Touring in 1600

As to the other diversity, that of kind, Lauder saw a proclamation which assessed the values of five hundred coins then current in France.

The whole of the above refers mainly to gold and the higher denominations of silver. Yet these more important coins were a simple matter compared with small change, especially in Italy; for when the tourist had been confronted with soldi, grossi, giuli, paoli, reali, quattrini, susine, denari, cavallotti, cavallucci, carlini, bagatini, bolignei, baocchi, baelli, etc., he could not but feel relieved when, crossing the Alps, he had only to face Swiss plapparts and finfers and the German batz, kreutzer, stiver, copstück, sesling, pfennig, and not many more. The grosch perhaps ought to be mentioned as well if only for the fact that Taylor, the "water-poet," when at Hamburg, noticed that among twenty-three groschen he had in his pocket there were thirteen varieties, owing to the number of local mints. He valued all these at twopence each, but as a matter of fact groschen varied so greatly that to give one away might be either extravagance or an insult. There were, of course, many multiples of these denominations, and besides coins, tokens innumerable, all having but this in common that when one had gone a few miles further they would not be taken in payment. They might be made of base metal, like that of the famous "Mermaid" tavern which is preserved at the "birthplace" at Stratford-on-Avon, or of leather, or almost anything else solid.

In Muscovy were no native coins but silver, and those so small that the Muscovites used to keep dozens in their mouths because they slipped through their fingers – and that without incommoding their speech. In Spain,157 so far as there was any standard, it was the Castilian real, which you might exchange for thirty-four Castilian maravedis, forty Portuguese rais, thirty-six Valencian dineros, twenty-four Aragonese, and thirty-eight Catalonian dineros. But these Portuguese coins would not be taken in Castile, nor the Castilian in Valencia, nor Valencian anywhere out of Valencia. Along the chief merchants' road in Spain, from Barcelona, you might go one hundred miles, as far as Lerida, and find every place with a different minor coinage, current there only, and in Barcelona one was especially liable to receive coins which no one, not even in Barcelona, would accept.

On the Jerusalem journey the higher payments were reckoned in foreign money usually, the Italian gold zecchini and silver piastri most frequently; smaller ones in brass meidines of Tripoli or of Cairo, equal to about a penny farthing and twopence respectively, or in aspers, about three farthings.

Just as, further, the tourist could examine a coin without being able to find out its nominal value, could ascertain the latter and still be ignorant of its real value, so, too, he was continually having to pay reckonings in coins which did not exist. The Venetian and Spanish ducat, the German gulden, the French livre tournois, the Muscovite rouble, and, later, their altine also, were coins of account only. All these coins were as commonly used in daily business in their own localities as guineas are in English charities; and the ducat and the gulden far outside them. In the seventeenth century the Spanish pistole was actual coin in its own country and coin of account in France; board and lodging on "pension" terms would be reckoned in pistoles in Paris. In fact, the French equivalent for "rolling in riches," "cousu de pistoles," is equally evidence of the international character of seventeenth-century gold and of the method of carrying it.

The tourist in 1600 has done his touring. His money is spent; his pleasure is buried; his wisdom gathered; and the fruit is ours. And now; was the pleasure worth the money? was the wisdom worth the gathering?

The answer is, most emphatically, Yes! – Yes for them, and Yes for us. But as to the latter question there were two answers then, and the subject has suggestions beyond those that have come up so far. Let us look at this adverse opinion, and one or two of the suggestions.

During the sixteenth century it became a convention to abuse travel, especially travel in Italy; a convention which may have been more fruitful in England than elsewhere, but certainly was not so to the exclusive extent which modern books in English seem to imply. The difficulty would be to find a nation whose literature at this time does not contain examples of it; even in Poland, where of all places travel was most taken for granted, this topic was one of the first to be dealt with when the vernacular was turned to literary account, namely, in the satires of Kochanowski. When examined, these invectives turn out to have won more attention than they are entitled to, written as they generally are, especially in England, by the class whose medium is nowadays the half-penny paper or the 'religious' novel. We find among their authors all the familiar figures, from the hack-journalist who parades a belated morality for the sake of his stomach down to the bishop to whom the subject, when worn rather thin, is revealed as a brand-new dummy-sin. It is curious that this very bishop, Joseph Hall, should in describing his own journeys, unconsciously provide the most clear-cut sketch of how not to travel that has, perhaps, ever been written.158 If, among these types, we miss the retired colonel, we must remember that the title was so recently invented, the times so bloody, that all the colonels were probably either fighting or dead. At any rate, the interest of this type of pamphlet belongs rather to the history of publishing than to that of travel, as dating the time when publishers first discovered what a paying public can be created among the lower levels of Puritanism. The proportion of fact that gave them a starting-point may best be put in perspective by pointing out the parallel that exists between travel in Italy three hundred years ago and modern motoring. Nobody who could afford it went without; everybody who could not afford it abused everybody who did; it killed some, maimed others, benefited most, and brightened the life of many a poor rich man who otherwise would have departed this life little better off mentally than his own cows. These pamphleteers were committing the fundamental error of allowing their attention to be absorbed by the seven eighths of foolishness that characterises everything human instead of concentrating it on the other eighth which provides the justification as well as the driving-force. For a sober, all-round, view of the question as it appeared to a man who was both man of the world and scholar, one cannot do better than turn to a letter written by Estienne Pasquier, a letter of introduction for a son of Turnebus. "Comme il a l'esprit beau, aussi lui est-il tombé en teste, ce qui tombe ordinairement aux âmes les plus généreuses, de vouloir voyager pour le faire sage… S'il m'en croit, il se contentera de voir l'Italie en passant; car ce que Pyrrhus Neoptolemus disoit de la Philosophie, qu'il falloit philosopher, mais sobrement, je le dy du voyage d'Italie, à tous nos jeunes François qui s'y acheminent par une convoitise de voir."159

Yet there is one defect of their travels which necessarily escaped notice at the time but cannot fail to strike any one now, which is, how much they passed by without a glance. It is commonly thought that the contrast of travel in days gone by with that of the later times is one of leisureliness as against universal effort to go "faster, farther, and higher" than one's neighbour. But the truth is that in what essentially characterises leisureliness in travelling, the leaving time and energy free for enjoying and studying places on the road, and still more, off it, they were more wanting than we. They went the greatest pace they could; where they stopped at the night they left at dawn; and overnight they had been too tired to explore amid the filth, the dangers, the darkness, the inextricable confusion, of a sixteenth-century town or hamlet. Yet if you call to mind the towns seen in passing which you recollect most vividly, most will probably be those in which your first walks happened after dark. And is there any Gothic cathedral, however grand, whose outside is not commonplace by day compared to its glory by night?

Moreover, the dearth of information narrowed not their opportunities merely, but their interests likewise. Carnac and Stonehenge were no doubt a long way out of their way, but the dolmen of Bagneux was no more than three-quarters of a mile from Saumur, where many of them stayed for weeks, or even months. Yet not a single one, apparently, went to see it. As for the opportunities, not only was Pompeii still buried for them, but Rome itself was, as Montaigne says, not so much ruins as a sepulchre of ruins. When, again, some one says of Lyons that the houses are fine but the streets so ill-smelling and dirty that one cannot stop to admire them, it may remind us that much that was nominally visible was practically invisible; whether through being what was, to them, a considerable distance off their routes, like Brou or Laon, or, as with most cathedrals, through houses being built up against them. Similarly, the Roman amphitheatre at Nîmes is a case in point; houses having been erected inside it so freely that in 1682 five hundred men capable of bearing arms were supposed to be dwelling there.160 And along with these conditions of living went ideas to correspond; the total effect being half-prohibitive of the occupations of the artist, the historian, and the archæologist, and this at a period when a larger proportion of the greatest buildings of Europe coexisted than at any other period. In fact, so far as the Loire châteaux are concerned, it is clear that the modern tourist sees far more of some of the finest Renascence work than did its contemporaries, who were restricted here to a visit to Chambord and a glimpse of the outsides of Blois and Amboise.

But after all deductions of this kind have been granted, they may well reply that their concern was not so much with that part of the present which we term the past, but with that which we term the future, their individual futures, in particular; and that their object was achieved; adding, moreover, that travel under these conditions was certainly superior to travel of the twentieth century, considered as a form of education in the wider sense of the word. For not only was it obligatory to share the life of the country and its language to an extent which is optional now, but a traveller was continually being thrown on his own resources and presence of mind in matters which concerned his self-respect, his health, and his safety, whereas now everything is merely a matter of cash.

Turning to the benefit to us in day-by-day matters accruing from their experience abroad, so many instances have already shown themselves that the burden of proof falls on the other side; whether, that is, any contemporary effort worth making, any contemporary achievement to which we are indebted, has not been in some degree fashioned and vitalized by influences due to travel. If one further instance, typical of much else, is to be chosen, it may be pointed out how almost everything that contributes to the material attractions of Dublin is due to those who, in exile on the Continent, saw the gain that lay in planning a city finely. Further still, their knowledge of languages, acquired at a time when vernaculars were coming into their own, resulted in an infusion into each vernacular of the additions it needed to assimilate to enable it to fulfil its potentialities for the purposes both of every-day life and of life at its best. It is curious and significant that the Pole who has just been quoted as an opponent of travel, Kochanowski, learnt the value and, one might even say, the possibility, of using the vernacular as a medium of literature from associating with members of the "Pléiade" in France.

Far above these and the rest; far outweighing, too, all imaginable drawbacks, was the value of the central idea, that of taking those who were to enjoy the widest opportunities of usefulness and influence, and bringing them, when their conscious receptivity was at its highest, into personal contact with the whole of that world in which, for which, and with which, their lives were to be spent. That was its value at that time. But it had a future as well as a present value, inasmuch as the results of the system were cumulative, more especially in so far as it served the purpose of bringing these younger men into touch with the best teachers and those older men of the finest achievements, to gain acquaintance with whom was always insisted on as an object second to none in importance. As Bacon said, these travellers were "Merchants of Light." They contributed a definite share towards strengthening and widening what is the only effective agency of real advance in civilisation, "that better world of men," of which the contemporary poet Daniel was reminded by the "Essays" of Montaigne.

… That better world of men,Whose spirits are of one community,Whom neither oceans, deserts, rocks nor sandsCan keep from th' intertraffic of the mind.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O blessed Letters! that combine in one,All Ages past and make one live with all;By you, we do confer with who are gone,And the dead-living unto Council call.By you, the unborn shall have communionOf what we feel and what doth us befall.Samuel Daniel(1562-1619; in "Musophilus").

The literature of the subject as a whole is absolutely inexhaustible, the contemporary part alone being sufficient to provide anyone with recreation – and sleep – for ten years. Including a few whose accounts I have had to read in translation, or even in paraphrase (such as that of Bisoni mentioned below), the number of travellers on whose evidence I have drawn first-hand amounts to over two hundred and thirty; but this number could certainly be doubled, perhaps trebled, by any one who found it practicable to devote to the subject all the time and money it could employ, inasmuch as there are probably few libraries of long standing which do not contain a manuscript account of a journey at this period; some contain them by the dozen. Besides this, there are many printed accounts little less inaccessible than most manuscripts. The most convenient library for consulting contemporary editions of these printed narratives is Marsh's Library, Dublin, where one set of shelves is given up to them; there they will be found by the score, besides having a sub-heading ("Itinera") to themselves in the catalogue.

This appendix, therefore, can concern itself with nothing but actual accounts of journeys, and that only in some abbreviated form. The method followed is this. First comes a list of the MSS. that I have been able to obtain the opportunities to read (very few, unfortunately); then another list, of printed books, consisting of those which are bibliographies or serve as such, and of accounts of journeys not mentioned in these bibliographical works: together with some notes on certain recent editions of books which are there mentioned.

Asterisks indicate bibliographies; square brackets, books my knowledge of which is second-hand: while, in order to obviate needless suffering on the part of any who may feel inclined for a little further acquaintance with these accounts, the names of the authors of the more readable are printed in heavier type. It may as well be said that the value of most of these narratives consists simply in their having been written three hundred years ago.

The second list is one of authors' names, but topographical guidance is provided in the index by means of the abbreviation "Bibl"[iography] added as a sub-heading to place-names, followed by the names of the authors who are of assistance with regard to that place; e. g.: —

"Spain"

Bibl.: Wynn.

After such names will sometimes be found numbers; these refer back to the Table of Special References. It is taken for granted that every one of these bibliographical books will be recognized as adding information about many countries, since however strictly the scope of each may be limited, it will include travellers who came from, and went in, all directions.

References to accounts, generally fragments, which have appeared in periodical form only, have had to be restricted to the more interesting; most of which are to be found in the Table of Special References. For further sources not indicated in detail, bibliographies of national history, correspondence, biographies, records of embassies and prefaces to the last-named, especially to the Venetian "Relazioni" edited by Barozzi and Berchet, have all proved particularly useful. All the later publications of the Historical MSS. Commission (the earlier contain indications of MSS. in private hands, but no more than the titles are given) and all the Calendars of State Papers which include the required years, have been examined up to the end of the publications for 1908, at least.

As to non-contemporary sources of information, I have used them only for negative purposes – to decide which of two travellers is the bigger liar, for instance; or to avoid displaying more ignorance than is necessary on those elementary points of geography which everybody is supposed to know and nobody does; etc., etc. Some exceptions to this procedure seemed reasonable; but these are made obvious. Any statement of objective fact, indeed, seems to me impracticable in connection with such a subject as this. My aim has been merely at approximate subjective accuracy; to study, that is, the psychology of the subject, conscious and sub-conscious; and its phenomena only in so far as they are causes of, or symbolize, the psychology. Students are requested to hear this statement with the ear of faith, remembering that all such attempts have to be heavily peptonized if expenses are to be paid, as this one's must be, by those in whom the spirit indeed is willing but the digestion weak. And even students – !

But when all limitations of aim have been granted, it must be admitted further that a summary of the experiences and thoughts of scores of individuals, and of the thousands they stand for, over a period of more than a century and extending over all one continent and into fractions of two others, must be mainly remarkable as an anthology of half-truths.

Further still, to those who may notice that the half-truths are less stereotyped, the detail less hackneyed, than might have been the case, I should like to say that the credit of that is largely due to the London Library, without which this book would probably not have seemed worth writing or worth publishing; and that my debt is by no means only to the books and to the librarian's readiness to add to them, but also to the exceptional ability, and equally exceptional willingness, of the staff to help. It is only fair to mention, too, in speaking of bibliographical assistance, how much I am indebted to that furnished in the numbers of "Revue Historique." Acknowledgments are also due to the owners of the originals of the illustrations. No trouble has been spared to make the book the best illustrated existing for the period dealt with, with the necessary exception of the two quarto volumes of Van Vaernewyck's "Mémoires d'un Patricien Gantois"; all the photographs have been specially taken (except that of Rabelais' receipt) from the best procurable originals, often unique ones. For translations and information from Polish sources my sincere thanks are due to members of the Polish Circle in London, Mr. A. Zaleski in particular; and for help in various ways, which includes encouragement, to many others, especially Mr. Hubert Hall and Professor Gollancz, and, most of all, to my wife.

MSS. USED

Bodleian Library.

Rawlinson, C. 799. R. Bargrave's narrative, already frequently quoted: reliable, & especially useful for economic data. He went to Constantinople (1646), returned overland (1648); went again (1654), returning viâ Venice.

D. 120 Anon. France, Italy, & Switzerland (1648-49).

D. 121. Anon. Italy (1651).

D. 122. John Ashley: account of a stay at Jerusalem in 1675: details of expenses at the end.

D. 1285. Sir T. Abdy. France & Italy 1633-35.

D. 1286. Anon. Italy & Spain 1605-06.

British Museum.

Add. 34177. ff. 22-50. "Account of a journey over Mont Cenis into Italy": 1661.

Harleian, 288. "Direction for some person who intended to travel into France & Italy; being a short account of the roads, chief cities & of some rarities worthy to be seen." (End of the 16th century?)

Harleian, 942/3 and 1278. Note-books of Richard Symonds used in France & Italy (1648-49), no. 943 being the more valuable as containing his diary & detailed expenses.

Harleian, 3822. Journey throughout Spain (1599-1600) by Diego Cuelbis, the author, & his companion Joel Koris. Written in Spanish although the author was of Leipzig.

Egerton, 311. Visits to shrines in Spain, Provence, & Italy in 1587 by a proxy of Philip II.

Lansdown, 720. The frequent references to this MS. will have shown how useful it is. Among many other points that give it value are the excellent drawing of the bust of Petrarch at Arqua, soon afterwards destroyed, and a copy of the subsequently effaced epitaph of Clément Marot at Turin (fol. 37 b). The MS. is anonymous, but the author may be identified as Nicolas Audebert (1556-98), son of Germain Audebert. Beckmann (q. v.) had already established the identity of "le sieur Audeber," whose "Voyage et Observations en Italie" were published at Paris in 1656, with Nicolas Audebert, and that the author of the printed book is the same as he who wrote the MS. is suggested by the relations of both with Aldrovandi (MS. fol. 101 b). More definite evidence is obtainable from an article on Nicolas in the Revue Archéologique (3rd series, vol. 10, pp. 315-322), by means of the dates on his letters written from Italy. In view of this identification it may be worth mentioning that the author's birthday was April 25 (fol. 558) & that he was elected "president de l'Université" of Bologna in Nov. 1575 (fol. 86 b), a year in which the name of the rector has not hitherto been known.

Sloane, 4217. A honeymoon trip, a pilgrimage, & a tragedy combined. Lady Catherine Whetenal, the subject (it is written by her servant, Richard Lascells), after being married at Louvain, travelled to Rome for the year of jubilee, 1650: but on her return journey gave birth to a still-born child at Padua, & there died.

Stowe, 180. Constantinople & the Levant in 1609, as seen by a "Mr. Stampes"; its value consists in its exemplification of the limitations of the ordinary tourist.

Tournay Library.

159. Journey of the Comte de Solre, Sieur de Molenbais, from Solre, near Dinant, in Belgium, to the court of Philip II of Spain 1588: viâ Genoa.

160. Journeys of J. de Winghe, founder of the library (1587-1607). Earlier journeys to Italy, Vienna, & Prague; later ones to shorter distances around Tournai.

PRINTED BOOKS

Aarssen, F. van, belonged to a Dutch family which was accustomed to take part in public affairs (cf. especially preface to "Lettres inédites de François d'Aarssen (his father) à Jacques Valcke," 1599-1603, by J. Nouaillac, Paris, 1908), and there is record of some journeying by himself & relatives in the middle of the 17th century, as part of the training of the younger generation. The very interesting "Voyage d'Espagne" (published 1656) attributed to him is now known to have been written by Antoine de Brunel, his companion; but Aarssen's own notes on the preceding journey, through Italy, will be found in vol. 3 of the "Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storiche," Rome, 1906. The "Journal d'un Voyage à Paris" of the cousins of the above, the Sieurs de Villers, was published by A. P. Faugère (1862) [and by L. Marillier, 1899].

*Adelung, F. von. "Krit-literarische Übersicht der Reisenden in Russland bis 1700": 2 vols. 1846. The promises implied by the title are fulfilled so thoroughly & so exhaustively that the "Catalogue … des Russica" published by the Imperial Library of St. Petersburg in 1873 (Index of travellers thither up to 1700, vol. 2, p. 702) in no way supersedes the former, although it has some additions to make.

*Amat di San Filippo, P. "Biografía dei Viaggiatori Italiani, colla bibliografía delle loro opere" Rome, 1882. (Società Geogràfica Italiana.)

*Babeau, A. "Les Voyageurs en France, depuis la Renaissance jusqu'a la Révolution." 1885.