Ludovico de Varthema

Ludovico de Varthema's travelogue ( Itinerario ): The title page of the book in the first Italian edition from 1510

Ludovico de Varthema (* around 1470 probably in Bologna , † 1517 in Rome ), also known as Lodovico di Varthema , Ludovicos de Varthema , Ludwig Vartomann , Barteme Ludovico or Vartomanus , was an Italian writer and explorer.

From 1501 to 1507 he made long journeys to the east through Asia and reported about it in detail in a book. This travelogue ( Itinerario ), in which he was the first European to present the holy places of Islam in Mecca and Medina truthfully and in detail, was published in Italian for the first time in 1510. It has been a very successful book and has been translated into many languages, with countless editions up to the mid-17th century. In Germany it was published in Augsburg in 1515.

The remarkable success of this book is primarily the result of the author's lively manner of presentation, with which he reached the broad readership, and also of the many interesting - mostly accurate - information about the various circumstances and events in the distant countries in the East, from to whom cosmographers, cartographers, historians, natural scientists and writers felt addressed and who spent more than a century drawing on their own work.

First stage of life

Little is known of Ludovico de Varthema's person and circumstances. He seems to come from Bologna, because in the title of the first book edition he is referred to as a Bolognese ( Itinerario de Ludovico de Varthema Bolognese ... ). But it's not that safe and sometimes Genoa or Venice are also mentioned as possible places of origin. And since his name sounds very un-Italian, it was even suspected that he came from Germany. ( His original name could then have been Wartmann or Wertheim .) Ludovico de Varthema was certainly connected with Bologna and spent some time in this city.

Before traveling east, Varthema will probably have been on military campaigns in Italy as a mercenary for several years. In any case, he knew his way around weapons. This is clear from his book, in which he deals in detail with the war techniques of foreign peoples. A sea battle at Cannanore, which he participated in, has been described in detail and with expert knowledge. Nor could he have pretended to be a warlike Mamluk for years if he hadn't been trained in the handling of weapons.

In the dedication speech of his book to Agnesina Feltria Colonna, the Duchess of Tagliacozzo and mother of the poet Vittoria Colonna , Varthema writes that he did not have the courage to reach the desired goal through studies or conjectures, and preferred the situation in person the distant places and the people there. - Of course, Ludovico will have informed himself beforehand in books and documents, which is probably evident from the fact that he corrected errors in reports from predecessors in his book and also assumed that some things were known to the reader and therefore did not describe them in detail.

Voyages of discovery

In the Orient

The pilgrim caravan to Mecca: Page from a German book edition from 1548. The illustration (a woodcut) is by Jörg Breu the Elder

Around 1501 Ludovico de Varthema set out on his journey from Venice and took a ship to Alexandria in Egypt , from where he soon traveled on to Cairo . He had little to say about this city, and assumed that its wealth and beauty were known; he did not even mention the nearby pyramids. After probably only a short stay, he went to Beirut and from there to Damascus , where he stayed for many months and learned the Arabic language. He was very impressed by the beauty of this city and had a lot to say about it. In April 1503 Ludovico de Varthema joined a group of Mamluks who accompanied a caravan to Mecca as protection. And so he came to the holy places of Islam and described them factually and authentically. In Medina he saw Muhammad's tomb and corrected in the itinerary that the corpse of the prophet was not, as Niccolò da Poggibonsi (1346) and Lionardo di Niccolò Frescobaldi (1384) claimed, was buried in a coffin held in suspension by magnets. Then in Mecca, where he participated in the penances and rituals of the pilgrims, circumstances forced him to join another caravan that was to go to India. But in Dschedda , also called Djudda, he left this caravan again and took a ship south across the Red Sea to the Bab al-Mandab ( Gate of Tears ) and on to Aden , where he experienced some adventures that he, in order to keep his story flowing, has probably embellished it quite heavily.

Blurred route

From now on there are some inconsistencies in Ludovico de Varthema's report, which so far sounded credible. The chapter about Persia, where he wants to go next (touching Africa for short), contains serious geographical errors, so that a visit to Varthema in this country seems very doubtful and he probably only knew it by hearsay and then this part in his Book wrote what was a common practice of many travelers at the time - Hans Schiltberger, for example, or Marco Polo .

His further trips to India and beyond are also very dubious in some respects. He wants on India's west coast to the southern tip (along with a Persian merchant Cape Comorin have penetrated), and even as far away as from there using standard, low winds the behind Indian and Far East, Java , Sumatra , Borneo and the Banda islands have reached . But there are too many errors and gross errors here in Varthema's report to suggest that he never got beyond the west coast of India and that he only knew the more distant areas by hearsay and never entered.

On the Malabar coast in India

Cannanore in the 16th century: Engraving by Frans Hogenberg for the Atlas Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Georg Braun

After his alleged visit to the Far Eastern regions, Ludovico de Varthema came to Calicut on the Malabar coast in India in the autumn of 1505 and from now on the description of his personal experiences becomes more believable again. Here he got right in the middle of the war preparations of the Sultan of Calicut, who was gathering a fleet and a land army in order to be able to wage war against the Portuguese. When Varthema learned one day that a small Portuguese fleet was lying at Cannanore , he decided to leave Calicut in secret to warn the Portuguese of the impending attack. He managed to escape on December 3, 1505: With a Prau he drove across the sea to Cannanore, where he informed Lorenço de Almeida († 1508), the son of the Portuguese viceroy of India, of the looming danger, as well as for a few days later in Cochin the viceroy Francisco de Almeida (1450–1510).

On March 16 and 17, 1506, the sea battle at Cannanore broke out, in which the Portuguese were victorious. Ludovico de Varthema fought in this battle and reported extensively about it. About three months later, the Viceroy entrusted him with a high office: the trading post in the area, which made Varthema a high official or dignitary of the Portuguese crown and was therefore in their service. He then held this office for a year and a half. After a few more battles with the Moors, as Varthema calls the Indians, he was knighted by Francisco de Almeida.

Return to Europe

On December 6, 1507, Ludovico de Varthema began his journey home to Europe on board a Portuguese ship from Cannanore, which was about the Cape of Good Hope. On the way, in Africa or Ethiopia, as Varthema just calls this continent, some points were touched on, but the author has nothing special to report about and which were probably only of interest to the cosmographers and cartographers of the time.

In the spring of 1508, Ludovico de Varthema reached Lisbon . The Portuguese King Manuel I was still in Almeirim in his winter residence, where Varthema visited him and had to report to him for days. Finally, the king (at Varthema's request) confirmed the knighthood in India in a document. Then Varthema traveled on to Rome.

Last phase of life

Back in Italy, Ludovico de Varthema spent the next time giving lectures about his travel experiences in different cities. The historian and writer Marino Sanudo (1466–1532) attended such a lecture in Venice and commented critically that the audience was more interested in Varthema's personal adventures than in factual information about the distant foreign countries. Varthema had become a celebrity and got in touch with well-known personalities in order to publish his travel experiences as a book.

The world map from 1532, showing Varthema on the right half of the lower border as a wanderer and in a scene of his adventure in Aden. The map has been commented on by Sebastian Münster: Typi cosmographici et declaratio et usus, per Sebastianum Munsterum

In November 1510, the first edition of the book in Italian was published by the Roman printers Stephano Guillireti and Hercule de 'Nani. Just one year later, the work was printed in Latin in Milan, after which many more translations appeared. The first German edition (Augsburg 1515) was illustrated by Jörg Breu the Elder with 46 woodcuts. In total, Ludovico de Varthema's book is said to have seen 31 editions by the middle of the 17th century. For this purpose, his Itinerario was included in the large travel collections by Johann Huttich and Simon Grynaeus ( Novus orbis regionum ac insularum veteribus incognitarum , Basel 1532), Giovanni Battista Ramusio ( Navigationi et viaggi , Venice 1550), Jean Temporal ( Description de l'Afrique , Lyon 1556), Richard Willes ( History of Travayle in the West and East Indies , London 1577) and Samuel Purchas ( Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrims , London 1625).

A wide variety of scientific disciplines benefited from the book for a long time. Cosmographers like Sebastian Franck ( Weltbuch 1533), Sebastian Münster ( Cosmographia 1544) and Livio Sanuto ( Geografia dell 'Africa 1588) used it for their works. The cartographer Martin Waldseemüller used it as early as 1516 for his work Carta marina navigatoria and others like Lorenz Fries (1531), Gerhard Mercator (1569), Abraham Ortelius (1570), Jacopo Gastaldi (1576) and Jodocus Hondius (1608) have dealt with theirs Work attached. Natural scientists such as Andrea Cesalpino ( De plantis 1583), Giulio Cesare Scaligero ( De historia plantarum 1644), Girolamo Cardano ( De subtilitate 1554) and Andrea Bacci ( L'alicorno 1573) have drawn from the book. And even the writers of other travel stories have disregarded some things with Varthema. According to the French Vincent Le Blanc in his report on a fictitious journey (1570), in which he reproduces Varthema's impressions in Mecca, and in Hans Staden's True History , influences of the Italian are said to be recognizable in places.

The unique attention and impact of Ludovico de Varthema's book shows that this man was more than just a soldier and adventurer who had a few adventurous stories to tell.

After his death, Ludovico Varthema received very special attention: in the large travel collection of Johann Huttich and others from 1532, which contained a map of the world on which he was a wanderer (Vartomanus) in a woodcut, that of Hans Holbein the Younger should be, has been represented.

literature

• Ludovico de Varthema: Travels in the Orient , introduced, translated and explained by Folker Reichert , Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Sigmaringen 1996, ISBN 3-7995-0601-2
• Xenja von Ertzdorff (eds.) And Rudolf Schulz: Description of the world: on the poetics of travel and country reports: Lectures at an interdisciplinary symposium from June 8 to 13, 1998 at the Justus Liebig University Giessen , Editions Rodopi BV, Amsterdam 2000
• Ernst Samhaber: History of voyages of discovery: The great journeys into the unknown , Droemersche Verlagsanstalt Th. Knaur Nachf., Munich and Zurich 1955, p. 131 ff.

Web links

Commons : Ludovico di Varthema  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Ludovico de Varthema in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Bayerische Staatsbibliothek The first German edition of the Itinerario from 1515
• Culturegraph ( Memento of March 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Information about Ludovico de Varthema

Remarks

1. ↑ The years 1461 and 1465 are also mentioned here by some sources.
2. ↑ Centuries later, travelers to the Orient Johann Ludwig Burghardt (1784–1817) and Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) are said to have recognized the accuracy of his description.
3. ↑ Ludovico sent the eighteen-year-old girl a version designed by the calligrapher Ludovico degli Arrighi (1475–1527).
4. ↑ According to Varthema (where? Page?) The caravan consisted of 35,000 camels and around 40,000 people.