The founding of Latin states in the Eastern Mediter- ranean offered security and provided the impetus for exploration to a long list of Western travellers who started visiting the Cyclades and other Aegean re- gions a couple of centuries after the Fourth Crusade. Geographical, political and trade sea-routes were the main interests of the first group of travellers during the 14th and 15th centuries, while after the Renais- sance and the extension of the Ottoman Empire into Europe, the interest of Western Europeans shirted to- wards Greece with its glorious ancient past and its contemporary life-ways. The textual accounts and the pictorial evidence most travellers published are of great importance for the study of the Post-Medie- val and Early Modern Cyclades, since there is a con- siderable lack of Greek written records and historical sources. Buondelmonti in the early 15th century (Le- grand 1897), Thévenot (1687), Randolph (1687), Wheler (1682), Sauger (1699), Tournefort (1718), Sonnini (1801), and Bent (1885) are some of the tra- vellers who visited the islands in the Late Medieval– Early Modern eras. Their observations were underta- ken by the order of West European governments or certain individuals who had commercial interests in the Aegean region.
The descriptions that travellers provide about soil fertility and agricultural products, contemporary state of affairs, daily life and customs of the islanders, en- able us build up a picture of the settlement pattern- ing, population, economy and everyday life in this
Fig. 3.2 The French botanist and traveller Joseph Pitton de Tournefort
insular part of the Aegean. Nevertheless, traveller ac- counts should be treated with caution. It has been ar- gued that not all of them were equally concerned with the matters mentioned above. The French bota- nist and traveller Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (Fig. 3.2) was interested in the natural history of the is- lands of the Archipelago (1718); others were inter- ested in the antiquities of the places they visited, while Bent (1885) collected information on island customs and folk traditions. It is not surprising that some travellers had never actually been to the Cy- clades themselves. Bennet and Voutsaki (1991, 366) refer to them as‘armchair travellers’. Such travellers had composed their imaginary accounts based either on letters written by European missionaries in Athens, or on information from already published travellers’ literature. It is evident, for instance, that Frieseman (1789), who published his book in French, copied Tournefort (1718) in most of his ac- count. Tournefort, on the other hand, has left one of the most important testimonies of the 18th century, since he travelled in the Aegean, and his account in- cludes all kinds of information about population, agriculture, local economy and public affairs. Al- though there were travellers who had been on the is- lands, not all of them actually visited their interior.
Some of them did not leave the main ports, while in- formation about anything but the main town could have come from other sources. Their observations were therefore limited to those areas they saw them- selves (Bennet and Voutsaki 1991, 367), while what they actually saw was nothing else but the harbour, the chief town of each island and the towers where the local elite accommodated and entertained them. The first group of travellers who visited the Aegean Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean by the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th centuries were more of geographers, political agents and traders in- terested in the geophysical character of islands and Aegean coastal regions (Tselikas 1990, 8-14). The Florentine priest Christoforo Buondelmonti (Legrand 1897) was one of the leading travellers and geogra- phers in the East whose maritime knowledge and in- terest in commercial sea-routes were printed on his original work in Latin, titledLiber Insularum Archi- pelagi. There followed a number of other geogra- phers who produced the so-calledPortolaniandIso- laria, hand-drawn or printed maps of sea-routes, and navigational texts about islands and island-ports. The Venetian Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti (1898) who pub- lished his work in verses in 1485, the French André Thevet (1575) who produced maps of many islands, and the Ottoman-Turkish seaman Pîrî Re’is (Kahle 1926) who published his navigational work in 1521, are some of the works that include maps of the Cy- clades. The strategic significance of the Aegean Ar- chipelago during the Late Medieval and Early Otto- man period is clearly emphasised by the published works of both Western (Venetian, French) and Otto- man cartographers throughout the 15th and 16th cen- turies. Some of these early maps of the Aegean are simply copies of earlier sources. The general aware- ness of the inadequacy of Ptolemy’s ancient map and the increased need for more detailed geographical and maritime information during this period is strik- ing. The majority of the Cycladicisolarii(maps and navigational narratives) provide useful information about ports and island towns of the period. Since other historical sources are not widely available or published, these maps contain valuable references to the establishment and growth of fortified settlements in the Cyclades.
Inspired by Renaissance ideals and the human sciences, the second group of travellers visited Greece in order to compile descriptions of archaeolo- gical sites and places well-known since the Classical period. Cyriacus of Ancona (Simopoulos 1999a), an Italian diplomat, was the first known traveller to de- scribe archaeological sites and collect antiquities in the first half of the 15th century. From the late 16th century onwards, and especially during the late 18th and later, the number of romantic foreign travellers’ accounts of ruined archaeological sites increased dra- matically. Some of these accounts contain general or less detailed information about contemporary daily life, while their narrative bears specific biases, as a result of their authors’social, political and cultural backgrounds (Angelomatis-Tsougarakis 1990, 13). The third group of foreign travellers is obviously the most important one, since they provide a great deal of information about settlements and population numbers, agriculture, economy and daily life. The extension of the Ottoman Empire into Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries provoked the curiosity of most European nations about this powerful political and military state and its economic system, as well as about the behaviour, beliefs and customs of the people who inhabited it (Tselikas 1990, 9). The first detailed descriptive accounts of most Aegean islands began in the second half of the 16th century, when rising powers such as France, England, Austria and the Netherlands sent informers and consuls to ob- serve and record interesting data (in order to establish a strong commercial presence in the Aegean ports of the Ottoman Empire). André Thevet (1575) and the Italian Thomaso Porcacchi (1620) were amongst the first travellers to describe the islands as feasibly as possible, providing information of social, economic and cultural nature (Tselikas 1990, 10). Even mis- sionaries and monks were sent to the Aegean islands in order to found monasteries and schools, and preach the Roman Catholic dogma and Latin culture. Very often they sent reports back to Paris and Rome, describing Greek-Orthodox superstitions, religious customs and church property, such as the account of the Jesuit monk François Richard (1657) who lived in Santorini. Such Catholic religious and cultural es- tablishments on the Aegean islands were not always seen negatively by local Orthodox populations; learning Italian (the language of international trade)
by Greeks was followed by financial rewards, as on the islands of Crete (McKee 2000, 124), Syros, An- dros and Naxos.
Meanwhile, after the loss of Crete by the Venetians and the subsequent replacement of Mediterranean commerce by France, England and the Netherlands, a great number of island-ports attracted European merchants and consuls who were in close contact with the local upper class. The Greek elite usually entertained Western travellers, diplomats and mer- chants and provided information about local econo- my, society and everyday life. This is how textual evidence about productivity, food resources, diet, dining, household interiors and costumes was com- posed, while most of these accounts were accompa- nied by drawings and engravings depicting cos- tumes, interiors of houses and island-landscapes. Apart from information of a more scientific charac- ter, Pitton de Tournefort (1718) for instance, pro- vided a textual description of the islanders’customs and manners, as well as detailed accounts and draw- ings of their costumes. Similarly, the work of the French ambassador in Istanbul, Marie-Gebriel-Flo- rens-Auguste compte de Choiseul-Gouffier (1782), enriched with a descriptive narrative and exceptional drawings, remains a milestone in the history of travel literature (Tselikas 1990, 13).
Although there is reliable detailed information about daily life in most travellers’ accounts of the 16th- 19th centuries, textual evidence needs to be used wi- sely, especially when it comes to population figures and settlement size. As Bintliff (1977, 553-4) has pointed out, some travellers, having difficulties in calculating the population of a specific region, very often either quoted figures from much older travel books, or misinterpreted the poll-tax paid by the non-Muslim male population. Angelomatis-Tsougar- akis (1990, 14) notes that although it was very com- mon that foreign travellers had to depend more on other people for the greater part of their information, they rarely cited the original source.