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Jan Hasištejnský z Lobkovic: A Fifteenth-Century Czech Traveler to the Mediterranean World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Laura Lisy-Wagner
Laura Lisy-Wagner*
Affiliation:
San Francisco State University
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Extract

In 1493, a Czech nobleman named Jan Hasištejnský z Lobkovic embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. As nearly all Central European pilgrims did, he traveled south through the Tyrol to Venice and joined a large, multinational group there before setting out across the Mediterranean. He remained nearly a month in Venice, meeting prominent political figures, visiting churches and cloisters, and admiring the realism of the painting and sculpture of the Venetian quattrocento. Among all the other marvels of Venice that he describes in his 1505 travelogue is the memory of his day trip to the island of Murano. “In this little town,” he writes, “there are, I think, close to seventy artisans or more, and all are glass makers.” He describes some of the fine works that he saw there, and eagerly adds, “and there is always a great quantity of these various things completed, so that whoever arrives wants to buy something of it.” In this moment, the fifteenth-century tourist is not that far removed from his counterpart in the twenty-first century.

Type
Special Section: Mediterranean Encounters
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , Summer 2012 , pp. 72 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 2012

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References

End Notes

Many thanks to all the participants of the University of California World History conference “Encounters in the Mediterranean,” May 14–15, 2010, at the University of California at Riverside, especially conference organizers Fariba Zarinebaf and Terry Burke.

1 Strejček, Ferdinand, ed., Jana Hasištejnského z Lobkovic Putování k Svatému hrobu (Prague: Nákl. Ceské akademie pro včdy, slovesnost a umení, 1902), p. 5.Google Scholar

2 His companions think about all the nails and parts of nails of the cross they have seen and decide that there must be at least six. Lobkovic considers the possibility that the first three nails may have been too weak and had to be pulled out and replaced by three stronger ones. Strejček, p. 47.

3 For example, he describes Muslim women and children throwing stones at him and the other pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem. Strejček, p. 57.

4 Abulafia, David, The Mediterranean in History (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003), p. 19Google Scholar; see also Horden, Peregrine and Purcell, Nicholas, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000).Google Scholar

5 Strejček, pp. 20, 21, 24.

6 For Shkodër, see Strejček, p. 26. For Rhodes, see Strejček, pp. 43–45.

7 Martínez, Oscar, Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), pp. 6–10Google Scholar. See also Zartman, I. William, ed., Understanding Life in the Borderlands: Boundaries in Depth and Motion (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2010).Google Scholar

8 Strejček, p. 3.

9 Strejček, pp. 18–30.

10 Strejček, p. 11. Throughout the text, Lobkovic distinguishes between “Turk” and “pagan”, by which he seems to mean “Arab”. At one point where the context makes it clear that he is talking about the Arabic language, he says that his interpreter speaks Italian, Greek, and “pagan”. Strejček, p. 52.

11 Strejček, p. 24.

12 Strejček, p. 18.

13 Strejček, pp. 4, 7–8.

14 Strejček, p. 30.

15 Strejček, p. 16.

16 Strejček, p. 90.

17 Bartlett, Robert, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

18 Lobkovic does compare the size of Cairo to Prague, but this is in a section after the narrative of his journey, which seems to rely on outside sources rather than his experience. Lobkovic never traveled to Egypt. Strejček, p. 105.

19 Strejček, pp. 18, 20, 25.

20 Strejček, p. 27.

21 Ibid. Whether what he is witnessing is better described as tolerance or syncretism, he chooses to describe it as coexistence.