Touring in 1600

Besides, from southeast to northwest stretched the high road from the Black Sea through Kamienietz to Danzig, which one of these travellers assures us was the most thickly-populated highroad in Europe.51 Danzig itself was one of the great centres of world-commerce; so great that its citizens were well justified in one detail of their daily life that Moryson records, that of taking off their hats as they passed the town hall. The commerce was very varied, but its main export seems to have been grain and its main import, Scotchmen. Of these latter there were certainly thousands;52 in fact, from some date in the reign of Stephen Bathory (1575-86) till 1697, perhaps later, a "brotherhood" of Scots existed, recognised officially; and boys of fifteen to seventeen came over in such quantities and so often with such disastrous results, that in 1625 an edict was issued in Scotland prohibiting skippers taking over any who had not been sent for or had not 500 marks. But these can hardly be reckoned as tourists, travelling, as they did, Scot-fashion, on the "ubi panis, ibi patria" principle, with the object of sharing the retail-trade with Jews, so successfully that there has long lingered in Eastern Prussia the proverb, "Warte bis der Schotte kommt," alluding to the annual visits of these pedlars. Many, too, can be traced as becoming burgesses of Danzig, or of Posen.

Of visitors of the type with which this chapter is more specially concerned, the reign of the Henry who afterwards became Henry III of France marks a starting-point, judging partly from the evidence available before and after that date, partly from the statement in the report of the first resident Venetian ambassador there, Girolamo Lippomano, who came in that reign, that Poland was at that time an unknown land to Venetians.

So much for the Average Tourist at work. Let us now see how he spent his spare time. It goes without saying that the degree to which the foreigner enjoyed himself was more or less dependent on the behaviour of natives. Let us see, first, then, what reception he might expect. Small boys, of course, are the same yesterday, to-day and forever, but they were, if possible, somewhat more outspoken then. An ambassador's wife went to the Hague once, never again, "by reason of the boys and wenches who much wondered at her huge farthingales and fine gowns, and saluted her at every turn of the street with their usual caresses of 'Hoore! hoore!'" Concealing herself from view was impossible, no cart would hold her farthingale. And although with all the detail that is poured forth concerning the Venetian constitution, the feature in it which, though informal, has outlasted all the others, that of the limited despotism of the small boys, is ignored, yet in practice it was felt; Sastrow, for one, did not forget being pursued with "Tu sei tedesco, perciò Luterano."

As regards the adults, Frenchmen, or any one dressed in French fashions, had to beware of the Italian towns where the French had been masters for a time, and although Strassburg had a gate on the west, any one coming from the French side had to enter by the east gate. Commercial quarrels were even more bitter than political. When, for instance, the English removed their "staple" from Hamburg to Stade, nearer the mouth of the Elbe, it was not safe for an Englishman to be seen at Hamburg after the citizens had reached their mid-day stage of drunkenness. As for theological enmity, a Roman Catholic was saying his prayers one evening in Frisia with the windows open; an old woman marked it and came across the street to spit at his inn; the next morning she came again, to spit at him, and he had to put up with it for fear of worse happening.

With such exceptions as these there was not much to be feared from the upper classes; nor even, on the main routes, from the lower; in Dauphiné, for instance, all classes were pleasant enough, whereas at Rochelle strangers were liable to be pulled off their horses if they did not remove their hats when passing the guard at the gates. The two worst towns for brutality towards foreigners were, by general consent, London and Toulouse. In the former, according to Giordano Bruno, whose account only differs from every one else's in being more picturesque, the shop-people and artizans, on seeing a stranger, make faces, grin, laugh, hoot, call him dog, traitor, foreigner, the last name being the rudest they can think of, qualifying him for any other insult. Should he take the offensive, or put his hand to his weapon, an army of ruffians seems to spring out of the ground, flourishing a forest of sticks, poles, halberds, and partizans. In a more playful humour, one will pretend to run away behind a booth and come out charging on the stranger like an angry bull; if an arm gets broken, as happened to one Italian, the bystanders shout with laughter and the magistrate sees nothing reprehensible in the affair.53 Oxford was a change for the better, for there it was only the students who behaved like brigands; as they did at Carcassonne, too, where the law-students insisted on tribute from visitors, – they called it a "bienvenu," – or if it was not forthcoming, the contents of the visitor's trunks were shaken out. Yet among those of Oxford, Zinzerling makes an exception in the case of Queen's College, where as soon as a foreigner is recognised as such, he is brought an ox-horn full of beer.

Such presents were customary on a very large scale on the continent; in France they generally consisted of wine and were presented to persons of high rank only, but in Germany every gentleman received gifts of drink and food which usually cost more than their value in tips and dinners. The higher the rank of the visitor, the greater the quantity; the Infanta Clara Eugenia writes home that at the stopping-places in her passage through Switzerland the gifts require thirty or forty men to carry them, who lay them at her feet until she is surrounded by barrels and has the greatest difficulty in preserving her gravity. At Lucerne she received barley as well as wine, and two oxen, both too fat to move. Many other local customs had to be submitted to which have died out since; such as ceremonies of initiation into the freedom of Hansa League towns, which were accompanied by practical joking; the obligation on Protestants staying at Geneva to attend service at 7 A. M. whenever there was a sermon; and so on.

Among these exceptional customs and regulations should be mentioned those concerning weapons in Italy. At Lucca no knife might be carried unless blunted at the point; in the Papal States, a sword was allowed, but no short, easily hidden, weapon; in Venetian territory fire-arms only were forbidden; elsewhere a license from the local authorities had ordinarily to be obtained for wearing a sword, and in Florence the license only referred to day-time. This is Moryson's account of the regulations; before his time the regulations were laxer, and later they became stricter, which gave a great impetus to the poisoning trade; in fact, the bakers in Lombardy were mostly Germans, and those of Rome, Jews, the Italians being unwilling to trust their fellow countrymen.

Such subjects naturally suggest executions, which formed one of the commonest and principal "sights" throughout Europe. Lithgow landed at the Piazzetta at Venice just when a friar was being burnt alive there for getting fifteen nuns with child in a year. It was in Venice, too, that Moryson saw two young senators' sons, who had had too uproarious a night, have their hands cut off at the places where they had done the mischief, their tongues cut out where they had sung blasphemous songs, and finally beheaded by a sort of guillotine in the Piazza. And when he was staying at Leipzig, where, as was the custom in Germany, adultery was punishable by death, a case had recently occurred of a girl giving birth to an illegitimate child in a church, during service. It was under consideration when he left whether an ancient precedent should not be revived to meet her case, that she should be tied up in a sack with a cat, a cock, a snake, and a dog, all alive, and so drowned. To quote one more as a sample of many, there is the detailed description of a man being broken on the wheel at Hamburg, by Taylor the "water-poet." The place of execution was on a mound, so that the enormous crowd could see well; moated, to keep the people at a distance, and approached by a drawbridge which was raised during the execution; the criminal was drunk, according to custom. In Germany exceptional criminals were on view for some days before execution, nailed by the ears to posts. Torture accompanying execution was common, and branding and mutilation things that no traveller could well avoid seeing. But none seemed to want to avoid them: Evelyn went to the Châtelet prison at Paris to look on while a prisoner underwent legal torture. The only occasions that seem to have struck them as too horrible was when the headsman bungled matters: a Dutchman at Paris saw one try sixteen times and then have to be assisted. And as in the towns, so by the wayside. Gallows and wheels bearing the bodies of men and sometimes of women, dying, dead, or decaying, were continually to be seen: Taylor says he counted seven score between Hamburg and Prague, and Moryson mentions a criminal hanging in chains near Lindau, starving to death, with a mastiff at each heel, in order that he might be partially eaten before death.

No less awful a sight, and no less frequent in certain places, such as Marseilles, was the galley-slave, naked except for a pair of breeches, shaven, dragging behind him when ashore the chain fixed to his feet, treated worse than a beast, and yet not necessarily criminal: at Leghorn was a tent, at Naples a certain stone, where a man might stake his liberty against a few shillings on a throw of the dice. Among the few who obtained their release by being bought out were those who, on that condition, acted as deputies in the processions of flagellants which tourists often mention: Montaigne witnessed one at Rome with five hundred persons in it. He, like others, was astonished to note their unconcern; the scourging was genuine: their backs were raw and bloody, the thongs of the scourges adhering to each other with the blood; yet so far from showing signs of pain, they marched along, careless and talkative, in an every-day mood.

Other forms of slavery were ordinarily met with: at Naples an open slave-market was held; at Lisbon, too, where men and monkeys were sold side by side. And here and there one might come across settlements of those who could not claim all the benefits of the law. Zinzerling picked up a cagot servant near Toulouse, a young man, well-informed, who told him how his brother-outcasts had just petitioned for permission to marry whom they chose, offering to have their blood tested to prove it no different from other men's. Those who did not act as servants, lived by handicraft, carpentering mostly; they were forced to dwell in the suburbs, and nothing they owned was heritable except furniture, which was looked on as sharing their taint.

But he does not mention the goose-foot badge which distinguished them from "clean" persons. The badge of the Jew, on the other hand, often seen, is often mentioned, varying according to the extent they had acquired influence and used it. In Poland, thanks to the Jewish mistress of one of their kings, they had almost equal rights with Christians. Elsewhere, except in those places, such as England, which they were nominally forbidden to enter, a badge was compulsory; lightest in Mantua, merely a bit of yellow lace tacked on inside their cloaks, but generally a red hat for the men and a red garment for the women: red as betokening their guiltiness of Christ's blood. An alternative colour was yellow, as in Rome, where a short-sighted cardinal once mistook a red-hatted Jew for a brother cardinal and obtained a change of colour in order to safeguard himself against being so polite again.

But the tourist's leisure, so far, has been too much occupied with blood and social damnation; let us look for a lighter mood: let us see him at the Zoo. Florence seems to have been the best stocked. Rabelais saw two Zoos there, and this was not an optical illusion of a credible kind, for he localises them differently; one at the Palazzo Strozzi with porcupines and ostriches as the "stars"; one near the Belfry, boasting lions and tigers. Moryson mentions one only, the Duke's, containing five lions, five wolves, three eagles, three tigers, one wild cat, bears, leopards, an Indian mouse which could kill a cat, and wild boars. After another fifty-year interval comes Evelyn, who looks down upon all the animals housed together in a deep court, a pleasanter confinement, he thinks, than the narrow cages of the Tower at London. But I have forgotten Audebert, who should have come between (1576) Rabelais and Moryson, and who found a Zoo near the "Annunziata," possessing fourteen lions, a tiger, an eagle, and a vulture therein. In 1592 at Prague there were twelve camels in the Emperor's Zoo, very probably the sons and daughters of those whom Busbecq brought back from Constantinople in the hope of naturalising them in Europe as beasts of burden, – not the only attempt of the kind, for Sir Wm. Brereton saw some so used in Holland, and a German others near Aranjuez. The leopards, moreover, in this same Imperial Zoo, were taken to assist in hunting.

Experiments and novelties such as these, of course, provided a larger part of the interest of a journey then than is the case now, when such news is communicated immediately through the newspapers. We find Tommaso Contarini, ambassador to Flanders, greatly struck by the value of peat as fuel, and bringing back some to Venice to assist him in ascertaining if anything of the kind is obtainable near. Then there was "Der Einlasse," the complicated night-entrance to Augsburg, worked by mechanism which allowed a person to be admitted without seeing any one, – such a mystery that many allowed themselves to be locked out on purpose to see it work, and Queen Elizabeth sent a special agent to acquire the secret; in vain. But in Augsburg front doors were habitually opened by pulleys from some room, and shut automatically; it was at Augsburg, too, that a coach was to be seen "driven by engines" within it by the occupant so that it seemed to go of itself; it had been driven about the city.54 This occurs in the year 1655; three years later fountain pens55 were on sale at Paris for ten francs each, twelve to those whom the inventor knew to be eager to have one; that is, £5 to £6 in our money. Even an Italian might learn: like the Florentine who discovered in England what garden-rollers were, in their early solid-stone-cylinder form. But Tasso had the chance to learn something important and not only passed it by but places it first among the three customs in France which he strongly condemns. It is that in some districts the people nourished the children with cow's milk. How, he asks, can any good come of feeding infants with the produce of an animal that is a beast of burden and has to endure blows daily? An Englishman in Italy noted the method of stripping hemp with wooden instruments instead of with the fingers, the laborious English way; and fans, forks, and umbrellas would be new to every one who crossed the Alps; but a learned physician warned Moryson against using the last-mentioned, "things like a little canopy," as concentrating the heat of the sun on the head.

In Flanders, again, every one might learn what kind of a thing a door-mat was, and a Dutch barber had only to cross the Channel to find that he was behind the times in using dregs of beer as a lather. And if it was possible for a twentieth-century Englishwoman to cross into sixteenth-century Germany she would find out what a convenience it was for an invalid to have a towel attached to a wheel running along the head of the bed, to assist him or her in changing position. Where, too, except from travel, his own or some one else's, did Sir John Harington get his ideas concerning the introduction of real water-closets, with gold-fish visible swimming about in the cisterns, just as they are to be seen at railway stations to-day?

A greater discovery than all these put together lay in the differences in the position of women in the above countries. Take the United Provinces and Italy, as the two where the contrast was greatest. In the former, girls of good birth and looks might not only settle down in the common-room of an inn instead of hiring a private room for meals, but would sit round the fire and share the after-dinner drink of the men as a matter of course. All-night skating-parties were so common that the liberty was not misused; whereas in Italy the strictness was as extreme as the Dutch freedom, and its result, too; only, in Italy, the result was the demoralisation of both sexes. Chioggia was an exception, where Villamont was surprised to see the women and girls sitting at their doors, needle-working; and where French influence had made itself felt some relaxation had taken place, especially at Genoa, where one foreigner even notes that the women walked with a longer stride than most Italian women. But the unmixed Italian convention gave most girls no choice between becoming either prisoners or prostitutes, that is, of course, like everything else in this book, from the foreigner's point of view. Of the former class the tourist saw next to nothing; the men of the household did even the marketing themselves; while the latter formed one of the best-known features of Italian life. The numbers may seem at first sight incredible – 30,000 is the figure always quoted for Naples; but there was some check on such statements inasmuch as every government licensed each one for a fixed sum and therefore could reckon the total. Moreover, Sir Henry Wotton writes in 1592 that a census just taken in Rome counted 40,000, and he had it on good authority; and in 1617, that the Espousal of the Sea at Venice had been spoilt as a sight because the courtesans, offended at an edict directed at them, had abstained from taking part in it. Those at the head of the profession lived "like princesses," not only so far as expenditure went, but also in their command of marks of respect in public, except that every now and then some sumptuary edict would create, and perhaps enforce, some distinction between those who populated and those who depopulated Italy. It is pleasanter to turn back to Holland again, to the homely arrangements of Thursday in Delft fair week, when the women who had had enough of waiting for husbands sat in the church and the men who had waited long enough for wives came to look at them. A few questions, a pot of beer, a few details to be settled; and then the wedding.

There were plenty of these fairs, Lyons had four a year, so had Rouen; but the attraction they possessed for the sixteenth-century human being lay rather in the amount of wholesale and financiers business done than in homely picturesqueness; sentimentality is the last vice he can be charged with. Who, for instance, nowadays, would dare to say he saw nothing charming in a Breton festival? but Brittany was left to itself in those days, and a travelling doctor who chanced on one leaves it with the remark that the Breton girls singing their folk-songs reminded him of "the croaking of frogs when they are in love." Yet St. John's Eve was a festival that gave plenty of pleasure to lookers-on as well as those who took part in it; at Paris, in particular, where there was hardly a citizen named after the saint who did not light a fire at his door that night. And it is perhaps worth mentioning how they kept that feast at Naples, according to Audebert, in 1577; how the custom was to bathe in the sea previous to paying one's devotions at "S. Giovan' a' Mare," seeing that he adds that the custom was dying out, the younger people scorning it as a pagan survival.

A larger proportion of the public pleasures of Europe were bound up with religious ceremony than is the case at present; and as regards pilgrimage, the reference above to the subject in general needs to be supplemented by some details concerning the relics, since there is no room for doubt as to whether or not they held their ground as "sights," the more so inasmuch as a sceptical attitude did not become a conventional habit of mind until, to judge by tourists' books, about the third quarter of the seventeenth century. At the abbey of Marmoutier, near Tours, for example, was shown a vessel which had been sent from Heaven filled with oil for the healing of St. Martin's leg, a breakage of which the devil had caused by taking away the stairs. They also showed a vast barrel wherein St. Martin kept his wine; but not till 1675 does any one remark that that was probably the fiend who stole away the stairs. Disbelief finds expression in plenty, it is true, but it is always that of the Protestant who disbelieves, not because his reason tells him the tale must be false, but because Roman Catholicism affirms it to be true. When there was no suspicion of a friar at the back of the story, there was nothing they would not swallow: even Evelyn accepts Mettius Curtius and his chasm as if all four evangelists had guaranteed both; or, to take a still better example, that of the monument near Leyden to the lady who had 365 children at one birth – (she had laughed at a poor woman's tale that the latter's two babies were twins, and the woman had expressed a hope that the lady might give birth to as many children at one confinement as there were days in the year) – Münster, the great Protestant geographer, repeats the story without throwing doubt, and consequently one tourist after another has no hesitation about it.

So happy a frame of mind must have increased the interest of many a resting-place. Breaking one's journey at Angers, for instance, there was a porphyry vase to be seen, one of those used at the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee; others were preserved at Famagosta, Magdeburg, and the Charterhouse at Florence. At Angers, also, at St. Julian's, was a copy of the portrait of Our Lady which St. Luke had painted; at Arras, manna which had fallen in the days of St. Jerome, looking like white wool; at Milan, the brazen serpent which Moses set up in the wilderness; at Vienna, one of the stones wherewith St. Stephen had been stoned, another at Toulouse; and at the monastery of the Celestines at Louvain, one of the thirty silver pennies for which Christ had been sold, bearing the head of Tiberius on one side, a lily on the other. It is well known how Mary Magdalen came to Provence to live after the Crucifixion, but less known that at Maximilien near Marseilles the tip of her nose used to be on view: no more than that because she had been cremated, but the tip of her nose remained imperishable because there Christ had kissed her. Pontius Pilate also ended his life in Europe: in exile at Vienne, where the tower in which he had been imprisoned was pointed out to the visitor, likewise the lake wherein he had committed suicide, although it was on the shores of another lake, one in the territory of Lucerne, that he was to be seen walking once a year in his official robes. But this every one was content to take on hearsay, since he who saw him then died within the year.

The monastery of St. Nicholas at Catania, in Sicily, had an excellent collection: a nail from the Cross, one of St. Sebastian's arrows, and pieces of St. George's coat of mail, of St. Peter's beard, and of the beard of Zachary, father of John the Baptist. This, and the places previously mentioned, serve to show what treasures would surely be met with on the road; great relic-centres like Venice and Rome would require pages to catalogue their wealth; even a secondary centre like Trier held as many bodies of saints as there are days in the year, besides the well by which Athanasius sat when he composed the "Quicunque Vult" and the knife wherewith St. Peter cut off Malchus' ear.

As for their belief in relics, it is only fair to point out what may not occur to every reader, that they had the same reason, neither more nor less, for believing so, as we for believing that the earth moves round the sun: it is common knowledge. 'Common knowledge' – is not all of it, whether scientific or theological, equally an act of faith? and is it more reasonable for us to quote Baedeker to ourselves than for pilgrim Nicholas to put his trust in friar John? "Howbeit (if we will truly consider it), more worthy is it to believe, than to know as we now know" – that is not a quotation from a theologian but from Bacon's "Advancement of Learning." Of two things we may be sure, that the true history of a relic would probably be far stranger than its legend, and that whatever marvels the southerner saw or heard, he came across nothing more novel or more miraculous than the ebb and flow of the northern tides.