In addition to the caravan routes, some pilgrims, especially from India, arrived by sea. The most direct route was to sail up the Red Sea, although such voyages were susceptible to piracy then as today. Sailing to the Persian Gulf required passing the Portuguese stronghold at Hormuz. This route was complicated by international maritime conflicts, and once arrived on the Gulf pilgrims would still face difficult choices for completing their journey. Nonetheless, the hajj contributed to the vitality of sea travel in the Indian Ocean region.
Ships even arrived from the distant east coast of India. Between 1610 and 1620 a ship from Golconda successfully carried pilgrims up the Red Sea despite the contentious international maritime situation in the Indian Ocean. As ballast the ship carried rice to be distributed to the poor in Mecca.
Pilgrim, late sixteenth–early seventeenth century. Unknown artist. Isfahan, Persia. Ink and colors on paper, 5 × 10 cm. British Museum, ME 1920.0917.0.279.2.
Depictions of pilgrims, shaykhs, and dervishes were popular during the reign of Shah Abbas. A popular pilgrimage destination among Persians was the Shrine of Imam Riza in a region disputed with the Uzbeks. Pilgrims often endured hardships during their travels. This pilgrim is aged and stooped but retains a look of determination.
The Mughal emperor Akbar, Jahangir’s father, was at one time an enthusiastic supporter of the hajj. In the early years of his reign he subsidized the travel expenses of poor people and founded a hospice in Mecca. Perhaps feeling that his efforts were insufficiently appreciated or his people inadequately cared for, he later cooled to the pilgrimage; Jahangir’s support for the hajj was likewise tepid. But many pilgrims from South and even Southeast Asia continued to make the journey.
Poorer pilgrims would sometimes run out of funds and be reduced to begging. In time a large community of poor Indians made up a slum in central Mecca. The destitute Indians were unwelcome to the Ottomans. Some degree of charity had to be provided for them, and they disrupted plans to upgrade the city center. Information is scarce, but it appears this community was forcibly relocated to the outskirts of the city around the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Maintaining an attractive city center provided an environment conducive to the sale of goods and souvenirs. Pilgrimages were not simply religious journeys but were often combined with trade. Wealthy pilgrims would carry goods for exchange in order to help finance their trips, and the large assemblies of pilgrims at Mecca provided an opportunity for a great deal of trade. Caravans and ships carrying pilgrims also brought vast numbers of merchants and peddlers, although it was often hard to draw a sharp distinction between religious and commercial travelers. Cotton garments brought along with pilgrims by ship from India made their way into Turkish and European markets where they became something of a fad in the seventeenth century.
As a result of trade disparities, silver brought to Spain from the Americas often passed through the Ottoman empire and ended up in India. By some estimates as much as a third of the silver that entered Europe in the century and a half after 1600 made its way to India. The Ottomans encouraged importation because they saw the customs imposed on imports as a source of revenue. They also tolerated non-Muslim residents in the empire in part because they were taxed at a higher rate than Muslims and thus were another source of revenue.
Della Valle’s caravan from Cairo proceeded with little incident, and two years after setting out from Istanbul he reached Jerusalem. A few years before, another European traveler had made the same journey in reverse. Like della Valle, he was wandering for no better reason than restlessness and curiosity. In 1616 he was enjoying a rare moment of comfort, dining in the company of the North African corsair captain Yusuf Reis (Jack Ward). His name was William Lithgow, and he had made the journey from Damascus to Jerusalem (and then on to Cairo) in the company of “about 900 Armenians, Christian Pilgrimes, men and women: 600 Turkes trafficking for their owne businesse, and 100 souldiers, three Showsses, and sixe Janizaries.” His trip had been more eventful than della Valle’s,
being oft assailed with Arabs, fatigued with rocky mountains, and sometimes in point of choaking, for lacke of water. The confusion of this multitude, was not onely grievous in regard of the extreme heate, providing of victuals at poore Villages, and scarcity of water, to fill our bottles, made of Boare-skins; but also amongst narrow and stony passages, thronging, we oft fell one over another, in great heapes; in danger to be smothered: yea; and oftentimes we that were Christians had our bodies well beaten, by our conducting Turkes.
Even after he reached Jerusalem — where he had his right forearm tatooed with the Cross of Jerusalem and the Crown of King James I in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — Lithgow’s troubles continued. He booked a tour led by Franciscan Guardians to the River Jordan and the Dead Sea (noting bitterly the fee of the equivalent of forty-two shillings sterling). Stopping by the river at the spot where Jesus was supposed to have been baptised, the party, despite an escort of a hundred soldiers, fell under attack from a band of thieves. Lithgow, who had wandered off from the others, had been bathing in the river’s waters and was in danger of being left behind. Hearing gunfire, he
ranne starke naked above a quarter of a mile amongst thistles, and sharp pointed grasse, which pitifully pricked the soles of my feete, but the feare of death for the present, expel’d the griefe of that unlooked for paine. Approaching on the safe side of my company, one of our Souldiers broke forth on horsebacke, being determined to kill mee for my staying behinde: Yea, and three times stroke at me with his halfepike; but his horse being at his speed, I prevented his cruelty, first by falling downe, next by running in amongst the thickest of the Pilgrimes, recovering the Guardians face, which when the Guardian espied, and saw my naked body, hee presently pulled off his gray gowne, and threw it to me, whereby I might hide the secrets of nature; By which meanes, (in the space of an houre) I was clothed three manner of wayes: First, like a Turke: Secondly, like a wild Arabian: And thirdly, like a grey Frier, which was a barbarous, a savage, and a religious habit.
Lithgow was a grimly determined tourist, who by the end of his major travels estimated that his “paynefull feet traced over … thirty-six thousand and odde miles, which draweth neare to twice the circumference of the whole Earth.” Most of his travel had been on foot — and most of it in a bad mood. What drove him to wander so prolifically is not easy to make out, as he seemed to derive little pleasure from it, although as a fierce Calvinist he did receive some satisfaction from vilifying the “deceitful deepes” of the “bottomless Gulfe of Papistry.” Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims were also objects of his scorn, although the empire of the sultans comes off better than the church of Rome in his estimation.
As his long travels went on and on they failed to lighten either his mood or his prose. A first short publication describing his early travels appeared in 1614 under what was, for him, the happy title of A Most Delectable and True Discourse of an Admired and Painfull Peregrination in Europe. The initial printing quickly sold out and a second was issued in 1616. The original dedication to the king’s then-favorite, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and his wife, Lady Francis Howard, was changed in the reprint to “all Noble-minded Gentlemen, and Heroicke Spirits” — Carr and Howard were in the Tower of London, charged with the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury.
By 1632 Lithgow was presenting his expanded wanderings under the expanded title of The Totall Discourse, of the Rare Adventures and Painfull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Yeares Trauayles, from Scotland, to the Most Famous Kingdomes in Europe, Asia, and Affrica. Perfited by Three Dear Boughte Voyages, in Surueighing of Forty eight Kingdomes Ancient and Moderne; Twenty One Rei-Publickes, Ten Absolute Principalities, with Two Hundred Ilands. The Particular Names Whereof, Are Described in Each Argument of the Ten Diuisions of This History: And It Also Diuided in Three Bookes; Two Whereof, Neuer Heretofore Published. Wherein Is Contayned, and Exact Relation, of the Lawes, Religion, Policies, and Gouernment of All Their Princes, Potentates, and
People. Together with the Grieuous Tortures He Suffered, by the Inquisition of Malaga in Spaine, His Miraculous Discouery and Delivery Thence: And of His Last and Late Returne from the Northerne Iles. Clearly this was a man who didn’t know when to stop.
In the later years of his life, when travel became difficult for him, he turned his attention to an account of an explosion at a Scottish castle called A Briefe and Summary Discourse upon That Lamentable and Dreadfull Disaster at Dunglasses and a lengthy poetic work with the mournful title The Gushing Teares of Godly Sorrow, Containing, the Causes, Conditions, and Remedies of Sinne, Depending Mainly on Contrition and Confession. This moralistic poem invites the reader to dwell on “mans stinking flesh” as a “Mass of ill,” a “Chaos of corruption,” “rotten slime,” and a “pudle of inruption” of “base filthynesse.”
He had some cause for gloom. His journeys were stalked by bad luck and hard knocks. In contrast to Pietro della Valle, who seems to have been shielded by wealth and a kind of cosmic insouciance, Lithgow was robbed and beaten all over the world. Yet those beatings were only the prelude for his greatest torment, which would be saved for the end of his three main journeys.
Not much is known of Lithgow’s origins. He was certainly not nobility, but his family doesn’t seem to have been hard up either. He was educated at the Grammar School in the little market town of Lanark in Scotland. After leaving school he traditionally is said to have taken up with a certain Alice Lockhart, whose family considered themselves too high of station for the likes of Lithgow. One day her brothers followed the lovers and, surprising them in a compromising situation, the “four blood-shedding wolves,” as he called them, cut off both of Lithgow’s ears. This amused the good folk of Lanark no end: they pegged the poor boy with the moniker “Cut-Lugged Willie” and laughed him out of town. According to historian Boies Penrose, local residents were still enthusiastically pointing out the house where this incident took place more than two hundred years later.
Recently a Lithgow specialist named James Robert Burns has proposed that the object of Lithgow’s youthful affections was not Alice Lockhart but a young woman from an even more upper-crust family named Helen Hamilton. However that may be, after this trouble Lithgow seems to have just kept on moving. Disdainful of stay-at-homes, whom he dismissed as “prattling Parrots, and sounding Cymbals,” he resolved “to seclude my selfe from my soyle, and exclude my relenting sorrows.” After warming up with walks through northern and central Europe, he began his three major journeys in 1608, when he left England for France; he would continue to Italy and on from there to Egypt and the Levant. His second journey, 1614–1616, took him to North Africa; his third, 1619–1621, to Spain.
On his first journey he was particularly disgusted by Rome, where he “sawe nothing but abomination, prophanation, and irreligious living.” He had trouble keeping quiet about his religious beliefs, and “hardly escaped from the hunting of blood-sucking Inquisitors.” In Penrose’s estimation, “Lithgow’s hatred of Catholicism … was so violent as to be in fact psychopathic, and his dour Calvinistic soul was so bitter that he would work himself into a raving frenzy at the mere thought of the Romish church.” In Italy he also visited Naples, Venice, and other cities. He liked Venice best, in part because on the day he arrived “there was a gray Frier burning quick at S. Markes pillar, for begetting fifteene young Nopble Nunnes with child, and all within one yeare; he being also their Father confessor.” Or so Lithgow claimed: his account is suspiciously similar to that of the English traveler Thomas Coryate, who visited Venice the year before and reported seeing hanging from a steeple the head of a friar who was supposed to have impregnated ninety-nine nuns.
He was less enthusiastic about nearby Padua, where he spent three months studying Italian. He considered the university a hotbed of depravity, rampant with the “monstruous filthinesse” of “beastly Sodomy” which was “to them a pleasant pastime, making songs, and singing Sonets of the beauty and pleasure of their Bardassi, or buggerd boyes.”
Leaving this decadent scene, Lithgow set off through the Ionian islands, which were mainly under the control of Venice at the time. But his vessel was attacked by a Turkish galley, “which sudden affrighting newes overwhelmed us almost in despare.” The other passengers urged surrender but Lithgow, who doubted that anyone would cough up a ransom for him, rallied a spirited defense. Seven men were killed in the fight, and Lithgow took a shot in the arm, but the ship was able to reach Cephalonia.
His wound treated by a Greek surgeon, Lithgow made his way to Crete. Ignoring advice not to venture into the interior of the island, he left most of his money behind in exchange and set off to see the sights. Sure enough, he was almost immediately attacked by “three Greeke murdering Renegadoes and an Italian Bandido: who laying hands on me, beate me most cruelly, robbed me of my clothes and stripped me naked, threatening me with many grievous speeches.”
Stumbling into the town of Canea, he was befriended by some English soldiers. There he encountered a French galley slave who had been brought ashore bound in shackles. Lithgow got the captor drunk and freed the slave, disguising him as a woman in one of Lithgow’s laundress’s gowns. When this was discovered Lithgow was pursued by the furious slave owner and barely made it to the safety of a monastery.
When it was safe to come out he continued sailing from one Greek island to another. Again he was attacked by Turkish pirates, who took over his ship and imprisoned its captain, but Lithgow somehow escaped to shore.
His next vessel was not attacked by pirates. Instead it ran into a furious storm, in the face of which “every man looked (as it were) with the stampe of death upon his pale visage.” Most of the passengers and crew were drowned, but again Lithgow and a few others made it to shore in a dinghy. Several days later they were rescued by Greek fishermen.
Arriving in Istanbul he had hardly touched down on the dock when he was set upon by four French “runnagats” who shouted “Adio Christiano!” and “beat me most cruelly.”He was rescued by Turks from the crew of his ship.
In Istanbul he witnessed “men and women as usually sold here in Markets, as horses and other beasts are with us.” Most of the slaves sold in Istanbul at this time were from the Balkans. Moved by her “pittifull lookes, and sprinkling teares,” he purchased the release of a Dalmatian widow and found her a job as a barmaid. Lithgow overwintered in Istanbul, not unexpectedly forming the judgment that the city was
A painted Whoore, the maske of deadly sin,
Sweet faire without, and stinking foule within.
The following spring he scowled on to Cyprus, braving along the way “invasions of damnable Pirats, who gave us divers assaults to their own disadvantages.” Arriving at this destination he repeated his pattern of rashly setting off to survey the interior and was promptly “encountered by the way with foure Turkes, who needs would have my mule to ride upon; which my Interpreter refused: But they in a revenge pulled me by the heeles from the Mules backe, beating me most pitifully, and left me almost for dead…. If it had not been for some compassionable Greekes, who by accident came by, and relieved me, I had doubtlesse immediately perished.”
Lithgow was made of too stern a stuff to be held back by a bit of a beating. As usual he was soon back up to speed, but he reached Aleppo too late to catch the caravan to Baghdad as he had planned. He had to content himself with observing the city’s strange customs, such as sending messages by carrier pigeon, smoking hookahs, and drinking coffee. Changing his plans, he now made his trip to Jerusalem, where he lodged with the Guardians of Mount Zion at the Francisco Monastery of Saint Salvatore, who arranged his eventful trip to the River Jordan.
In 1612, freshly tattooed with the mark of the holy city, and complaining about the eighteen pounds sixteeen shillings sterling his visit had cost him, he joined a caravan bound for Cairo in the company of six Germans. It proved to be an exceedingly difficult trip. Crossing the Sinai Desert, three of the Germans died of heatstroke, and when they reached Cairo the remaining Germ
ans visited the house of the Venetian consul, where they celebrated a little too vigorously for their strained systems and also passed away. Lithgow insisted that with his dying breath the last to go left the possessions of all six to him, but these were seized by the consul. Later an Ottoman court awarded Lithgow two-thirds of the total and one-third to the consul.
Having benefitted from its justice system, Lithgow formed a not completely negative impression of Cairo. “The Inhabitants here,” he allowed, “were the first Inventors of the Mathematicall Sciences, of Letters, and of the use of Writing: Great Magicians and Astrologians, and are yet imbued with a special dexterity of Wit.”
“The Author in the Libyan Desart” from The Total Discourse, of the Rare Adventures, and Painefull Peregrinations etc., London, 1632, by William Lithgow.
From Cairo he returned to Italy — “five sundry times assayled by the Cursayes and Pyrats” — and back to Scotland, where he published his first account of his journeys. His book was a hit, but Lithgow did not remain home for long. He was still restless, as he wrote in a poem that would be published in 1618:
I loathe to live long in a private place,
My soil I love, but I am born to wander,
And I am glad when I extremes embrace.
Sweet-sour delights must my contentment rander,
So, so I walk to view hills, towns and plains,
Each day new sights, new sights consume all pains.
In 1614 he set out again, this time hoofing it through the Netherlands and Germany. He paid a visit to King James’s daughter, Elizabeth, and he looked up relatives of the German travelers who had died in Egypt during his last trip; they rewarded him handsomely for reporting on their final days. Along the way he picked up a young Scottish gentleman named David Bruce (presumably no beastly sodomy was involved). In Germany the two travelers were set upon and robbed, and would have been again in Italy, but the would-be thieves were so impressed by Lithgow having visited Jerusalem that they
1616 Page 32