Abstract
Early sixteenth-century European travelers venturing beyond the borders of Christendom shared a mandate to report on the lifestyles, customs, and habits of the peoples they encountered. Little data from this loose assortment of observations, however, could satisfy a reader in search of systematic information. In German print culture of this period, we see nascent attempts to fasten these observations about new peoples onto sturdier scaffolding. Whereas the description of peoples new to western Europeans was not yet concretized as a subject of systematic or anthropological investigation, a discursive system began to take shape within an amorphous network of travelers, merchants, printers, and illustrators whose documentation of a common subject eventually formed the armature of a critical inquiry resembling ethnography.1 Although the manners and customs of the world’s peoples peppered the pages of chivalric fiction, crusader, and pilgrim narratives, and were summarized with increasing coherence by cosmographers, the first organized study of the world’s peoples to announce itself as such was Johannes Boemus’ The Manner, Laws, and Customs of All Peoples, printed in 1520.2 This chapter considers the illustrated 1515 German edition of Ludovico de Varthema’s travels to the Holy Land and southeast Asia, Die Ritterlich vn lobwirdig rayß (Augsburg: Hans Miller, 1515) as a visual precursor to Boemus’ pursuit of organized comparison.3 Endorsing the merits of the traveler’s “systematic curiosity,” this chapter argues that the illustrator, Jörg Breu, formalized that curiosity in his visual records.4
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Notes
Here I follow Foucault’s remarks on the birth of discourses, such as natural history, psychology, or grammar that begin with a convergence of agents who recognize a common object of analysis. Mapping the surfaces of these objects, delimiting them, ordering them, and establishing the discursive relations that connect them, yields an enunciative field. See Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 21–63.
Johannes Boemus’s Omnium gentium mores, leges, & ritus ex multis clarissimis rerum sciptoribus (1520) stakes a claim to ethnographic recording by virtue of its comparative nature. Margaret Hodgen locates this text, which was frequently reprinted until the eighteenth century, within a culture of collecting, and suggests that Boemus’ collection of characteristics of peoples developed in tandem with amateur collecting of coins, gems and fossils for curiosity cabinets. See Margaret T Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 131–135. Rubies considers Boemus’s text a comparative ethnology based on classical and humanist sources. Rubies, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, 126. Klaus Vogel considers works like Boemus’s to be a reaction to vernacular travelers like Varthema, see “Cultural Variety in a Renaissance Perspective: Johannes Boemus on ‘The manners, laws and customs of all peoples’ (1520),” in H. Bugge and J. P. Rubies, eds., Shifting Cultures. Interactions and Discourse in the Expansion of Europe, Periplus parerga, vol. 4 (Münster: Lit, 1995).
Die ritterlich un[d] lobwirdig Rayss des gestrengen un[d] über all ander weyt erfarnen Ritters undLantfarers Herren Ludowico Vartomans vo[n]Bolonia sagent vo[n] den Landen! EgyptolSyria vo[n] bayden Arabia Persia India un[d] Ethiopia (1515). This first German edition, printed by Hans Miller in Augsburg, is a vernacular translation of the first Italian edition printed in 1510. See The Travels of Ludovico di Varthema in Egypt, Syria, Arabia Déserta and Arabia Felix, in Persia, Lndia and Ethiopia, ed. George Percy Badger (New York: B. Franklin for the Hakluyt Society, 1963) for the various editions.
Joan-Pau Rubies has convincingly demonstrated that the traveler himself, Varthema, exhibited a systematic curiosity in his account of the peoples of these lands. See Joan-Pau Rubies, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Joseph Leo Koerner has likened Breu to a “bookish linguist who masters many languages but speaks all—including his own—with a strong foreign accent,” in “Jörg Breu,” a review of Andrew Morrall’s Jörg Breu the Elder: Art, Culture, and Belief in Reformation Augsburg in Apollo 158: 500 (October, 2003): 59–60x.
For the woodcut cycle, see Campbell Dodgson, “Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Holtzschnittwerkes Jörg Breu des Alteren,” Jahrbuch der Preussichen Kunstsammlungen, 21 (1900), 192–214; and idem., “Jörg Breu als Illustrator des Ratdoltischen Offizin,” in Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, 24 (1903), 335–337;
and H. Roettinger, “Zum Holzschnittwerk Jörg Breus des Älteren,” Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaf, 31 (1908), 48–62;
and R. Stiassny, “Jörg Breu von Augsburg,” Zeitschrif für Christliche Kunst, 7 (1894), 101–120.
The woodcuts for the Varthema cycle are attributed to Jörg Breu and can be found in Max Geisberg, Die Deutsche Buchillustration in der ersten Hälfte des XVIJahrhunderts, vol. I (Munich: Hugo Schmidt Verlag, 1930–32). For the afterlife of this cycle in later captivity narratives,
see Lisa Voigt, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 43ff.
Despite having enjoyed a vigorous reputation in his own lifetime, Breu has only recently been revived by scholarship. The subject of two English-language monographs, Jörg Breu the Elder’s importance as a craftsman-artist has hinged on his activity during a critical historical moment. Andrew Morrall, JörgBreu the Elder: Art, Culture, andBelief in Reformation Augsburg (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 42,
and Pia Cuneo, Art and Politics in Early Modern Germany: Jörg Breu the Elder and the Fashioning of Political Identity c. 1475–1536, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, vol. 67 (Boston: Brill, 1998).
Asserting oneself as the direct observer was the “fundamental literary mechanism of legitimation in the genre of travel literature.” See Jas Eisner and Joan-Pau Rubies, Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 3.
Contemporary accounts made of these regions by Tome Pires (1512–15) and Duarte Barbosa (1517–18) did not become common knowledge until they were printed for the first time in Ramusio’s compendium of travel accounts, the Navigationi et viaggi (1550). See George Winius, ed. Portugal, the Pathfinder (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1995), 79;
Thomas Suarez, Early Mapping of Southeast Asia (Singapore: Periplus, 1999), 123.
After Cairo, Varthema travels up the Mediterranean coast to Lebanon and Syria, stopping in Aleppo and Damascus. At Damascus, he joins the hajj en route to Medina and Mecca in the guise of a Mamluk. After Mecca, he then travels to Aden in present-day Yemen and Sanaa, and across the Arabian Sea to Diu in Gujarat, then journeys up the Persian Gulf to Ormuz to view the pearl fisheries. Next, he wends his way back to India, beginning in Cambay and then stopping at various points south along the Malabar coast, including Goa, Calicut, and Cochin. Leaving the mainland India, Varthema crosses to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and heads up the Coromandel coast north to Pulicat. Then he goes to Tenasserim in Burma (present-day Myanmar) and finally to Malacca. He spent the bulk of his seven years away in India. For the exact route, see Ludovico de Varthema, Die ritterlich un[d] lobwirdig Rayss, ed. George Winius (John Carter Brown Library: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints for the John Carter Brown Library: NY, 1992), 12.
July 29, 1508. This document is preserved in Arquivos Nacionais da Torre do Tombo. Chancellaria de Dom Manuel V, fol. 15v. See Ludovico de Varthema, Reisen im Orient, Folker Reichert, ed. (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1996), 17.
Varthema borrowed from Marco Polo and Mandeville, and perhaps even had knowledge of the still-new reports of Vasco da Gama and Pedro Alvares Cabrai as early as 1499. Rubies doubts that Varthema went beyond the Coromandel coast, which makes journeys off the Indian mainland to Tarnassari, Pegu, Bengal, Malacca, the Moluccas and Java also highly unlikely. See Joan-Pau Rubies, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 127.
Bronwen Wilson cites a number of business transactions in Venice that were brought to trial because they were conducted under false cover, especially by Jews who were doing business attired as Christians. See Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 121 FF.
See also Perez Zagorin, Ways of lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Campbell Dodgson, as quoted in Hugh WM. Davies, Bernhard von Breydenbach and his Journey to the Holy land 1483–4: A Bibliography (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert, 1968), xxi. See Davies for the various Breydenbach editions;
also Breydenbach, Die Reise ins Heilige land: ein Reisebericht aus dem Jahre 1485, Elisabeth Geck, ed. (Wiesbaden: Pressler, 1977). See also Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 35.
Marvin Trachtenberg calls this view “equestrian,” see Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in early modern Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Stephen Orgel, “Textual Icons: Reading from Early Modern Illustrations,” in The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print, ed. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (New York: Routledge, 2000), 59–95.
Peter Mason, “Seduction from Afar: Europe’s Inner Indians,” in Anthropos 82 (1987), 587.
For Raimondi’s engraving The Three Doctors, see Innis H. Shoemaker, ed., The Engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi, exh. cat. (Lawrence, Kans.: Spencer Museum of Art, 1981), 106–107;
and Claire Richter Sherman, ed. Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Seattle: distributed by the University of Washington Press, 2000), 184–185. Bernice Davidson finds a compositional precedent for this in Erhard Reuwich’s depiction of four Syrians for Bernhard Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in terram sanctam.
See Bernice Davidson, “Marcantonio Raimondi: The Engravings of his Roman Period,” Ph.D. diss, Radcliffe College, Harvard University, 1954, 209–210. For copying and collaboration in the Italian Renaissance print generally,
see Lisa Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
Just prior to his departure, for instance, Fortunatus swiftly orders a ship-shape galleon to be built and hastily orders gifts to be made for the Sultan: “Fortunatus ließ sich gar schnell eine gute Galeere mit allen Vorteilen bauen;” “Eilends sandte Fortunatus nach vielen guten Meistern des Goldschmiedehandwerks und ließ sich von Silber und Gold einen überaus wertvollen Anrichtetisch machen,” see Gerhard Schneider and Erwin Arndt, eds., Fortunatus: Ein Volksbuch aus dem Jahre 1509 (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1963), 121.
Breu furnished these Mamluks with Ottoman turbans: the taj, a small turban wound around a red cap with vertical ribbing introduced into Turkey by Sultan Mehmed II. This head covering was popularized in Venice by the Bellini and brought north by Dürer, whose work between 1495 and 1505 shows only the Ottoman variation. After his second visit in 1505, Diirer’s work reflects the typological shift of Venetian Orientalism to a predominantly Mamluk mode: the horned turban, high rising with vertical folds, often ending in curled peaks. See Julian Raby, Venice, Dürer and the Oriental Mode (London: Hans Huth Memorial Studies I, Islamic Art Publications, 1982), 21, 40. For typical dress during the Mamluk period,
see Yedida Kalfon Stillman, Arab Dress: A Short History from the Dawn of Islam to Modern Times (Boston: Brill, 2000), 62–85. I am grateful to Persis Berlekamp for these references.
Bernadette Bucher’s analysis of the images of De Bry’s Great Voyages borrows a structural model from Claude Lévi-Straus to show how the visual narrative of America answers to an internal logic. See Bûcher, Icon and Conquest, trans. Basia Miller Gulati (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
See Christine Johnson, “Accounting for the Discoveries,” in The German Discovery of the World (University of Virginia Press, 2008), 88–122.
Unembellished lists of commodities were features typical of merchant accounts circulating in Europe. The 1506 Nuremberg pamphlet Den rechten weg largely ignored any aspect of the landscape that would not bring direct profit; it focused instead on spices and precious minerals, viewing the local peoples as annoying obstructions to their easy acquisition. Da Gama’s report also includes a separate section on Calicut and its commerce. See E. G. Ravenstein, A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco Da Gama, 1497–1499. Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, no. 99 (New York: Franklin, 1963), 77.
For these, see Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006);
Claudia Swan, Art, Science and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland (Cambridge, 2005);
and Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, eds. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
For suttee, see sati in Margaret and James Stutley, Harper’s Dictionary of Hinduism (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). The authors argue that sati was perhaps originally only a mimetic ceremony in the Vedic period. Whether actual or purely symbolic, it probably fell into disuse until it was resumed in the sixth century along the Ganges, in Bengal, Rajputana, by some aboriginal tribes.
Ulrich Tengler, Layenspiegel: Von rechtmässigen ordungen in Bürgerlichen und peinlichen regimenten… (M. Hupfuff, 1511), for the various editions printed in the first half of the sixteenth century, see Miriam U. Chrisman, “Printing and the Evolution of Lay Culture in Strasbourg 1480–1599,” in Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, The German People and the Reformation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988) 80, n. 15.
See also the broadsheet by Erhard Schön, Ein erschröcklichgeschieht vom Tewfel und einer unhulden beschehen zu Schiita bey Rotweil in der Karwochen 1533 (Nuremberg, 1533), that recounts the events of a witch burning on St. George’s Day ofthat year. See Walter Strauss, The Illustrated Bartsch: German Masters of the Sixteenth Century, vol. 13 (New York: Abaris Books, 1984), 453. For images of witchcraft,
see Charles Zika, Exorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, v. 91. Leiden: Brill, 2003.
Prester John’s reports about a lost community of Christians strengthened the search for St. Thomas Christians in India. The Christians Vasco da Gama thought he saw were in fact Nairs (Nayyar), a warrior caste of the Malabar Coast who ate meat and practiced polyandry. See Ravenstein, A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 49ff. See also M. N. Pearson, The Portuguese in India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 13.
Critics who view Breu’s illustrations to be at the root of essentializing inversions of European culture debate who was responsible for the origin of this image. Partha Mitter maintains that it is Varthema’s description that cues Breu’s depiction of the Deumo as a European demon; see Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: a History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 16–20. Joan-Pau Rubies, on the other hand, exonerates Varthema on the grounds that his textual description reasonably evokes contemporary representations of the Hindu god Narasimha, the lion-like incarnation of Vishnu on view in temples in Kerala and Vijayanagara. See Rubies, Travel & Ethnology, 157–158. In Rubiés’s view, it was Breu who transcribed this Hindu god into the European syntax for representing demons. Missing from this lively debate about whom to blame for these essentializations is a discussion that puts Breu’s borrowings into their visual context.
Joachim Vadianus, Das wolffgesang (Augsburg: Ulhart, 1522). See R.W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 75–77. For satirical representations of the Pope,
see Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 154–159.
In 1509 Breu painted an image of St. Christopher on the North façade of the Church of the Holy Cross in Augsburg; in 1491 Ulrich Apt had painted St. Christopher on the south wall of the Cathedral in Augsburg. See Morrall, Jörg Breu the Elder, 11. Superstitious practices such as these that assigned functions and cures to specific saints were the target of Erasmus’s critique of late-medieval piety. See Carlos Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 37ff.
Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 53. On idolatry,
see Michael Cole and Rebecca Zorach, The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009);
Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004);
Hans Belting, likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989);
Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
For Hans Burgkmair’s 1507 broadsheet of St. Kiimernus that relayed this miraculous occurrence in Lucca, see Bob Scribner, “Ways of Seeing in the age of Dürer,” in Dürer and his Culture, ed. Dagmar Eichberger and Charles Zika (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 101–102.
For this opposition, see Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Mythologies,” in The Raw andthe Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
This posture has also suggested Diirer’s Melancholia to Wolfgang Neuber. The figure also recalls Saturn who governed melancholic humors, an iconographie tie strengthened by his own cannibalistic tendencies, see Neuber, Fremde Welt, 256. For the iconography of Melancholia, see Erwin Panofsky, Dürers “Melencolia I” (Berlin: Teubner, 1923);
see Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964). For a summary of the published reception of Diirer’s Melencolia I,
see Peter-Klaus Schuster, Melencolia I: Diirer’s Denkbild, 1 vols. (Berlin: Mann, 1991), and a recent contribution by Patrick Doorly, “Diirer’s Melencolia I: Plato’s Abandoned Search for the Beautiful,” Art Bulletin 86:2, 255–276.
Varthema reports that the Kanphata yogis, a sect of militant ascetics, possess sharp-bladed iron disks that would wound an enemy when thrown. See Gita Dharampal-Frick, Indien im Spiegel deutscher Quellen der Frühen Neuzeit (1500–1750): Studien zu einer interkulturellen Konstellation, Frühe Neuzeit 18 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 251; and Reichert, 128ff and note 15.
See also The Travels of Ludovico di Varthema in Egypt, Syria, Arabia Déserta and Arabia Felix, in Persia, India and Ethiopia, ed. George Percy Badger (New York: B. Franklin for the Hakluyt Society, 1963), 111.
This was unlike the case in the Americas, where European observers found hierarchical power structures lacking. It was also the absence of a natural hierarchy, according to the authorities at Salamanca, that contributed to the confusion native Americans had about the direction of the food chain, leading them to consume human flesh and insects. See Peter Bakewell, A History of Latin America, second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 150. 92. These may have arrived in Strasbourg by way of Burgkmair’s frieze, Wolf Traut’s illustrations for the 1509 pamphlet version of Balthasar Springer’s Merfart which portrayed the procession of the King of Cochin in a single scene, or even Georg Glockendom’s 1511 edition of Hans Burgkmair’s frieze in which birds flesh out the background. For Glockendom’s version,
see Briesemeister et al., Amerika 1492–1992: Neue Welten—Neue Wirklichkeiten (Braunschweig: Westermann, 1992), 122–123.
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Leitch, S. (2010). Recuperating the Eyewitness: Jörg Breu’s Images of Islamic and Hindu Culture in Ludovico de Varthema’s Travels (Augsburg: 1515). In: Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany. History of Text Technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112988_5
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