Touring in 1600

Yet civil war was less detrimental to touring than international war, inasmuch as no nation was barred the country for the time being. Besides, fewer mercenaries were employed. Now, however bad the native soldier may have been – and how bad that was may be judged from Shakespeare's picture of him in "Henry V" (Act III, sc. 2), – mercenaries were far worse, seeing that they behaved in the country they were defending as the others did only in that which they attacked. Sastrow followed in the wake of the mercenaries whom Charles V imported; wherever they had passed the way was strewn with corpses. In one house he found the body of a man who had been suspended by the genitals, a usual custom, while they tortured him to make him reveal his valuables, and released by a sword-stroke, not on the cord he hung by, but "flush with the abdomen." From Bamberg they carried off four hundred women as far as Nuremberg, while Hungarians cut off the feet and hands of children and stuck them in their hats instead of feathers. And it is perhaps worth while quoting the effect on Sastrow himself. On his horse being stolen, he "chose the best nag at hand"; and finding a gentleman's house temporarily abandoned, he and his companions stole wholesale, not only to satisfy present wants, but also in order to realise money later.

The effect of all this so far as it concerned tourists may be exemplified by the state of the highroad between Danzig and Hamburg, along which, in 1600, the only corpses in evidence were those of criminals. By 1652, in one day's journey, a traveller144 could count thirty-four piles of faggots, each pile marking the spot where a wayfarer had been murdered. Each passer-by was expected to add a faggot. Another result was that soldiers continued to exercise during peace the habits they had contracted in war. When Lady Fanshawe passed through Abbeville in 1659, the governor warned her against local robbers, advising an escort of garrison soldiers at a pistole [£3, 6s. 8d.] each. She engaged ten, and met a band of fifty 'robbers.' The ten parleyed with the fifty, and the fifty retired; they, too, were soldiers of the garrison.

Between the soldier and the robber, in fact, the difference was merely that of official, and unofficial, employment. It was in the latter capacity, of course, that they oftenest had dealings with the tourist; or were supposed to do so. One cannot help being struck by the idea that these travellers were far more frightened than hurt, so far as robbery was concerned. A lady, for instance, between Turin and Genoa, saw the road stained with blood where wayfarers had lately been robbed and murdered, yet passed in safety.145 One traveller, it is true, was stopped four times between St. Malo and Havre, but more normal experiences were those of Moryson, who suffered so but once in more than four years' travel, and of Hentzner, who encountered robbers once in three years and then escaped. He had warning and hired an escort; but it has to be noted that this escort, for one day, cost more than fifty crowns [£90]. Very similar was the experience of the Venetian ambassador Lippomano on his way to Paris in 1577.146 A rumour got about that he was conveying a loan of eight hundred thousand francs to the French government, and a Venetian ambassador was easy to get information about because of the red trappings of his mules. He was warned, and so were the towns on the route; with the result that his own company were refused admission on suspicion that they were the highwaymen in disguise; and watched, as they passed, by garrisons on the walls. For six days they marched in continual fear; swords drawn, arquebus-matches lighted. Once they thought the "volori" really were upon them, but out of the cloud of dust galloped nothing but the escort from Troyes to relieve the escort from Bar-sur-Seine. And in the end they were fleeced by none but the escorts themselves.

These escorts were part of the life of the time; important towns kept them as a matter of course, in default of a system of country-police such as existed in Spain, the "Santa Hermandad," who first suppressed the thieves and then took over, and extended, their business. In France, however, towards the end of this period, the highways began to be patrolled regularly by police, in couples, none but whom might carry firearms. Yet this arrangement was in force when of the travellers who followed just behind Evelyn on the Paris-Orleans road, four were killed. And within a few years of this some one tells us how he heard cries issuing from the inside of a dead horse, cut open by robbers in order to give themselves more time to escape by fastening their victim inside it, a dirty trick, literally, for he was pulled out in as untidy a state as it was possible for a stark-naked man to be.

To meet, when alone, with two ruffians, to pretend, being on foot and decidedly shabby, to be a beggar; and to pass them thus, not only without loss, but with 1s. 2d. towards his next meal – such was the experience of one Englishman abroad. But what could he have done had the beasts been four-legged ones? Here was another risk to run; and, perhaps, to pay for. There were plenty to meet. It is not surprising to read of them breaking into stables and ransacking cemeteries in Muscovy, where, by the way, protection against them was supposed to be secured by the noise of a big stick dragging at the back of the sledge by a rope; but things were little better near Paris. Readers of Rabelais may recollect a second narrow escape that befell the six pilgrims whom Gargantua ate in a salad in consequence of their hiding among the lettuces to avoid being eaten by him as meat. After their miraculous escape out of his mouth, they barely saved themselves from falling into a snare for wolves. It was no exaggeration to write so about Touraine; in the winter of 1653 a pack entered Blois and ate a child. And just before Evelyn visited Fontainebleau, "a lynx or ounce" had killed some one passing thither by the highroad from Paris. The country between Geneva and Lyons, again, writes one who passed through it, was "mainly inhabited by wolves and bears."

But we have not finished with people. Slavery had to be reckoned with, and therefore ransoms. More than one refers to the "malcontents" of the Low Countries, unpaid Spanish garrison-soldiers who wandered about on the look-out for Englishmen in particular, and esteeming a younger brother's ransom at twenty thousand crowns of the sun [£35,000], says Wotton. But the risk of capture, in the ordinary way, was confined to Mohammedan territory and the neighbouring seashores, with Algiers as headquarters. Many men who were slaves there at this period have left record of their adventures; of whom Gramaye is perhaps the best to quote from, inasmuch as no one was a more acute, thorough, and trustworthy observer. He lived at Algiers in 1619, one of twenty thousand Christian slaves. According to the statistics he gives of the previous twelve years, two hundred and fifty-one ships had brought in twelve thousand, two hundred and forty prisoners, of whom eight hundred and fifty-seven Germans had apostatised, three hundred English, one hundred and thirty-eight from Hamburg, "Danes and Easterlings" one hundred and sixty; Poles, Hungarians, and Muscovites two hundred and fifty, Low Countrymen one hundred and thirty; besides French and others. Fewest renegades came from Spain and Italy, because in those two countries alone were permanent systematic collectors of money for ransoms; the two orders of the Trinity and of Our Lady of Pity paid out sixty-three thousand ducats [over £70,000], in this way yearly, a drain of gold which does not seem to have been taken into account by economists, although not counteracted, but on the contrary increased, by trade transactions with Mohammedan centres like Constantinople and Aleppo, and added to by all the privately paid ransoms. Sir Anthony Sherley ransomed two Portuguese gentlemen for ten thousand pounds, who had been enslaved sixteen years, and for one of whom three ransoms had been sent, each of which had been captured by pirates. The statement already made about all forms of life insurance being censured as gambling must be modified in connection with slavery, for both the law and public opinion approved of a man paying premiums to assure a ransom being paid, and that promptly, in the event of his capture; and the system seems to have been in frequent use,147 although it must be admitted that not one of these travellers seems so much as aware of its existence.

The expenses of protection against pirates may be imagined from the estimate for the outfit of the galley intended to carry the Provençal deputation to Constantinople in 1585, referred to earlier. The galley-slaves numbered two hundred; the deputation fifty. Sixty soldiers were to be taken for defence, whose wages for the eight months were to be nineteen hundred and twenty crowns of the sun; in addition to which was their keep, nine thousand and forty crowns, and arms and gunpowder, five hundred crowns, the total equalling about twenty-seven thousand pounds of our money.

Of Turkey Sir Henry Blount says that in assuring himself against loss of liberty lay "the most expense and trouble of my voyage." And Blount's opinion is the better worth having, seeing that he would have been the last to fail in the exercise of courtesy and tact, the absence of which is the commonest cause of martyrdom. Several times he had to use his knife to avoid being pushed into a house, and hardly a day passed without his Janizary being offered a price for him. His defences against it in general were to cultivate or buy friends and to make a practice of pretending he had no friends and little money, and that all that remained to him was wagered against his return, because enslavement would be more in hope of ransom than service.

The enslavement of the Jerusalem pilgrim seems to have been comparatively rare before the end of the sixteenth century; yet two of the most striking narratives belong to the year 1565. The first adventure, however, happened during an excursion to Jordan without escort, a risk that none dreamt of running later. A German, named Fürer, set out in February, with a friend, a eunuch-interpreter, and a monk-guide. Sitting down to a meal on the way back, four Arabs appeared, whom they treated as guests; yet, the meal over, the Arabs enquired whether their hosts had any money or garments worth stealing. Doubting their negatives, they undressed them, and beneath the monkish outer-garment which each one was wearing discovered on the two travellers underclothing which suggested riches. The Arabs forthwith led all four away into the desert to sell them at Medina, but were induced before long to despatch the monk with two of themselves to the nearest monastery, that of S. Saba, some hours' journey from Jerusalem, for ransom. The remaining three Franks, unarmed, chose their time to attack the two armed Arabs, and after a desperate fight and a fearful journey, wounded, parched, and famished, Fürer climbed up a rope-ladder into the monastery through one of the back-windows, while the two other Arabs were being kept waiting in the front.

The other tale concerns sixty-two pilgrims who sailed from Jaffa in the August of that same year.148 On October 16 they were shipwrecked off the coast of Asia Minor, one being drowned. On landing six were killed, the rest taken prisoners, a proportion of whom go to Rhodes. These are urged to apostatise – in vain. They offer ransoms; Frau Johanna of Antwerp three hundred ducats [£540], Pastor Peter Villingen three hundred and twelve kronen [which may mean anything from £200 to £800; probably the former]: the total came to three thousand, two hundred and sixty kronen. This does not seem enough to their owners; the Venetian and some sailors get free somehow; the others are sent to the galleys. During 1566 Frau Johanna and six others die. By May 1, 1568, seven more are dead; two have been redeemed for six hundred kronen; two others for four hundred and eighty kronen. Soon after, an Italian was ransomed by the Venetian "bailo." This is all that is known of the sixty-two.

Another risk that was greater on the Jerusalem journey was that of disease, or enfeeblement through hardship. The state of things normal in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre must alone have told on health; one German on his return to Jaffa counted two hundred and thirty lice in his clothes. But, throughout, disease lay in wait for all in a deadlier form than any we meet with. Just as instead of "nerves" they suffered from "inflammation of the conscience," so, instead of influenza, they had plague, infectious in the highest degree and fatal in a few days, or quicker. In Constantinople it was looked on as inevitable and raged unhindered. Yet, says Blount, the Turks' carelessness was less of a hindrance to trade than the Christians' precautions. In Venice, over the doors of the inn-bedrooms was written "Ricordati della bolletta" – "Remember your bill of health." This "bolletta," or "bolletina," also known as "fede" or "patente," had to be obtained, before entering Venice, from the "commissari" or "soprastanti della sanità," certifying freedom from plague; failing which, or if a "fede" obtained elsewhere was not "clean," i. e. not bearing the official counter-signatures guaranteeing freedom from plague at the last stopping-places, the new-comer had to "far la contumacia," go into quarantine for forty days. The disinfectants consisted of sun, air, and vinegar, and the confinement, if not on board ship, was in a spot chosen for its pleasant healthiness, under shelter which was clean, roomy, and well furnished, with a broad verandah on which one's belongings were to be laid out. This practice was constant at Venice, where ships were always arriving from plague-stricken ports; in the rest of Italy it was frequent but intermittent. Outside Italy a plague-scare occurred more rarely. When it did the healthy but tired wayfarers might find themselves shut out of the town where they looked to find food and rest; perhaps would find the highway itself barricaded149 by the authorities of a town which was plague-free and determined to remain so, and forced to ride all night by dark and dangerous by-ways150– unless they pretended to be an ambassador and his retinue, as some English merchants once did.

Too much stress must not be laid on the troubles of a stranger who fell ill of a less deadly illness. Perhaps, even, a German with the toothache might still have the same experience in Spain as did a countryman of his three hundred years ago. Having tried a cupping-glass himself in vain, he went to the local barber-surgeon; the latter dug the tooth out with a bread-knife! Yet in hospitals a change for the better can be easily proved. The chief hospital at Paris, the Hôtel-Dieu, was visited by an Italian151 in the middle of the seventeenth century. Three or four men lay in each bed, or two women; and the stench was terrible, even to a seventeenth-century nose. At the galley-slaves' hospital at Marseilles, a boy went in front of visitors with a "pan of perfume." Still more to the point, regarding this particular period, was the predicament of a man at the point of death in a district with a different theological stamp from his own, say, a Protestant in a Roman Catholic country. He would then have the choice of accepting the sacrament in the locally orthodox form or confessing himself a Protestant. In the latter case the priest might cut the heretic off from the help, not only of the doctor, but of the cook also, and if he recovered in spite of this, the Inquisition might be awaiting him. And yet a man of average morality would be far less of an adiaphorist in the sixteenth century than to-day. Some Protestants at Venice resigned themselves at death to the only cemetery-burial – that with Roman Catholic rites; but most chose to be buried at sea off Malamocco, trusting in the phrase, "And the sea shall give up its dead."

As to the "sudden death" of which the Litany speaks, if one regards direct evidence only, there may well be a tendency to think the risk of it somewhat exaggerated, but the balance will recover itself if, to the number of travellers who have left us record of their doings, is added that of the dead men who would have told tales if they could. Mile after mile of loneliest road had to be slowly traversed, many a mile through forest where now is open ground, at a time when existed far less force in conventions to restrain those, perhaps even more numerous then than now, like the murderers of Banquo: —

… I am oneWhom the vile blows and buffets of the worldHave so incensed that I am reckless whatI do to spite the world.… And I anotherSo weary with disasters, tugged with fortuneThat I would set my life on any chanceTo mend it or to be rid on't.

In the towns, the narrow dark streets gave the assassin his opportunity, whether a mistaken one or not. Readers of Cellini's autobiography will recall his remark that he trained himself to turn corners wide and may have noted it as merely characteristic; but before Cellini's book was in print, we find the French tourist, Payen of Meaux, writing of the Venetians, "Quand ils marchent la nuit, ils ne tournent jamais court pour entrer dans une Rue; mais ils tiennent le milieu, afin d'éviter la rencontre de ceux qui voudroient les attendre."

Supposing, however, that a foreigner died in peace, what happened to the money and chattels with him at the moment? According to Zeiler, in Aragon the practice was to notify the authorities at his native place and hold the goods at the disposal of the legal heirs for a year, after which limit unclaimed property was handed to the Brotherhood of Our Lady of Pity to be employed in the redemption of captives. In Rome the custom was for the servant to take the dead master's clothes. In France the State took absolutely everything by the "droit d'aubaine," which was the law wherever feudalism had established itself, though sometimes in abeyance; in Poland it seems to have been completely so.152 The strictness, on the contrary, with which it was enforced in France is well illustrated by the fate of the library of Sir Kenelm Digby, who died at Paris in 1665. It was forfeited to Louis XIV by the "droit d'aubaine"; he gave it away; the new owner sold it to a relative of the late owner for ten thousand crowns.

This right, based as it was on the same "right to pillage" under which the Jews suffered in the Middle Ages,153 brings out very clearly one fact which was always liable to affect a traveller's finances, namely, that in so far as he was a traveller, he had no legal privileges. Two Dutch gentlemen,154 for instance, were at Paris at a time when war between Holland and France suddenly became imminent. They found the financial agents forbidden to pay them on bills of exchange or letters of credit, and their goods were temporarily confiscated. It was the ordinary procedure of the time. Here again is obvious the advantage of going in the train of an ambassador; the latter's rights were the fullest protection that an alien could acquire, except mercantile ones at their best. Yet even these ambassadorial rights lacked so much of the fullness and the clearness that they possess to-day that they were not put forward in a modern form, not even in theory, until the treatise of Grotius on the subject published in 1625.155

These Dutch gentlemen just mentioned found themselves in difficulties on their arrival in Paris in another way also. They had introductions to good society; fashions had changed while they were en route; they must stay in their lodgings till the tailor had done his worst. Even if they had been going to Jerusalem they would still have felt the relationship between cost and clothes, a relationship decidedly closer then than at present. Only in going to Jerusalem it took this form, that the shabbier you went the less the journey cost. As to kind, preferably such as were worn by Greeks, friars, merchants, or Syrian Christians. The pilgrim's ordinary dress, described in one of those picturesque snatches of verse with which Shakespeare's contemporary, Robert Greene, lightened his tales, —

Down the valley 'gan he trackBag and bottle at his back.In a surcoat all of grey,Such wear palmers on the wayWhen with scrip and staff they seeJesus' grave on Calvary, —

was no protection against suspicion of riches. Yet it was supposed to lessen the risk of being kidnapped into slavery at Algiers on the road to Montserrat if one carried the white pilgrim's staff.

Crossing the Alps, for a northerner who did not wish to be conspicuously alien, meant a complete change into black silk; for the brilliant attire which we see in productions of "Romeo and Juliet" reflects Elizabethan England, not Italy. Italy manufactured those multi-coloured materials, it is true, but for export or official use only, except for the ash colour that betokened a vow not perfected.

Typical minor incidents were the purchasing of a new handkerchief in Germany, of light-coloured silk, and, as to size, somewhat resembling a saddle-cloth, with initials of some motto worked in a corner thereof, say D. H. I. M. T. ("Der Herr ist Mein Trost") or W.H.I.B. ("Wie heilig ist Bruderschaft"), and secondly, the story of a sugar-loaf hat. An Italian priest wore it in Italy – but not in France. Before leaving Lyons he had grown tired of a crowd of children following him about. So far from being able to sell it, it was impossible to find any one who would take it as a gift until he met a man whose business was partly selling a powder which killed mice. The rest of his business was the profession of town-fool. That being so, he could accept the hat; he cut it into the shape of an imperial crown and gave himself out as the Emperor of the Moluccas.

A complete change into French clothes cost this priest two pistoles [£8], and he adds the detail that nowhere was waterproof material to be bought. The waxed cloth which was sold as such cracked wherever it had been folded.

On occasion, too, changes of clothes might be a legal obligation. The sumptuary laws might step in and forbid the new-comer to wear what was perhaps his one respectable garment. Or again, in Muscovy, foreigners used to dress as natives to avoid the jeers of the crowd; but at some date early in the seventeenth century the Patriarch noticed Germans behaving irreverently at a festival and complained that foreigners ought not to seem included in the benediction that was given to the faithful. Foreigners were therefore ordered to revert to their national dress, which produced most ludicrous results until the tailors could finish new garments; inasmuch as the merchants had to fall back on those that had belonged to their predecessors, leaving sometimes a whole generation between the fashions of their upper and nether garments.

All these things might fall on the tourist: each one cost money; some one, at least, of them he would hardly escape. One more source of possible loss existed, one that he was certain to have to face – the money itself. The variety of coins was just as great as the variety of clothes, though with this difference that the clothes were as local as the coins were international – just the opposite of the case to-day. This is not equally true, of course, of all denominations, and the majority may not have circulated so freely as in preceding centuries, but the higher ones seem to have passed about from hand to hand with little more hesitation than Australian sovereigns do in England. When exceptions occurred, they generally had political causes: French gold, for example, being more willingly taken by the Swiss than other foreign gold because they had become so used to it in the course of serving as French mercenaries.

Of the uncertainties of the tourist, however, in relation to coins, that caused by their international character would be the first to disappear. There remained a trinity of diversities to bewilder him permanently and to deliver him over, defenceless, to the dishonest: diversity of value, diversity of kind, diversity of inscription.

To take the last first; it might seem that absence was a more appropriate term than diversity, seeing that the nominal value of a coin in circulation about 1600 was only in the smallest percentage of cases stated on its face; and when one comes to think of it, it is only the tourist who ever reads a coin for business purposes. Where the diversity comes in lies in the fact of certain names becoming popular, such as "paolo" in Italy, which meant that many different types would be struck, all "paoli" but none alike. As to variations in value these may be illustrated from the Venetian zecchino, the Hungarian ducat, the sultanon of Constantinople and the sheriff of Cairo. All of these are reckoned as equal in one year or other between 1592 and 1620 by one or other trustworthy traveller, yet the differences of value of one coin or other of the four vary from 6s. 8d. to 9s.; and this was not a steady rise. In fact, the difference between the 1592 and 1620 valuations is but fourpence. Moreover, the settlement of values was far less a commercial affair merely than it has become; governments were forever tinkering at it by means of proclamations, all telling against the tourist, since their object was to attract, or to retain, bullion, which either depreciated the value of the coin he wished to change or appreciated that of the coin he had to acquire. Lady Fanshawe mentions a proclamation of October 14, 1664, at Madrid which cost her husband, ambassador there, eight hundred pounds. Since then, paper money has come to absorb all the political dishonesty that used to be exercised on coins, and the far less abrupt modern methods minimise the loss to the tourist. The French government went bankrupt fifty-six times during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.156