Travels and Mobilities in the Middle Ages: From the Atlantic to the Black Sea

388 Pages·2015·12.355 MB·English

by  Marianne O’Doherty, Felicitas Schmieder

Travels and Mobilities
in the Middle Ages
INTERNATIONAL MEDIEVAL RESEARCH
Editorial Board
Axel E. W. Müller, University of Leeds — Executive Editor
John B. Dillon, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Richard K. Emmerson, Manhattan College, New York
Christian Krötzl, University of Tampere
Chris P. Lewis, University of London
Pauline Stafford, University of Leeds / University of Liverpool
with the assistance of the IMC Programming Committee
Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.
Volume 21
Travels and Mobilities
in the Middle Ages
From the Atlantic to the Black Sea
Edited by
Marianne O’Doherty and Felicitas Schmieder
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
© 2015, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2015/0095/80
ISBN: 978-2-503-55449-5
e-ISBN: 978-2-503-55505-8
Printed in the EU on acid-free paper
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction: Travels and Mobilities in the Middle Ages:
From the Atlantic to the Black Sea
MARIANNE O’DOHERTy and FELICITAS SCHMIEDER ix
Part I. Centres and Peripheries:
Travellers to and on the Margins
‘Them Friars Dash About’:
Mendicant Terminario in Medieval Scandinavia
JOHNNy GRANDJEAN GøGSIG JAKOBSEN 3
Papal Delegations to the Edge of the World:
Visits from the Papal Curia to Norway Between 1050 and 1536
SæBJøRG WALAKER NORDEIDE 31
From the Edge of Europe to Global Empire:
Portuguese Medicine Abroad (Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries)
IONA McCLEERy 55
Have Crutch, Will Travel:
Disabled People on the Move in Medieval Europe
IRINA METzLER 91
Part II. Nobility of the Road: Travel and Status
Why Didn’t King Stephen Crusade?
JOHN D. HOSLER 121
vi Contents
The Travels of Ivan Babonić: The Mobility of
Slavonian Noblemen in the Fourteenth Century
HRVOJE KEKEz 143
The Perfect Gentle Knight: Fourteenth-Century Crusaders in Prussia
MARy FISCHER 163
Part III. Men and Women on the Move:
Gendered Mobilities
Dangerous Travellers: Identity, Profession, and Gender
Among the German Landsknechts (1450–1570)
STEFANIE RüTHER 191
On the Road Again: The Semi-Nomadic Career
of yolande of Aragon (1400–1439)
zITA ROHR 215
Student Mobilities and Masculinities: The Case of the
Empire North of the Alps in the Fifteenth Century
MAxIMILIAN SCHUH 245
Part IV. Migration and Return:
Peoples and Objects on the Move
Slavs but not Slaves: Slavic Migrations to Southern Italy
in the Early and High Middle Ages
zRINKA NIKOLIć JAKUS 267
Ex partibus orientalibus translata ad hanc urbem: The Evacuation
of Elements of Church Decoration from Pera to Genoa in 1461
RAFAł QUIRINI-POPłAWSKI 291
A Herald and his Objects in Exile:
Roger Machado and his Memorandum Book, 1484–1485
GEMMA L. WATSON 313
Index 335
List of Illustrations
Figures
Figure 2.1. Average annual temperatures in Celsius in St Albans,
Avignon, Rome, Trondheim, and Oslo. .....................................38
Figure 2.2. Possible lodging for Nicholas Breakspear
during his stay in Trondheim..................................................40
Figure 2.3. The Dominican monastery in Oslo in relation
to the bishop’s seat and other surroundings..................................45
Figure 2.4. Plan of the Dominican monastery, with the guest house. .........46
Figure 4.1. St Martin in a French psalter and breviary
of the fifteenth century. .......................................................92
Figure 4.2. Detail from a Romance of Alexander made between 1338–1344
by the Flemish illuminator Jehan de Grise and his workshop. .............98
Figure 4.3. Illustration of Miracle no. 39 in Les miracles de St Louis,
produced c. 1330. ............................................................ 101
Figure 4.4. Thebaid (around 1410), by Gherardo Starnina,
now in Florence, Uffizi Gallery. ............................................ 106
viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 11.1. Church of sv. Silvestar (St Sylvester), Biševo. ................... 280
Figure 12.1. Istanbul, church of S. Paolo (S. Domenico), now
Arap Camii. Built in the first half of the fourteenth century. ............ 292
Figure 12.2. Istanbul, detail of the French gymnasium together
with the church tower of Santa Maria della Misericordia
(later St Benedict). Prior to the mid-fifteenth century (?). ............... 294
Figure 12.3. Genoa, part of the façade of the church of
Santa Maria di Castello. Established in the ninth century;
built in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries. ............................... 302
Figure 12.4. Genoa, so-called Madonna di Pera from the church
of Santa Maria di Castello, 1383 (?), destroyed in 1878. ................. 305
Figure 12.5. Genoa, Museo di Sant’Agostino, the so-called Madonna
di Pera from the church of S. Antonio di Prè, fourteenth century. ...... 306
Maps
Map 1.1. Locations of Dominican and Franciscan houses
in medieval Denmark..........................................................12
Map 1.2. Locations of Dominican and Franciscan priories
in both orders’ medieval province of Dacia. .................................13
Map 2.1. Norway, with Trondheim (Nidaros) and Oslo........................37
Map 6.1. The Travels of Ivan Babonić. ......................................... 147
Map 11.1. Connections between the East Adriatic
and Southern Italy in the high Middle Ages. .............................. 271
Map 11.2. Slavic traces on the Gargano Peninsula. ........................... 276
Introduction: Travels and
Mobilities in the Middle Ages:
From the Atlantic to the Black Sea
Marianne O’Doherty and Felicitas Schmieder
The Mobile Middle Ages
Before we can talk about travels and mobilities in the Middle Ages, we first need
to address a factor that has cast a long shadow over scholarly and public percep-
tions of the period, and from which scholarship has only recently begun to
emerge: the long-standing association between mobility and modernity. In the
nineteenth century, when pioneering scholars such as E. G. Ravenstein began
work in the fields of mobility and migration studies, they did so in the context
of the mass movement of people set in motion by the Industrial Revolution in
Marianne O’Doherty ([email protected]) studied at the Uni ver sity of Leeds (Ph.D.
2006). She has taught for the Open Uni ver sity and at the Uni ver sity of Leeds. She joined the
Uni ver sity of Southampton in 2007 as Lecturer in Medieval English Literature and Culture.
Her research interests include medieval forms of spatial representation, with particular reference
to travel writing and cartography; contacts between the Latin West and non-Christian cultures
in the late Middle Ages; medieval European literary and imaginative engagements with the
wider world. Her monograph, The Indies and the Medieval West: Thought, Report, Imagination,
was published by Brepols in 2013.
Felicitas Schmieder ([email protected]) born 1961; Ph.D. 1991,
‘Europa und die Fremden. Die Mongolen im Urteil des Abendlandes vom 13. bis in das
15. Jahrhundert’; Habilitation 2000 Frankfurt am Main; has been Professor of Premodern
History at FernUniversität Hagen since 2004. Her main research areas are medieval cross-
cultural contacts and perceptions; prophecy as political language; history of medieval ‘Europe’;
medieval German urban history; pre-modern cartography; European cultural memory.
Travels and Mobilities in the Middle Ages: From the Atlantic to the Black Sea, ed. by Marianne
O’Doherty and Felicitas Schmieder, IMR 21 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015) pp. ix–xliii
BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.IMR-EB.5.105539
x Marianne O’Doherty and Felicitas Schmieder
England.1 The influence of the field’s early history has been pervasive; scholar-
ship on this major dimension of human movement has, until very recently, con-
sidered modern movements of people largely in isolation from their premodern
counterparts.2 Scholarship on travel and exploration, too, has suffered histori-
cally from a similar bias. The major English language series that publishes trans-
lated primary sources in this field is the Hakluyt Society’s. Thus we read our
accounts of whaling voyages in the nineteenth-century Atlantic and Christian
missions in thirteenth-century Asia alike under the shadow of an early modern
editor who did much to further and promote English activities in the world’s
incompletely known oceans and new found lands.3 When Cambridge Uni-
ver sity Press published its first Companion to Travel Writing in 2002, the edi-
tors chose 1500 as its terminus a quo. Early modernity, it implied, is when
travel really begins.4 Long distance travel, exploration, discovery, mobility, and
migration became, and for a long time remained, associated with modernity.
Unexamined in the background of these assumptions, the Middle Ages too
often provided, as Kathleen Davis has pointed out, ‘an alterior, static mode of
existence against which claims of modernity can define themselves’.5
If the contrast, often implied rather than explicitly stated, between a static
Middle Ages and a mobile modernity was sharp, that between the Middle Ages
and fast-moving post-modernity is often presented as starker still. We ‘global
citizens’ are routinely reminded through media and marketing that our glo-
balized world has been and continues to be shaped by hitherto unimaginable
speeds and levels of transportation and communication. Our impression is that
1 Ravenstein, Census of the British Isles; Ravenstein, ‘The Laws of Migration’; Ravenstein,
‘The Laws of Migration: Second Paper’.
2 As recently as 1990 a handbook of migration studies was produced that featured no
discussion of migration prior to the twentieth century: Handbook on International Migration,
ed. by Serow and others. A much more recent and comprehensive handbook features two
primarily historical chapters, out of forty-seven: Routledge International Handbook of Migration
Studies, ed. by Gold and Nawyn. For a more balanced approach see Cultures in Contact, ed. by
Hoerder.
3 The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, ed. by Hakluyt;
The Principal Nauigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation. For details
of the Hakluyt Society’s publications from 1847 to the present, see <http://www.hakluyt.com/
index.htm> [accessed 29 September 2014].
4 The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. by Hulme and youngs. See also the
various general interest volumes that treat the period of 1450–1600 as the ‘age of discovery’ or
‘age of exploration’: Arnold, The Age of Discovery, and Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance.
5 Davis ‘Time behind the Veil’, p. 107.