Episoder
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Pedro Tafur ventures out from Constantinople to visit a sultan, an emperor, and the centre of the Black Sea slave trade.
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Sources:
Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Barker, Hannah. That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Gregory, Timothy E. A History of Byzantium. John Wiley & Sons, 2010.
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Our 15th-century traveller dodges catastrophe on the Mediterranean and drops in on late-imperial Constantinople, where there's plenty of seafood and the roots of Pedro's family tree.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Gregory, Timothy E. A History of Byzantium. John Wiley & Sons, 2010.
Byron, Robert & Rice, David Talbot. The Birth of Western Painting. Routledge, 2013.
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As our Castilian traveller makes his roundabout way toward Mt Sinai, he finds ill-health but lots of help on Cyprus, while around Cairo he's struck by the street food and crocodiles.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Excerpta Cypria: Materials for a History of Cyprus, edited by Claude Delaval Cobham. Cambridge University Press, 1908.
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The journey of our 15th-century Castilian traveller continues, as Pedro Tafur leaves Venice and makes his way to Jerusalem, where there will be no shortage of things for him to see and do.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Antrim, Zayde. “Jerusalem in the Ayyubid and Mamluk Periods.” Routledge Handbook on Jerusalem, edited by Suleiman Mourad, Bedross Der Matossian, and Naomi Koltun-Fromm, 102-109. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Dalrymple, William. In Xanadu: A Quest. HarperCollins, 1990.
Little, Donald P. “Mujīr Al-Dīn al-ʿUlaymī’s Vision of Jerusalem in the Ninth/Fifteenth Century.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 115, no. 2 (1995): 237–47.
Norwich, John Julius. A History of Venice. Penguin, 2003.
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Pedro Tafur, a 15th-century Castilian, makes his way around Spain and Italy with lengthy stops in Genoa, Venice, and Rome, and generally has a pretty pleasant holiday.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Verità, Marco, Laura Speranza, Simone Porcinai, and Daniele Angellotto. “The Sacro Catino in Genoa: Analytical and Technological Investigations of a Unique Glass Vessel.” Journal of Glass Studies 60 (2018): 115–28.
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Giovanni Fontana was a 15th-century Italian engineer and inventor. His designs included everything from systems for retrieving sunken ships and automating the defence of fortifications to measuring time and producing music. He created locks, clocks, and magic lanterns.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
Fontana, Giovanni. Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum figuris... Digitized at https://codicon.digitale-sammlungen.de/inventiconCod.icon.%20242.html
Gilbert, Bennett. “The Dreams of an Inventor in 1420,” Public Domain Review. 2018. https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-dreams-of-an-inventor-in-1420/
Grafton, Anthony. “The Devil as Automaton: Giovanni Fontana and the Meanings of a Fifteenth-Century Machine,” in Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, edited by Jessica Riskin. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Grafton, Anthony. Magic and Technology in Early Modern Europe. Smithsonian Institution Libraries, 2005.
Grafton, Anthony. Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa. Harvard University Press, 2023.
Rossi, Cesare and Russo, Flavio. Ancient Engineers' Inventions: Precursors of the Present. Springer, 2016.
Sparavigna, A.C. “Giovanni de la Fontana, Engineer and Magician.” Cornell University Library, 2013.
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In the late-summer of 1914, a city burns and its university library with it. Unusually for this podcast, the story takes us into WWI, but there are medieval connections to the story of Louvain (Leuven) and what happened when the German army came to town.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
Bazydlo, Angela. “Manuscript lost in WWI fire turns up in Clark Archives.” https://clarknow.clarku.edu/2021/08/30/manuscript-lost-in-wwi-fire-turns-up-in-clark-archives/
Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
Battles, Matthew. “Knowledge on Fire.” The American Scholar 72, no. 3 (2003): 35–51.
Bouwman, André. “Book burning in Louvain, 1914.” https://www.leidenspecialcollectionsblog.nl/articles/book-burning-in-louvain-1914
Delannoy, Paul. “The Library at the University of Louvain,” The Nineteenth Century, Vol. LXXVII - No. 59, p. 1061 May 1915.
Derez, Mark. “The Flames of Louvain: a Library as a Cultural Icon and a Political Vehicle,” What do we lose when we lose a library? Proceedings of the conference held at the KU Leuven 9-11 September 2015.
Gusejnova, Dina. “Librarians as Agents of German Foreign Policy and the Cultural Consequences of the First World War.” The Historical Journal 66, no. 4 (2023): 864–86.
Kipling, Rudyard. “In Aid of Recruiting.” https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/readers-guide/rg_speeches_29.htm
Kramer, Alan. Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Matin, A. Michael. “‘The Hun is at the Gate!’: Historicizing Kipling's Militaristic Rhetoric, From the Imperial Periphery to the National Center: Part Two: The French, Russian, and German Threats to Great Britain.” Studies in the Novel 31, no. 4 (1999): 432–70. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29533357.
Ovenden, Richard. Burning the Books. Harvard University Press, 2020.
Ovenden, Richard. “One of Europe’s Great Libraries Didn’t Stand a Chance… In Either of the World Wars.” https://lithub.com/one-of-europes-great-libraries-didnt-stand-a-chance-in-either-of-the-world-wars/
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The Fernao Mendes Pinto story reaches its conclusion, and he finally reaches Portugal once more.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Hart, Thomas R. “Style and Substance in the Peregrination.” Portuguese Studies 2 (1986).
Hart, Thomas R. “True or False: Problems of the ‘Peregrination.’” Portuguese Studies 13 (1997).
Rubiés, Joan Pau. “Real and Imaginary Dialogues in the Jesuit Mission of Sixteenth-Century Japan.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 55, no. 2/3 (2012).
Rubiés, Joan Pau. “The Oriental Voices of Mendes Pinto, or the Traveller as Ethnologist in Portuguese India.” Portuguese Studies 10 (1994).
Spence, Jonathan D. The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds. W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.
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The story of Fernao Mendes Pinto intersects with that of the Jesuit saint, Francis Xavier, and takes him back to Japan.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
App, Urs. “St. Francis Xavier’s Discovery of Japanese Buddhism: A Chapter in the European Discovery of Buddhism (Part 1: Before the Arrival in Japan, 1547-1549).” The Eastern Buddhist 30, no. 1 (1997).
Rubiés, Joan Pau. “Real and Imaginary Dialogues in the Jesuit Mission of Sixteenth-Century Japan.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 55, no. 2/3 (2012).
Willis, Clive. “Captain Jorge Álvares and Father Luís Fróis S.J.: Two Early Portuguese Descriptions of Japan and the Japanese.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 22, no. 2 (2012).
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The first Europeans wash up on Japanese shores, bringing the musket as they do so, and Pinto would have you believe that he is with them.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Cooper, Michael. The Southern Barbarians: The First Europeans in Japan. Kodansha, 1971.
Lidin, Olof G. Tanegashima: The Arrival of Europe in Japan. Routledge, 2003.
Perrin, Noel. Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879. David R. Godine, 1979.
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Pinto's story continues, and the Portuguese traveller makes his way across China as a prisoner, describing some its towns, cities, and countryside as he goes. His China, which he may not have actually visited himself, is dotted with the remnants of previous Portuguese actions, an envoy's gravestone and the remnants of failed embassies.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Hart, Thomas R. “Style and Substance in the Peregrination.” Portuguese Studies 2 (1986): 49–55.
Hart, Thomas R. “True or False: Problems of the ‘Peregrination.’” Portuguese Studies 13 (1997): 35–42.
Rubiés, Joan-Pau. "The Oriental Voices of Mendes Pinto, or the Traveller as Ethnologist in Portuguese India." Portuguese Studies 10 (1994): 24–43.
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Our Portuguese adventurer resumes his piratical ways and runs into trouble on the coast of China. He and de Faria find silver in abundance, but also shipwreck, poverty, and leeches.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Hart, Thomas R. “Style and Substance in the Peregrination.” Portuguese Studies 2 (1986): 49–55.
Hart, Thomas R. “True or False: Problems of the ‘Peregrination.’” Portuguese Studies 13 (1997): 35–42.
Rubiés, Joan-Pau. "The Oriental Voices of Mendes Pinto, or the Traveller as Ethnologist in Portuguese India." Portuguese Studies 10 (1994): 24–43.
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Not a Christmas episode, but a winter one: winter in various Old English sources and winter now. Happy New Year and thanks for listening!
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
Clare, John. Major Works. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Gopnik, Adam. Winter: Five Windows on the Season. House of Anansi, 2011.
Hostetter, Aaron K. Translation of "Andreas" - https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/andreas/
Hostetter, Aaron K. Translation of "The Menologium" - https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/the-menologium/
McKennitt, Loreena. To Drive the Cold Winter Away. Quinlan Road, 1987.
Parker, Eleanor. Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year. Reaktion Books, 2022.
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Pinto and his colleagues embark on a quest for revenge against a certain pirate, and in the process indulge in quite a bit of piracy themselves along the coasts of Champa and Hainan. Ships are seized, silks are stolen, and brains are squeezed out.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Source:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
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Fernao Mendes Pinto recovers from shipwreck and captivity, neither his first nor his last, and returns to the story of the Aceh Sultanate.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Aceh Sultanate: State, Society, Religion and Trade (2 vols.): The Dutch Sources, 1636-1661, edited by Takeshi Ito. Brill, 2015.
Göksoy, İsmail Hakkı. "Ottoman-Aceh relations as documented in Turkish sources," in Mapping the Acehnese Past, edited by R. Michael Feener, Patrick Daly, and Anthony Reed. Brill, 2011.
Pinto, Paulo Jorge De Sousa. The Portuguese and the Straits of Melaka, 1575-1619: Power, Trade and Diplomacy. NUS Press, 2012.
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From William of Newburgh's 12th-century chronicle, "History of English Affairs," these stories aren't really about Halloween, but they do feel a little Halloween-ish. There's no Michael Myers, zombies, or vampires, but there are strange portents in the sky, toads locked in stone, faerie banquets, green children, and a good number of demons.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
3 Things:
At Stanford's Arcade, an article on heavenly portents and fire from the sky during the Little Ice Age.
At Medievalists.net, an article on the history of monsters, monstrosity, and dehumanization.
On the British Library's medieval manuscripts blog, charms against evil from their collection.
Sources:
The Church Historians of England, translated by Joseph Stevenson. Seeley's, 1856.
Watkins, C.S.. History and the Supernatural in Medieval England. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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The story of the 16th-century Portuguese traveller, writer, soldier, envoy, and so much more, takes us to Malaysia, to the city of Malacca (Melaka), and to diplomatic missions among nearby rulers.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
The Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, Second Viceroy of India, translated by Walter de Gray Birch. Hakluyt, 1875.
Boxer, C.R. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415-1825. Carcanet, 1991.
Diffie, Bailey Wallys. Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415-1580. University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
Newitt, Malyn. A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400–1668. Routledge, 2004.
Paine, Lincoln. The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World. Knopf Doubleday, 2015.
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Pinto visits the "Land of Prester John," faces trouble on the Red Sea, and brushes up against the 1538 Siege of Diu. He takes part in combat along the Indian coast, grumbles as to his lot in life, and is whisked about by boat to Massawa, Mokha, Qeshm, Chaul, Goa, Honnavar, and Diu, before heading further east.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
Sources:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Casale, Giancarlo. The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Pearson, N.M. The Portuguese in India. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
3 Things:
Article on ambergris, a substance which makes fairly frequent appearances on this podcast.
Podcast episode on “The Ottoman Red Sea.”
Article on the Ottoman coffee crackdown.
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Fernão Mendes Pinto, respected by many of his contemporaries for the expertise knowledge which he'd gained through his travels, absolutely synonymous for others with lies and exaggerations.
From humble beginnings and vaguely unfortunate events in his early life, Pinto would find a place for himself in the 16th-century world of colonial Portugal, would write himself into it if necessary.
He was, he said, “13 times a prisoner and 17 a slave.” As Rebecca Catz writes, he served as a “soldier, merchant, pirate, ambassador, missionary, doctor—the list is not complete.” He ran afoul of pirates, was shipwrecked, and robbed royal tombs. The characters in his story included a saint, an Indonesian ruler, the mother of Prester John, a Japanese lord, and someone who may or may not have been the Dalai Lama. He claimed to be among the very first Europeans to set foot in Japan, but then he claimed to be a lot of things.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
3 Things:
Article on the history of the mango and a Portuguese connection.
Article about the discovery of a shipwreck, thought to have come from Vasco da Gama’s armada.
The story of the rhino of Lisbon.
Sources:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History, edited by Malyn Newitt. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Pearson, N.M. The Portuguese in India. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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With all the medieval travel featured on the podcast—the trips across the Mediterranean, the Asian Steppe, and the Indian Ocean—of course we focus on the travellers themselves, the people actually making those trips, but whether they were merchants, envoys, or otherwise, they often left people behind, family that they were separated from for years at a time.
This episode is about those separations, the difficulties they caused, and what people did (or did not do) about them. We start with a letter from a merchant in Palermo, Sicily, move to one from an India trader in Aden, and finish with a pair of Rabbinic responses regarding a married couple in Egypt.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.
3 Things:
Article by Heather Dalton on the travels of a cockatoo to 13th-century Sicily.
Article by Minjie Su about four medieval love stories.
Blog post about the correspondence of a "happy family" in 2nd-century Egypt.
Sources:
Goitein, S.D. Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders. Princeton University Press, 1973.
Hofmeester, Karin. “Jewish Ethics and Women’s Work in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Arab-Islamic World.” International Review of Social History 56 (2011): 141–64.
Melammed, Reneé Levine. “He Said, She Said: A Woman Teacher in Twelfth-Century Cairo.” AJS Review 22, no. 1 (1997): 19–35.
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