The Quest for Classical Greece

Early Modern Travel to the Greek World

Lucy Pollard

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857737991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Greece and Asia Minor proved an irresistible lure to English visitors in the seventeenth century. These lands were criss-crossed by adventurers, merchants, diplomats and men of the cloth. In particular, John Covel (1638-1722) - chaplain to the Levant Company in the 1670s, later Master of Christ's College, Cambridge - was representative of a thoroughly eccentric band of Englishmen who saw Greece and the Ottoman world through the lens of classical history. Using a variety of sources, including Covel's largely unpublished diaries, Lucy Pollard shows that these curious travellers imported, alongside their copies of Pausanias and Strabo, a package of assumptions about the societies they discovered. Disparaging contemporary Greeks as unworthy successors to their classical ancestors allowed Englishmen to view themselves as the true inheritors of classical culture, even as - when opportunity arose - they removed antiquities from the sites they described. At the same time, they often admired the Turks, about whom they had fewer preconceptions. This is a major contribution to reception and post-Restoration ideas about antiquity.

CHAPTER 1

THE LOGISTICS OF TRAVEL

ye way up is very bad, difficult and dangerous especially descending, not only by being extream steep, and many times broken, but ye path itself is for ye most part so narrow as a horse cannot set both feet together to stand even, and on either side you are most part wall’d in by sloping banks of stone that if your horse fall right down it is difficult getting him up, if sideways you hazard your legs; we scaped well though not wthout a fall or two.¹

So John Covel described in his diary in October 1675 his climb up Mount Olympus in Mysia, near the town of Prusa/Bursa, now in Turkey. The descent from the mountain was made even more difficult because by this time it was dark, but Covel was a feisty traveller. He was 36 years old at this time, learned in classical languages and theology, and had been ordained to the Anglican ministry. This was a particularly good time for English travellers to visit the Greek world, between the end of the Ottoman siege of Crete (1669) and the coalition of Austrians and Venetians against the Turks (1684). Those who went to Athens, like Covel’s contemporary Wheler, also saw the Parthenon before the explosion of 1687, in which it was badly damaged.²

Covel’s prime motive for taking the Levant Company chaplaincy seems to have been his curiosity about the Ottoman world and about the state of Greece and the remains of its classical civilisation under Ottoman rule. He himself described his desire to see the world as ‘meer curiosity’,³ and on arrival in Smyrna he confided to his diary, ‘All things being so quite different from our own way of living, did very much surprise me wth wonder and delight.’⁴ He had also been commissioned by a group of Anglican divines to look into the question of whether the Greek Orthodox Church believed in the doctrine of transubstantiation – if it did, this would be a deal-breaker for those Anglicans who looked to the possible union between the Church of England and the Orthodox Church.⁵

At the time he climbed Mount Olympus, Covel had been in the Levant for some five years, as chaplain to the English diplomatic and mercantile community in Constantinople. On the evidence of his diary, his work as chaplain seems to have been the least prominent of his many interests. Above all, he was an intrepid traveller, hating to be hurried as he collected measurements of and inscriptions from ancient ruins, or botanical specimens. Travel at the time was usually, in the words of a traveller from the beginning of the seventeenth century, ‘dangerous, troublesome and tedious’ as well as full of interest.⁶ There was a choice of several routes from England to the Levant: overland all the way, or by land to Venice and then by sea, or – the route which Covel took – by sea all the way.⁷ None of these routes went by way of Athens, which helps to explain why few western visitors included Athens on their itinerary. In any case it could take weeks or months: Covel left Plymouth in the London Merchant, in a large convoy that included nine Levant-bound ships, in late September 1670, after a three-week delay in Deal, where he joined his ship, because of unfavourable weather. He was comparatively lucky in that he was in the Aegean by the second week of November.⁸ He showed his mettle during the voyage: on 10 November, near the western end of Crete, Algerine ships were sighted, and the captain suggested that Covel should go below with the surgeon, where he would be safe. However, he preferred to remain on deck, praying for success, which the captain said would be an encouragement for the sailors. Other passengers followed suit, and they were all provided with arms and stood on the quarter deck in readiness, but in the event the ships proved to be French and not a threat.⁹

During the second half of the period he spent in the Ottoman Empire, Covel took advantage of every opportunity to travel outside Constantinople. He was not to be defeated by the petty difficulties of getting about or finding the way. His climb up Mysian Mount Olympus has already been mentioned, and on another occasion, journeying between Adrianople and Constantinople, determined not to miss a chance and scornful of superstition, he set off with his servant on a detour via the sea shore: it was on this occasion that his companions were frightened that they might encounter thieves, and deterred by the bad omen of a calf with a white face.¹⁰ Having arrived at his post in December 1670, after visiting the ruins of ancient Ephesus on the way,¹¹ he did not record in his diary any journeys outside the city until 1674. In the first year or so, he was probably getting used to the job, but then in August 1672 the ambassador, Daniel Harvey, died, and his successor, John Finch, did not arrive until 1674.¹² During this interregnum, Covel’s duties seem to have been quite heavy,¹³ but in the next three years he made several trips: in September 1674 to Heraclea Perinthus (in Thrace, on the Propontis); from May to September 1675, with John Finch, to the Sultan’s court at Adrianople; in October 1675, with Wheler and his companion Jacob Spon, to the islands in the Sea of Marmara and Prusa; in late 1676 to Smyrna, Magnesia (under Mount Sipylus) and Prusa; in February 1677, at the end of his Levant chaplaincy, to Nicaea and the island of Chalcis; and in April to Cyzicus, Lemnos and Mount Athos.

He was an enthusiastic sketcher of maps and plans, filling a gap for himself that many travellers noticed. Although atlases such as those of Mercator and Ortelius from the sixteenth century and Blaeu after 1662, based on exploration, were gradually supplanting maps such as Ptolemy’s, which presented a schematic and symbolic depiction of the world, there was still some way to go in terms of practical guides for travellers,¹⁴ and atlases were not in any case very portable. Covel used Ptolemy, Ortelius and the seventeenth-century French mapmaker Sanson, but on one of his journeys wrote trenchantly, ‘[I am] resolved to set down every water run, that (if possible) I might give light to your antient Geographers.’¹⁵

He regretted that he had no sea compass to help him, unlike his friend Wheler, another enthusiastic mapmaker, who in turn was sorry not to have a quadrant.¹⁶ In Ephesus, Wheler proudly recorded, ‘I observed the Situation of all that I have hitherto described; and […] marked them on a Paper; from which I have transferred them to your view.’¹⁷ Another contemporary traveller, Edward Browne (a physician like his father, Thomas), complained that ‘he that travels in Macedonia, will never be able to reconcile the positions of Rivers and Towns to their usual Descriptions in Maps, although not long ago there have been large ones published of Greece’.¹⁸ In his view, the best available maps were those made by Turkish imperial messengers (‘chiauses’).

In some ways, travel in the Ottoman Empire was easier and more comfortable than it was at home. The facilities for travellers, in particular the khans or caravanserais and the fountains, are frequently praised by western Europeans. In some places there was a wide choice of accommodation: in Constantinople, for example, more than 20 places could be found in the vicinity of the bazaar, and one of the city’s khans, built in 1651, could hold 3,000 people.¹⁹ Khans were built round a courtyard or a series of courtyards, and each room had a raised platform round the edge where travellers could spread their bedding and cook their meals, while in the centre animals were tethered to rings in the walls. There might be hooks for clothes (though travellers tended not to undress to sleep), chimneys to allow the smoke to escape, shops for provisions, and even hot baths. The disadvantages were fleas and bugs, as well as noise and lack of privacy, for which reason some travellers thought English inns were preferable.²⁰ Sometimes, for privacy, safety or comfort, travellers stayed in private houses, but these were not necessarily better: Covel complained bitterly about the fleas and bugs in a house in Adrianople,²¹ although, as has already been mentioned, this particular house belonged to a Jew, and Covel is making a point here about his disapproval of Jewish dirtiness.

Tents were an alternative to khans. Covel describes how, on one of his journeys, the wagons were arranged in a circle round the travellers, a fire was lit, and men were set to watch by turns. He adds,

I have been used to the fashion of the country of lying in my clothes, which I did both outwards and homewards, and once in a frollick to Prusa baths I came not in a bed for 8 weekes together […] I carried a little sea bed with me which I lay on at Adrianople, and upon the road we first spread a carpet on the ground and then lay’d our beds or quilts upon it, and so tumbled down upon them booted, cloak’t &c as we rode.²²

When Wheler crossed from Lepanto to the Peloponnese on his way between Zante and Athens, his next lodging place left much to be desired:

we were forced to make a vertue of Necessity, and content our selves, to take up our Habitation in a place not much bigger or better than a Tomb, like the Madman mentioned in the Gospel: Which was a Brick Building, arched over, of six foot broad, and fifteen foot long; and the Floor digg’d two foot deep below ground. It had two such holes, one a top, and another below, as would neither let out the Smoak, nor let in the Light: But cold enough. This Room served us for all the Offices of a spacious House; the worst was, when it came to its turn to be made a Kitchin: not but that we might well enough have endured the Fire, if our Eyes could have agreed as well with the Smoak. Our Patron of the Barque lent us his Sail to spread on the Floor; on which laying our Quilts, we made but a bad shift, the Place being very damp. But the Wetness producing good store of Rushes thereabouts, I taught them at last to be Matt-makers, by tying handfuls of long Rushes together, with Pack-thred we had by us. These we laid under our Quilts, and to stop out the Cold.²³

The most usual method of getting about the empire was on horseback, and Covel’s account of descending from Mount Olympus suggests he was a competent horseman. Long-distance journeys were sometimes made by night, to avoid the scorching heat, but on at least one occasion all those in Covel’s party got sunburnt on the left-hand sides of their faces.²⁴ The French traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier describes a trip made to Ephesus from Smyrna in the spring of 1657: the party consisted of 12 Europeans, together with three janissaries, and three extra horses to carry provisions. They departed at three in the afternoon, stopped for supper in a village, and continued their journey until midnight.²⁵ Churches sometimes offered a cool place to rest.²⁶ There were also unexpected hazards in hiring horses: Wheler once got into difficulties because the horse he had hired came without saddle and bridle, which he had unfortunately failed to specify.²⁷ Near the Hellespont, Wheler and his companion were unable to find horses at all, ending up with ‘a conceited [i.e. ingenious] Chariot, or, to tell the truth, a Cart’, with solid wheels and wicker sides, pulled by buffaloes.²⁸ Food for the journey may have been carried in tin-lined boxes.²⁹

The little ‘sea-bed’ that Covel carried was not his only item of luggage. The first thing he did when he arrived in Constantinople on 31 December 1670 was to collect his trunks full of books from the customs officers:

[the officers] ript open my Trunks and boxes and searched and rifled everything; however at last I mist nothing but Niceron’s Thaumaturgus opticus, which I shrewdly suspect was filch’t from me by one, who was indeed call’d a Christian but had not it seems the honesty of a common Turk.³⁰

Presumably this so-called Christian was one of his fellow-travellers on board ship: perhaps he assumed that only a westerner would be interested in this book, but it is unclear how a fellow-passenger could have got access to the trunks before they were ripped open by the Turkish officials. We do know that Covel was interested in medicine, and he had replaced this volume, which was one of many medical works he possessed, in his library by the end of his life.³¹ We cannot tell what other books he had brought with him: his diaries are littered with quotations and references from the classics, but some at least of these may have been added later, and some quotations may have been inscribed from memory. We can only identify some titles that he wished to ha...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Illustrations
• Map
• Introduction
• 1. The Logistics of Travel
• 2. Scholars and Texts
• 3. Antiquities, Proto-Archaeologistsand Collectors
• 4. Among the Greeks
• 5. Among the Turks
• 6. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back Cover