The Death of Maani Gioerida, 1664–1665, from Der Voortrefelkyke Reisen van Pietro della Valle, a Dutch translation of Della Valle’s travels. Engraving.
Della Valle tried ineffectually to be of assistance to the Christian communities in Persia. His letters document local Christian activities such as Armenian weddings for which the bride’s face is covered with gold leaf “like we use on macaroons.” But his enthusiasm for the shah as a benefactor of Christianity faded, in parallel with the shah’s own disillusionment with the empty promises of the European powers. Unable to affect a great deal of change in the condition of Persian Christians, and still weak from illness, della Valle decided it was time to return to Italy. Once again he set out in a caravan, with Maani, their adopted daughter Mariuccia, and two servants in tow. This time his destination was Hormuz. Fearful of traveling through Ottoman lands after his long residence in Persia, he hoped to return to Europe from there by sea.
En route to Hormuz della Valle stopped in the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis to copy inscriptions off the walls of its ruins — his drawings would be the first versions of its cuneiform writing to appear in the West. Then he received the happy news that the wine regimen seemed to have done its job — Maani was at last pregnant. “We swam in a sea of joy,” he wrote, “spending all our time in laughter and amusement.”
Their joy was short-lived. Hormuz was a war zone. English forces had allied with the Persians against the Portuguese outpost. Della Valle’s party was forced to retreat to wait for the situation to settle down. During this time Mariuccia became ill with acute diarrhea. She would recover. Maani tended to her. Then she too became ill, as did Pietro.
Maani delivered a stillborn son prematurely. She was devastated that the child had died before receiving baptism. They had agreed to name the child Persindo, “since it had been conceived in Persia and, if all had gone well, would have been born in India.” Maani’s fever increased day by day. She had an unquenchable thirst. Every physical and spiritual remedy was attempted. She only grew worse. Then:
One day, one of the Muslim women who served her came, out of kindness and in very high spirits, with the news that she had consulted a famous fortune-teller who had assured her that it was certain that Signora Maani would be completely cured on the following Friday. This information terrified me, for I considered that divination — and Muslim divination in particular — could only be a black art; that the Devil, being at once the father of lies and a source of knowledge, could foretell the future that lay hidden from us. I was persuaded that by this answer he meant that Signora Maani would die on the following Friday — as in fact she did.
She was twenty-three. Her bereaved husband composed a now-lost sequence of twenty-three sonnets he entitled My Tears.
Della Valle felt it important to bury his wife on Christian soil. So he did something extraordinary. Lacking customary embalming fluids, he had local women remove his wife’s organs and preserve her corpse with camphor. But the heart, he stipulated, must remain inside — Maani would need it at the Last Judgment. The women complied, and to demonstrate that they had carried out his instructions they brought Maani’s heart to show him. “Imagine my feelings,” he wrote, “when I saw the heart of her whom I loved best in the world brought in to me on a saucer!”
A coffin was made of mango wood, nailed shut, and wrapped in waxed cloth inside an outer layer of leather. Carrying this macabre item, della Valle, still severely ill, made his way to the town of Lar. Expected to die, he surprised everyone by recovering in a couple of months. Soon he seemed more or less his old sociable self, conversing with the learned men of Lar, who impressed him more than the literati of the capital had. He delighted in the roof-mounted fans that delivered fresh air into stuffy houses, an innovation he hoped to introduce to Europe.
At length he learned he might obtain passage to India on English ships docked at Hormuz. He ordered two new containers similar to the one containing his wife but twice as deep. It would be necessary to hide his wife’s body, because no captain would set sail with a corpse on board. He disguised the contents of Maani’s container by surrounding her body with layers of clothing.
His next concern was to get Mariuccia on board, because women were not generally allowed sea passage. Disguising her as a boy, he managed to smuggle her aboard. In February 1623, a year after Maani’s death, he arrived in Surat in South Asia.
Over the summer and fall of 1615 an enormous caravan was making its way from Persia to India. Among its number was an odd Englishman from a little village in Somerset, who was traveling by foot. Having conceived a fancy to take a ride on an elephant, he was bound for India. His name was Thomas Coryate.
Coryate has been described as a fool. Which he might have been, but he was no dummy. He was the canny sort Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote “This fellow is wise enough to play the fool.”
Coryate and the Venetian Courtesan, from Coryats Crudites, 1611, by Thomas Coryate. London. Engraving by William Hole.
Coryats Crudities was one of the first great English-language travel books. It became an indispensable guide for young Englishment wishing to tour the continent.
Although Coryat is spelled without a final e in the book’s title, his name is most often given as Coryate. The primary sense of the word crudities in the title is “appetizers” (crudités).
Coryate visited a famous courtesan of Venice (as his young readers might be tempted to do). Although he sternly disapproved of her occupation, he may have undercut his moralistic message by comparing her magnificent dwelling to the “Paradise of Venus.”
Apparently he looked the part, though this is not evident from depictions of him that appear on the title page and elsewhere in his great travel book, Coryat’s Crudities. Yet a contemporary claimed that “he carried folly (which the charitable call merriment) in his very face. The shape of his head had no promising form, being like a sugar-loaf inverted, with the little end before, as composed of fancy and memory, without any common sense.”
He was a joker, and the butt of jokes. The son of a parson, he was born in the rectory of the village of Odcombe. He attended Oxford but didn’t complete his degree and seems to have spent a few years just hanging out in the village. Around the time James acceded to the throne he decided to try his luck in London.
He soon mixed in the literary scene. It wasn’t hard to find, since many of the city’s writers had made a tavern called the Mermaid Inn their unofficial clubhouse. Ben Jonson presided there, and luminaries such as Edmund Spencer and Will Shakespeare must have flung witticisms back and forth from time to time. Into this high-powered company Coryate presented himself as a sort of presumptuous rube. He spoke in an outlandish, overblown style that matched his appearance, and the Mermaid wags adopted him as a sort of jester-mascot. John Donne called him “that great lunatic.” No entertainment was complete, some said, without a helping of sweetmeats and Coryate.
The role of amiable buffoon was not the end of Tom’s aspirations. He was determined to make his name as a man of letters, and he hit upon an inspired means of doing so: he would walk to Venice and back and record his journey in what could serve as a guidebook to travelers on the continent. Many young Englishmen were undertaking tours of Europe, but there was no book available to guide them.
In 1608 he crossed the channel and arrived in Calais, having “varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the excrementall ebullitions of my tumultuous stomach.” He traveled through France and Italy to Venice — “this thrise worthie citie, the fairest Lady, yea the richest Paragon and Queene of Christendome” — which was the high point of his tour. He was impressed by its gondolas, which he said numbered ten thousand, and its courtesans, who were barely fewer in number. The Piazza di San Marcos, he commented, marked “the greatest magnificence of architecture to be seene, that any place under the sunne doth yeelde.”
He visited the Jewish ghetto, where he was startled to discover that Jews resembled other human beings. He had been led to ex
pect a Jew to be “a weather beaten warp-face fellow, sometimes a phrenticke and lunaticke person” but was forced to concede that “some fewe of those Jewes, especially some of the Levantines, to bee such goodly and proper men” with “most elegant and sweet featured persons.”
Venice, he concluded, was well worth the trip:
Had there bin an offer made unto me before I took my journey to Venice, eyther that foure of the richest mannors of Somerset-shire (wherein I was borne) should be gratis bestowed upon me if I never saw Venice, or neither of them if I should see it, although certainly those mannors would do me much more good in respect to a state of livelihood to live in the world, then the sight of Venice: yet notwithstanding I will ever say while I live, that the sight of Venice and her resplendent beauty, antiquities, and monuments, hath by many degrees more contented my minde, and satisfied my desires, than those four Lordshippes could possibly have done.
Reluctantly bidding Venice good-bye, Coryate returned to England through Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands, and set himself to writing. He spent some two years writing up his six-month journey, only to find himself in the position of many an aspiring author, with a manuscript but no publisher. He called the book Coryat’s Crudities, Hastily Gobbled Up in Five Months Travels in France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia Commonly Called the Grisons Country, Helvetia alias Switzerland, Some Parts of High Germany and the Netherlands; Newly Digested in the Hungry Aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset, and Now Dispersed to the Nourishment of the Travelling Members of the Kingdome. It was an excellent though very long guide to European travel, for Coryate was a sharp observer who had diligently visited the major sites and assembled pertinent statistics and information about each place he visited. But it seems no one was willing to take a chance on publishing it — at least, Coryate ended up self-publishing, whether by choice or necessity.
Faced with this dilemma Coryate devised a shrewd marketing maneuver — calling on his friends at the Mermaid Inn, he engineered the most elaborate book blurb in the history of publishing. With the backing of his sometime patron Prince Henry, he solicited rhymed testimonials from many of England’s literary luminaries as a preface to the book. The Mermaid wits vied with one another to create the slyest and most ridiculous couplets. Among those who contributed were John Donne, Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, and Thomas Campion. A sample gives a taste of the verses:
First, th’Author here glutteth Sea, Haddocke and Whiting
With spuing, and after the world with his writing.
A Punke here pelts him with egs. How so?
For he did but kisse her, and so let her go.
Old Hat here, torne Hose, with Shoes full of gravell,
And louse-dropping Case, are the Armes of his travel.
Here France, and Italy both to him shed
Their hornes, and Germany pukes on his head.
But here, nether trusting his hands, nor his legs,
Beeing in feare to be rob’d, he most learnedly begs.
As usual, Coryate was the butt of their humor, but he seems not to have minded. His promotional stratagem worked, and once the book was published in 1611 his faith in it was confirmed. Despite clocking in at some eight hundred pages it became an enormous hit and an indispensable guidebook for travelers.
He followed the Crudities with some supplemental writings, but its success fueled his appetite for larger undertakings. He resolved to travel for ten years, ride upon an elephant, and deliver an oration to an Asian potentate. He would travel almost entirely on foot.
While traveling through Turkey on his way to Persia, he was robbed of his bankroll near Baghdad, so he was forced to travel on a shoestring, relying on the kindness of strangers. He reached Isfahan without further incident and spent two months there, but he was frustrated in his desire to meet Shah Abbas. He joined an enormous caravan to India, consisting of six thousand people and five thousand animals. Traveling with this large party he encountered Robert Sherley and his wife, Teresia, among a caravan headed the opposite direction. He was flattered that Sherley was carrying his books and, considering the loss of his funds, was especially grateful to the kind and thoughtful Teresia “who bestowed fortie shillings upon mee in Persian money.”
In India Coryate visited Lahore, Delhi, and Agra. He reached Ajmere, Gujarat, at that time the site of Jahangir’s court (which he moved often), where he was greeted by the English ambassador, Thomas Roe, whom he had previously met at the Frankfurt Book Fair on his way back to England from Venice. Roe wrote that the
fates have sent Coryate hither, and now he lives in my house. He came hither afoote, hath passed by Constantinople, Jerusalem, Bethlem, Damascus, and (breefly) thorowgh all the Turks territory: seene every post and pillar: observed every tombe, visited the monuments of Troy, Persia, and this King’s dominions, all afoote with most unwearied legges: and is now for Samarcand in Tartarya, to kisse Tamberlans tombe; from thence to Susa, and to Prester Jhac in Ethiopia, where he will see the hill Amara, all afoote; and so foote it to Odcombe. His notes are already too great for portage….
Sadly, those voluminous notes have been lost. Coryate fell ill with dysentary, and he died in Surat, in the company of some of his countrymen. They reported that his last words were “Sack, sack, is there such a thing as sack? I pray give me some sack.” What might have been an invaluable book of early travel through the lands of Islam was lost to history. We have only some letters that he sent home, which were collected and published as Greeting from the Court of the Great Mogul in London in 1616.
Before he died Coryate realized some of his ambitions. He had walked from the Levant all the way to India. He had ridden upon an elephant, as illustrated in the 1616 volume (p. 30). And, in August 1616, he delivered an oration to Jahangir. He did so standing in the street and screaming up at the startled emperor, who looked down from an upstairs window. Apparently Coryate addressed the emperor in excellent Persian, which he had studied with the same diligence with which he approached all his undertakings. He began by exalting Jahangir with flowery praise. He explained that he had walked to Jahangir’s lands in order to ride an elephant and see the Ganges. He concluded with his intention to visit Samarkand and he requested the emperor’s permission to visit Timor’s tomb.
The emperor replied that he was unable to grant the permission because Samarkand was outside his dominion. But he tossed Coryate a purse containing £10. Sometimes it paid to play the fool.
Thomas Coryate was indifferent to mountains and their vistas. He was most attracted to fertile flat or rolling farmlands. He regarded the Alps not as a destination but an impediment to his travels. He was uninspired by Lake Como.
At the same time that Coryate was hoofing it through Persia and India, a traveler in China was also walking great distances and making notes on his travels for future publication. He was an unusually tall man, who covered ground quickly with long strides. He was described as “nimble as an ape, sturdy as an ox.” His complexion was dark, and he was said to have “a Taoist look.” A friend wrote that “after traveling for several hundred li, he would clamber up a broken rock to a withered tree and burnt pines in order to gather together some tassels. He would then dash off a record of his journey, which was as good as a writing manual.”
Born Xu Honzu, he was best known by his pen name of Xu Xiake (“traveler among sunset clouds”), which was given to him by his friend the landscape painter Chen Jiru. Like Coryate he preferred to travel on foot and to be completely independent. “When I travel,” he wrote, “I require neither a horse nor a companion; rather than traveling together, it would be better if you could simply point out the way to me.”
Xu Xiake did not merely reject horses and companions. In scaling mountains he was searching for what he called the “ultimate void.” Although he wrote that “in my boundless roaming there is nothing I wish to omit,” he admitted that he was particularly “obsessed with mountains.” On one occasion, reaching the peak of Mount Jinhua, he wrote:
As the evening sun w
ent down, a clear moon sustained the light, and all of nature was still; the sky was awash with blue…. I thought back to the mediocrity of the lower world: who else had experienced this clear light?
Even if others climbed towers and let out screams of delight, or sipped wine by the riverside, if they saw our solitary ascent of the peaks of ten thousand mountains to a place where paths end and roads cease and we are completely beyond the mortal world, they would see it was a true paradise. I was not frightened by the crowds of mountain spirits and strange beasts hemming me in, let alone the unmoving silence, for I was wandering with the Ultimate Void.”
His contemporaries agreed that Xu’s travels were a form of obsession: Chen Jiru wrote that “in his long travels Xu was neither an official nor a trader, nor was he on a social outing — he was just obsessed with the landscape.” Another scholar echoed that he was “born with a strange obsession.”
He was born to a well-to-do scholar household. His father, Xu Yuan, was described as a “recluse.” His mother, Wang Ruren, was characterized as a remarkably knowledgeable woman who was devoted to gardening and weaving. According to the painter and art theorist Dong Qichang, under whom a friend of Xu’s studied, Xu Xiake’s father “did not like to consort with officials. It was his wife who shaped their second son into such an exceptional person.”
Xu had a younger brother who was the child of a concubine. Before his death his father told his mother that the family estate could be divided only among her two sons; the son of the concubine did not require any inheritance. But she included the youngest boy and divided it into three parts anyway.
Xu Xiake spent long days talking with his mother, who outlived his father by twenty-one years. She too seemed fond of travel, and the two often journeyed together. Once he was on a mountain top when his heart started pounding. He hurried down to discover that his mother was ill. After that he tried not to range too far away from her. Only after her death did he feel free to undertake his longest excursions.
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