the Council of Ephesus (431), was not a proper self-identification. The usual denomination in Syriac would be Church of the East. Della Valle sought to minimize the connotations of heresy by declaring that it had become an ethnic denomination: “Her father belongs to those amongst the Syrians (who are divided into various groups) who are still today called Nestorians, because their ancestors followed the follies of Nestorius. However, this name nowadays signifies the people rather than the sect, and its origins, as well as its errors, have been almost forgotten in the course of time […] so that the biggest error found among them today may well be ignorance” (Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:744). Not content, Della Valle speculated that Sitti Maani’s family was one of those that had in the past accepted certain Catholic patriarchs sent to the East by Pope Julius II. He nonetheless insisted that the marriage ceremony should be postponed until it could be officiated by Latin priests in Persia, a delay that caused a great deal of anxiety to his young wife’s relatives.
16. Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:756. Della Valle, in particular, emphasized the efficacy of prayers to St Catherine, the patron saint of marriages. He had visited the monastery of St Catherine in Sinai on Christmas Day 1615. When he left the Holy Land after Easter, his mind was finally calm and ready to think about other women.
17. We have lost a letter of mid-June 1616 to the Roman patrician Francesco Crescenzi describing these requisites, but we have the follow-up from 11 July (Salvante, Il “Pellegrino,” 366; the Vatican manuscript with Della Valle’s private letters to Crescenzi BAV Ott. Lat. 3383 can also be consulted online at https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Ott.lat.3383; see fol. 55r for this passage). This is sufficient to work out that he wanted a wife who was not too young and childish – at least twenty. She did not have to be a virgin: in fact, a widow would be fine. After his experience with “Turkish women” he had also decided that he preferred them fat rather than thin (completely changing his mind on this issue), because for a wife the daily warmth and comfort she provided between the sheets was more important than how she looked in the street. The passage is also revelatory of his lack of embarrassment when discussing an irregular sexual life, presumably with prostitutes, which was of course typical of man of his station (although some words were coded in the letter). In July 1616 in Aleppo Della Valle was still seeking to assuage the demands of his uncle Valerio Della Valle, while also charging him with the task of finding the bride and arranging the marriage.
18. Schipano made this opposition explicit in his letter of 8 January 1617, complaining of Della Valle’s decision to further extend his travels to the East: “questa curiosità ha d’haver fine.” See Salvante, Il “Pellegrino,” 394–5. Della Valle elsewhere revealed that the pressure to return to Rome and marry a young (fertile) woman of his station was not really a concern for his needs, but rather for those of the family.
19. Maani was buried in the Della Valle’s family vault in the church of Ara Coeli. For her funeral a publication was issued with her portrait and numerous poetic eulogies, with an engraving of the catafalque which carried inscriptions in twelve European and oriental languages; see Rocchi, Funerale. Della Valle went on to eventually marry Mariuccia, a Georgian girl that his wife had adopted in Ispahan, after his return to Italy. She became the mother of his fourteen legitimate children (he also previously had a natural daughter). The fact that Della Valle married his adopted daughter, who was almost thirty years younger than he was, did cause some scandal, and even the pope (Urban VIII) expressed his disapproval.
20. See Hester, Literature and Identity, for the construction of an Italian identity in seventeenth-century Italian travel narratives, including an analysis of Pietro Della Valle’s intensive use of literary references.
21. Some of the journals are preserved in the Vatican Library. See Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ottoboniano Latino 3382, which covers the whole journey until 1626 (with the earliest stages missing).
22. “L’autore a chi legge.” This universalism stands in contrast with the earlier emphasis on restoring his honour in Rome.
23. The clean copies of the letters from Persia and India (nos. 19 to 54), ready for the printer, marked by the censors (in such a way that the suppressed passage are still legible), are preserved at the Società Geografica Italiana. There exists a facsimile reproduction of these, see Masetti, ed., De’ viaggi. Notably, the final volume devoted to India and the return to Italy seems to have had limited secondary redaction by Della Valle and received less attention from the censors, so that the printed text follows faithfully the letters sent to Schipano which are, in turn, often very close to the original journal.
24. The severe pruning suffered by the volumes devoted to Persia can be ascertained by comparing the editions of the seventeenth century to the full text printed by Franco Gaeta and Laurence Lockhart in their (sadly incomplete) critical edition of these Letters (1–5 from Persia, 19–23 of the complete set): Della Valle [ed. Gaeta and Lockhart], I Viaggi; for a list of some of these changes, see ibid., xx–xxi. I quote this uncensored edition for the relevant letters.
25. There is some evidence that after his travels Della Valle found the atmosphere in Rome rather stifling. In this respect, it is worth emphasizing that while the relations between Della Valle and the court of the Barberini pope Urban VIII (1623–1644) after his return to the city in 1626 were initially collaborative, especially in his role as advisor for a mission to Georgia sent by the Propaganda Fide, they eventually deteriorated, culminating in Della Valle’s exile from Rome in 1636. Rather than a different political outlook (Urban VIII was, like Della Valle, pro-French and anti-Spanish), the key issue seems to have been the clash between Della Valle’s inflated social aspirations and the nepotism of the Barberinis. Perhaps symptomatically, the volume was only published after Innocent X (Giovanni Battista Pamphili) had replaced Urban VIII. For an analysis of Della Valle’s return home and his not always successful attempt to position himself as a courtier in the Barberini papal court see Tazzara, “The Pilgrim at Home.”
26. The narrative of the visit to Palestine and the Holy Land is contained in the 13th letter, written from Aleppo on 15 June 1616. For what follows see Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:474–575.
27. It is symptomatic that Della Valle considered it right to reach the city on foot “for reasons of piety,” “per devozione” (ibid., 498). On the importance of reaching Jerusalem on foot, see the introduction to this Special Issue. This was meant to be a humble approach, but of course Della Valle travelled like a wealthy aristocrat, with two personal servants, a friar, a painter, an interpreter, and a large load carried by numerous camels, horses and donkeys. In Constantinople he had also been supplied with a couple of Turkish guards and official Ottoman documents to provide security in his journey towards the Holy Land. During the previous visit to the monastery of St Catherine in Mount Sinai, Della Valle had also been wearing a special pilgrim’s tunic. He did nonetheless take pride in the fact that he did not travel in disguise, but as a gentleman, as he explained in a letter written to Francesco Crescenzi from Cairo a few days later (25 January 1616): “non son andato solo, vestito da beduino, né poveramente, com’egli [il sig Crescentio, another traveller he had met in Constantinople and Francesco’s brother] consigliava per maggior sicurezza; ma con gli habiti miei, con i miei servitor, con cariaggio, padiglione et ogn’altro ordegno necessario ad un galant homo.” Quoted after Salvante, Il “Pellegrino,” 363.
28. Della Valle complained in particular that European Christian pilgrims – “the Franks” – were expected to be wealthier than Eastern Christians and had to pay higher fees (gabelle) for their various visits (Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:521–2). For an account of Ottoman policy towards the holy sites, see Peri, Christianity under Islam.
29. Ibid., 505–20. Whenever a relevant gospel passage was mentioned, Della Valle offered the first versicles of the Latin Vulgate. As his textual guide for the identification of various sites in the Holy Land he relied on Jerome’s De situ et nominibus locorum Hebraicorum liber, itself based on Eusebius, as well as passages from Strabo, Procopius, and Belon.
30. Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:524.
31. Ibid., 527–8.
32. Belon, in contrast, had been most positive about the Armenian Church.
33. Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:528–9. George Sandys offers a better informed and slightly more sympathetic description; see Sandys, A Relation, 173.
34. Della Valle’s attitudes towards Nestorians, for example, were developed in new directions after his marriage to Sitti Maani. It remained on the other hand a paternalistic attitude that assumed eventual subjection to the authority of the Roman Church. Of particular interest is the project he developed to establish a colony of Assyrian Christians in Ispahan subjected to Roman spiritual guidance, on a model similar to how Portuguese Augustinian friars from Hormuz had tried to take control of the Armenian Church of New Julfa.
35. Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:536.
36. Ibid., 546.
37. Ibid., 553ff. This was 9 April 1616, with all the Eastern celebrations taking place one week later than the Latin equivalent.
38. The revised letter in Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Archivio Della Valle-Del Bufalo, vol. 51, f. 7d, as quoted by Salvante, Il “Pellegrino,” 151–2, to whom I owe this comparison. The additional note suggests that when preparing the final version in Rome, Della Valle distanced himself from the influence of the friars who conditioned the narrative during his visit.
39. Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:560.
40. MS Ottoboniano Latino 3382, 19r: “io lo tengo per favola e traditione vana d’ignoranti.”
41. Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:430–2. This is a good example of a passage that Della Valle back in Europe rewrote substantially in the light of subsequent antiquarian research. He was almost apologetic that he had dismissed the local story so quickly.
42. Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:554. Della Valle was however generally hostile to the Turks, and contemptuous towards the Arabs. He thought, for example, that whilst the valley of Hebron was extremely fertile and close to paradise in biblical times, it was nowadays less cultivated than the magnificent Terra di Lavoro in southern Italy, because the Arabs were extremely lazy (a similar observation, contrasting the industrious ancient Jews and the indolent Arabs, had been made by Belon, Voyage, 372–3). De facto, Della Valle transferred the terrestrial paradise to his Italian homeland in the West.
43. For a paradigmatic example of Anglican ecumenical idealism transposed to the Levant, see Sandys, A Relation. For English observers of the second half of the seventeenth century, notably Paul Rycaut, see Shalev, “Islam, Eastern Christianity and Superstition.” Shalev proposes the interesting and almost Saidian notion of “polemical malleability” for how descriptions of Eastern religions and “superstitions” mirrored Western agendas, and even constructed new social realities.
44. The classic formulation of the thesis of the late-medieval rise of curiosity (largely with English materials) in Christian Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage.
45. William of Boldensele’s pilgrimage had been imposed upon him as a penance for “apostasy” by Cardinal Elias Talleyrand of Périgord (he had for some reason left his convent in Minden), and the account was written at the cardinal’s request too.
46. I quote from the 1351 French version of Jean le Long, as edited and translated by Christiane Deluz: Boldensele, “Traité de l’état de la Terre Sainte,” 1018.
47. On Sudheim’s use of Boldensele, see Gadrat-Ouerfelli, “The Authority of Written and Oral Sources.”
48. The Book of John Mandeville. Compare p. 46 to p. 210, where the Latin redactor also suggested that the Muslims promoted the miracle to economically exploit the piety of the ignorant Christians. The original French Mandeville was also very keen on differentiating the Greek and Latin churches (unlike Boldensele).
49. For a recent discussion that emphasizes Fabri’s relation to his audiences, see Beebe, Pilgrim and Preacher.
50. Fabri, Wanderings, vol. I, part I, 283–4.
51. Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:575.
52. Hence science in the early modern sense here stands for the pursuit of detailed and accurate knowledge of the natural and human world, using personal experience and reasoned speculation in order to verify and correct written authorities. Della Valle’s claim was far from unique. William Lithgow, for example, also ended his description of the monuments of Jerusalem declaring that “the like thereof was never by a travailer so punctually, so truly, and so curiously set down and made manifest to the intellective reader” (in the 1632 revised edition not mentioning the 1615 book by George Sandys, who made a similar claim). See Lithgow, The Totall Discourse, 252.
53. Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:602.
54. Ibid., 606. Ideally, he added, the plan was to have them printed with a parallel Latin translation. Della Valle was true to his word; see Miller, “A Philologist, a Traveller.” For the Coptic texts, see Stolzenberg, Egyptian Oedipus, chapter 3. Della Valle’s dual impulses, to enrich his private library with curious manuscripts and to serve the community of learning, were already present in his discussion of the Coptic writings that he acquired in Egypt, in his letter from Cairo of 25 January 1616: the Christian texts in Coptic would be an ornament to his library, to be perused by the curious; the Coptic–Arabic vocabulary should be translated into Latin and printed for the use of “the men of letters of all the world” (Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:397–8). Della Valle’s finds did revolutionize Coptic studies in Europe. For his extensive collection of Persian manuscripts, now in the Vatican library, see Piemontese, Persica Vaticana, 239–78.
55. Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:650–1 (at the start of letter XVII, written in Baghdad in December 1616).
56. His ambitions grew gradually. Originally his plan in Baghdad after meeting Sitti Maani was to travel to Ispahan with her and then return home, and he even planned his triumphant entry in Naples and Rome, at which point Schipano was meant to have prepared a more structured version of Della Valle’s account for publication (Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:765–6).
57. In Aleppo, where he stayed with Venetian merchants, Della Valle had corresponded with the Roman patrician Francesco Crescenzi and his uncle Valerio Della Valle about finding a new wife in Rome – see note 17.
58. He began by comparing himself to the Homeric heroes such as Ulysses, and even considered that his personal motivations when travelling the whole world, or at least the whole Orient, were “perhaps higher” (Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:647). The most explicit expression of this new identity appears in the preface to published the letters (see n. 94 below).
59. See his description of Sitti Maani in Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:742–3. Arguably, Della Valle’s new attitude would also be reflected in the changes he sought to introduce when revising his account of the supposed miracle in the Holy Sepulchre, which prompted Roman censorship.
60. Della Valle interchanged the words Syrian and Assyrian to refer to members of the various Eastern churches from Syria and Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) using Syriac as their liturgical language – Jacobites, Nestorians, and “Chaldeans” (their everyday language was often Arabic). He used the word Chaldean to refer to those who in theory accepted Roman Catholic doctrine, and sough to attract his wife’s Nestorian family into that category as a prelude to full assimilation to Roman Catholicism. Hence his wife was “per razza […] di quei che si chiaman Nestorini, e fu, di rito, Caldea […] adesso che, Dio gratia, non solo è cattolica, ma anche latina di rito” (Della Valle, Viaggi, 2:256, here quoted according to Della Valle [ed. Gaeta and Lockhart], I Viaggi, 237–8).
61. For a discussion, see Baskins, “Lost in Translation.” Belon, his model, had also published a portrait of himself (in the second edition of Les observations de plusieurs singularités of 1554) as well as many engravings of animals, plants, and people – and a sensational depiction of Mount Sinai. In turn, Della Valle travelled with a Flemish painter called Giovanni who had worked in Naples, and was planning an additional volume of engraved images (figure), but this never came to fruition. By the time the volume on India was published in 1663, only a few schematic drawings could be found by Biagio Deversin, the publisher of the first complete edition.
62. The Viaggi are obviously devoted to this self-construction, creating the persona of a traveller that could easily be placed in the gallery of baroque figures defined by Rosario Villari in relation to “strangeness and novelty, contradiction, revolt, astonishment, bizarreness, grandeur […] somewhere between an approximate concept of style and an attempt at a general description of a historical epoch” (Villari, “Introduction,” 2). Della Valle also expressed aesthetic values that we can define as baroque outside his practice of travel writing, for example in the catafalque for Sitti Maani, his experimental verses, his musical compositions “al modo antichi,” and the invention of two new instruments.
63. Salvante, Il “Pellegrino,” 364.
64. It read: “Petrus de Valle Patricius Romanus sacrae peregrinationis labores susceptique voti pietatem hoc donario consignavit MDCXVI.” A few months earlier Della Valle had left a votive inscription in Mount Sinai, in Latin, Arabic, and Greek, preserved in the manuscript of his journal (BAV, Ottoboniano Latino 3382, 17v), but not in the published version, in which the entire section was considerably abbreviated: see Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:420.
65. This was of course a process with many stages and many actors, of which Della Valle is only one. Arguably much decisive change already took place even before the impact of humanism was felt. For an argument about the long-term transformation of religious pilgrimage, emphasizing that a strong trend towards geographical and ethnographic empiricism can be detected in Italian and other European accounts of pilgrimage to the Holy Land from the fourteenth century, see Elsner and Rubiés, “Introduction,” esp. 39–41. For a discussion of the impact of humanism at the turn of the sixteenth century, leading to an antiquarian turn shift that came to permeate early modern pilgrimage to the Holy Land, see Shalev, Sacred Words and Worlds, 73–139.
66. See n. 13.
67. Another author Della Valle refers to in relation to the description of Jerusalem is the Walloon Jean Zuallart, whose Il devotissimo viaggio di Gerusalemme, with illustrations, had been published in Rome in 1587 (see Della Valle, Viaggi, I, 514). Della Valle considered Zuallart very diligent and truthful when describing the sacred sites, but rather tedious and, concerning the more worldly aspects of the journey, naïve.
68. Jerome, Letters and Select Works, letter 108, 195–212.
69. Thus writing to Paulinus of Nola in 395, Jerome (ibid., letter 58, 119–23) also observed that pilgrimage was unnecessary, and busy Jerusalem not the best place: “Nothing is lacking to your faith although you have not seen Jerusalem, and I am none the better for living where I do.” God was spirit, to be worshipped in spirit, and not to be restricted to a narrow strip of earth. True religious knowledge was scriptural. For the polemical context of the emergence of Christian pilgrimage, see Elsner, “Piety and Passion.” Worth noting is that Erasmus greatly admired Jerome, and edited his letters: Jerome is at the heart of the humanist critique too.
70. Ibid., 196. Quoting Psalm 55:6 – the whole letter is studded with scriptural quotes.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid., 200. It is characteristic of Jerome’s primordial and unconditional Christian pilgrimage that he replaces the impurity of bodily sex, or indeed of any real physical pleasure, with the poetic sensuality of spiritual allegory.
73. Ibid., 199.
74. Monsieur d’Aramont’s embassy must be seen as part of a diplomatic alliance between France and the Ottomans in order to fight together their common enemy emperor Charles V, a strategy which Francis I had initiated in 1535 and which led to the creation of a permanent French embassy in the Ottoman Court. It was common for these French political embassies to include men primarily dedicated to cultural and intellectual pursuits (as well as perhaps some espionage). Hence, Belon visited Constantinople in the company of Pierre Gilles, whose focus was strictly antiquarian rather than naturalist or ethnographic.
75. Belon however returned to France in 1549, before his companions.
76. For example Belon, Voyage, 384 (mensonges concerning Jews and Saturdays).
77. For the chapters on the Holy Land, see ibid., 375–86. On the fish that supposedly eat gold, ibid., 165; on Jews and blood, ibid., 384.
78. Ibid., 379, 383.
79. When discussing one those “errors” concerning the location of the beheading and the relics of Saint John de Baptist, Della Valle resorted to the idea that Belon, however good at naturalia, was not very curious of history and cosmography (Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:585).
80. Reasons of space prevent me from developing a more systematic comparison here, but it is worth emphasizing that all these narratives are examples of self-fashioning by literate elites imbued with a Christian humanist education.
81. Both Sandys and Lithgow dealt with the same Franciscan Guardian, friar Gaudentius – but as Lithgow shrewdly observed, the friars themselves learnt everything from the local interpreter, called Giovanni Baptista.
82. For the Franciscan custody see Armstrong, The Holy Land. At the time of Della Valle’s visit it was still dominated by Italians.
83. For the section on the visit to Jerusalem and surrounding areas (in a multi-national and multi-confessional company, as was usually the case) see Sandys, A Relation, 155–200. His itinerary from Constantinople to Egypt, including Mount Sinai, and then Palestine, was similar to Della Valle’s five years later. For an analysis see Haynes, The Humanist as Traveler.
84. Ibid., 166.
85. Ibid., 168.
86. Ibid., 154. He also thought that he was the first to do so in English (Lithgow’s book was written and published about the same time).
87. See Burns, “William Lithgow’s Totall Discourse.”
88. Lithgow, Most Delectable and True Discourse, sig. O1v-R3v. Lithgow’s polemics often equate Catholic and Greek superstition. Although a staunch Scottish Presbyterian, some have detected an inner fight with his own residual Catholicism; see Nelson and Alker, “From Scotland to the Holy Land.”
89. Here I quote the 1632 expanded text, which is more explicit: Lithgow, The Totall Discourse, 219.
90. Lithgow, Most Delectable and True Discourse, sig. P1r. The parable in Luke 16:20–31 was important because it gave a vision of the afterlife and the torments of Hell in Jesus’ own words. The Catholic Church, following Jerome, considered the story historical, taking account of the fact that the beggar Lazarus was given a personal name. Protestants often followed Luther in treating the details of the parable as metaphorical.
91. Lithgow, Most Delectable and True Discourse, sig. R3r.
92. Lithgow’s traumatic experience with the Inquisition in Spain in 1620–1621, and the marginalization he experienced at the court of James I in subsequent years, which landed him in prison on two occasions in 1623, were decisive in narrative transformations apparent between the editions of 1614, 1623 and 1632. This led to the interpretation of his pilgrimage as a personal Protestant epic, and to the idea of travel as constitutive of ‘a science of the world’ that, among other things, targeted Catholic superstition (Burns, “William Lithgow’s Totall Discourse,” 28–35).
93. Christian humanists from Guillaume Postel to Pierre Charron effectively combined the Stoic and Ciceronian cosmopolitan ideal of a world citizenship based on the cultivation of a universal rationality with Christian universalism, often applied to the ideas of world peace and global geographies. For a discussion of the complexities of this transformation see Penman, The Lost History, 15–63; and Rubiés, “The Cosmopolitan Paradox.”
94. Della Valle, Viaggi, 1:9. Here citizenship of the “gran teatro di tutto l’universo” is equivalent to citizenship of the world.
95. Bellori, “Vita,” xiii–xxxi.
96. Della Valle [ed. Gaeta and Lockhart], I Viaggi, 59. The draft of this ragionamento was written in Ispahan in 1617, and sent to Mario Schipano, Della Valle’s friend in Naples, with one of the letters.
97. Ibid., 60–1. Della Valle justified his interest in Asia in part by suggesting that in America, other than gold and silver, there was “little to see and even less to learn.” His comments about African peoples were even more contemptuous – they had never done anything noteworthy (Egypt here was part of “The Orient”).
98. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barberini Lat. 5206, f. 122r. I understand Christian Stoicism as the combination of Christian values with the cultivation of Stoic moral virtues (constancy and inner peace in particular) that flourished at the turn of the seventeenth century in the context of acute political and religious strife, a position supported philosophically by a moral universalism centred on reason and nature (including elaborations of the idea of natural law). Although the humanist revival of Stoicism is often associated with Justus Lipsius, in reality some key Stoic doctrines were already defended by Cicero, and in any case the themes were prevalent in many writers of the period, both Protestant and Catholic. Within Christian thought the revival of Stoic ethics is best understood not as secularism, but in tension with the more radical Augustinian denial of self-love and the human capacity for virtue ethics (usually by reference the doctrine of original sin). In this respect, see Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism.” On the political implications of the Stoic revival, see Brook, Philosophical Pride.
99. “Soleva dire de’ costumi degli huomini: che li vitii, e le virtù, erano in ogni luogo; e che li beni, e li mali per tutto si truovavano seminati: non havere conosciuta cosa migliore e peggiore dell’huomo: potentissimi essere l’opinione, e l’uso: Ciascuno professar di sapere, commune essere l’ignoranza: Moltissime essere le disgratie, poche le prosperità; quelle star sempre apparecchiate, queste succedere a noi raramente …” Bellori, “Vita,” xxviii.
100. Della Valle, Delle conditioni. For a discussion, see Rubiés, “Political Rationality.”
101. For his poetry in oriental languages, see Rossi, “Versi turchi e altri scritti inediti”; and Rossi, “Poesie inedite in persiano.”
102. Della Valle learnt a substantial amount of Turkish and some Arabic (although not enough to speak to his wife in her maternal tongue), and became particularly proficient in Persian after spending many years at the court of Shah Abbas. He also dabbled in various other oriental and African languages, such as Coptic and Ethiopic.
103. There was nonetheless a delicate balance between confessional identities and agendas, often pursued quite vigorously in this period, and the cosmopolitan and ecumenical principles embraced (in theory or in practice) by some members of the Republic of Letters. This makes it necessary to qualify the idea of a steady early modern trend towards secularization within late humanist and erudite circles at the expense of dogmatic theology. The contradiction is particularly clear in the field of ecclesiastical history and biblical criticism. In this respect, see Hardy, Criticism and Confession, 3–17.
104. This antiquarian curiosity also evolved from the desire to locate biblical ruins in the East (a Eurocentric approach that typically led to false identifications) to the growing understanding that ruins in Persia had to be interpreted as part of a complex local historical tradition. See Burioni, “Displaced Buildings.”
105. Della Valle [ed. Gaeta and Lockhart], I Viaggi, 450–1.
106. Ibid., 440.
107. Don García, in turn, thought that Della Valle, living in the court of a Muslim ruler without any specific purpose with an oriental wife and wearing Persian garb, was vain and pompous. For a comparison of their attitudes, see Rubiés, “Political Rationality,” 371–5, and Brancaforte, “The Encounter.”
108. For a contemporary description, see Funerale.
109. Here I follow Baskins, “Writing the Dead.”
110. I have discussed this encounter in the context of Pietro Della Valle’s account of India in Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, 366–8.
111. The classic example of female pagan virtue leading to suicide was that of Lucretia.
112. These sonnets were published in Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, 399–400.
113. As exemplified by his reaction of spitting on a local “idol” in southern India. See Della Valle, Viaggi, 4: 253–4.
114. He was thus exiled from Rome between 1636 and 1638 for his assault on a servant of the Barberinis, apparently one of their Swiss Guards who got into an altercation with Della Valle’s own servants during a religious procession. See Ciampi, Della vita, 118–19; Micocci, “Della Valle, Pietro.”
115. On Belon’s scepticism about the demonic wisdom of the Turkish dervishes, see Belon, Voyage, 483. Selective scepticism of course was very common in the period, as it is today. Within the paradigm of revisionist empirical observation, I find Belon often more systematic in his doubts about religious marvels than Della Valle.
116. The disputation began orally in a social gathering hosted by a Persian nobleman (Della Valle’s dedicatee) and in the presence of a Portuguese Augustinian friar. The three arguments advanced by Della Valle were: why Muhammad and the Koran were, unlike the Mosaic books, not authoritative; why the Gospels were on the other hand trustworthy; and why the Christian worship of images was not idolatrous. For a modern edition, see Wenzel, “Pietro della Valle’s Risāla.” This work of 1621 has been preserved in the Vatican Library, and apparently an edition with a facing Latin translation was planned by Della Valle upon his return to Rome for use by the discalced Carmelites in Persia. The contents are briefly discussed in Halft, “Pietro della Valle: Risāla.”
117. For a strong emphasis on Della Valle’s ethnocentrism, see the classic article by Gurney, “Pietro della Valle and the Limits of Perception.” My reservations in Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, 356, n.12.
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Joan-Pau Rubiés
Joan-Pau Rubiés is ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He was formerly Reader in International History at the London School of Economics, and has also been Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études et Sciences Sociales, and Visiting Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has specialized on early modern cultural encounters in a comparative perspective, East and West, with particular emphasis on the practices of ethnography, cultural translation, religious dialogue and their intellectual impact. His publications include Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge University Press: Past and Present Publications, 2000) and Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology (Ashgate, 2007), as well as a large number of articles and edited volumes, most recently, Cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2023).