When Levant Company clerk John Sanderson, whose horrible housemates I wrote about in my last blogpost for #BLMemos collaboration, had finally decided to return to England after three postings in the East, he had one more thing on his to do-list: a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Protestants could no longer participate in the Catholic traditions and practices of pilgrimage, and John Sanderson was no exception. He had to find a new way to engage with the biblical sites and landmarks of Palestine and Syria, ruled by the Ottomans, often seeming unsure of how to behave, and who to trust about its history. Sanderson had set sail from Istanbul on 14^th May 1601 on board the Mermaid, reaching Sidon on 3^rd of June, and continuing via Damascus down to Jerusalem and Bethlehem in the company of Jewish merchants and pilgrims. Sanderson’s pilgrimage was reported on the pages of his manuscript commonplace book, which is held at the British Library, with his account also published in Samuel Purchas’s Pilgrimes in 1625.[2]

        In his account, Sanderson does what many other travellers and pilgrims had done before him: he uses Scripture and local informants as his guide.[3] His pilgrimage is also greatly helped and facilitated by his Jewish travel companions, who take him to Safed, and stray from their own route to show him famous places and tombs on the way. In Jerusalem Sanderson briefly parts company with the Jews, stays at the Greek monastery and hires a local Greek monk to be his guide. Sanderson visits many sites both in and around Jerusalem apart from the Holy Sepulchre, claiming that local Franciscans prevented his visit, accusing Sanderson of being a Jew. During a visit to Bethlehem, he mentions causing wonder in the Greeks by not making a sign of the cross, and by seeming uninterested in the place, making the Greeks think that he is a ‘Christian from the worlds end.’ All these comments are carefully considered efforts to differentiate himself from the Catholics of Jerusalem, who Sanderson claimed were conspiring against him. Moors and Turks remain in the background, apart from one strident Moor who Sanderson has a scuffle with during his journey. Otherwise, he reports on Ottomans as governors and managers of the city, mostly deciding who gets to enter where, for how long, and for how much money, complaining about entrance fees and restrictions like travellers did and still do the world over. [SH1] He also mentions in passing that he is unable to visit the area nowadays known as Haram al-Sharif (‘The Noble Sanctuary’), writing that ‘uppon thes stepps none dare come, except Turks and Moores of the best accompt.’

        When visiting Mount Olivet, Sanderson comments that the footprint of Christ he sees there is ‘wourne mutch with the toutchinge and kissinge of Christians.’ He does not report touching and kissing it himself but mentions praying there and hoping that his ‘Saviour beheld [him].’ In Bethany he visits the grave of Lazarus, ‘whearin I writ my name on the waule, and not in any other place all my pilgrimadge.’ Sanderson’s senses seem heightened during his journey and is keen to record it: in Mount Lebanon he complains about the tediousness of climbing it, and despite it ‘beinge the hottest time of the yeare’ he feels ‘so extreame could that my hands weare benummed and seemed white all over like unto a kind of frost’. (p. 118). Although sceptical about being at the exact spot on the Jordan river where Jesus was baptised, he mentions washing his ‘hands and head and dranke of the river in divers places, as, yf you have and doe marke this discourse, may be perceaved’ (p. 113). In lake Tiberias, he does not fish like Jesus did with his disciples, but instead feeds the fish with crumbs of bread. Sanderson clearly engages physically and spiritually with these places but still tries to maintain a distance from other pilgrims and their practices.

         As many travellers of his time, in addition to touching, engraving, and tasting, Sanderson was also an ear – and an eye-witness. He listens to testimonies, observes rituals and ceremonies, and mentions seeing the places with his own eyes like hundreds of others had done before him. His journey rewards him with not only pleasant mountains, rocky terrains, churches, and chapels, but also with some trees he sees in Damascus which the ‘eye cannot behould a more pleasauner sight’ (p. 117). Drawn to both beautiful sights and pretty pictures, be them in Greek or Ottoman style, Sanderson also mentions drawing the Holy Sepulchre from the terrace of the Greek monastery after failing to enter it, reporting that he saw ‘as mutch as yf I had stoad in the church, and drewe with my penn the forme of the inside and alike the outside. More lower, in a rome at a windowe out of the Patriarks house I stoad and drewe the forme of that which is erected right over the sepulcher, as I have discribed it.’ (p. 109). Because both Sanderson and Samuel Purchas mention his numerous drawings, pictures, and maps, we can unfortunately deduce that most of these were lost to history when Sanderson sent them to Purchas to support his publication. Historians of senses and mobility would have benefited from these ephemeral and unfortunately now lost traces of Sanderson’s travel experiences, but will sadly have to do without them.

[1] This blog-post was inspired by a brief visit to Jerusalem and the IIAS research group Sensing the Truth: Changing Conceptions of the Perceptual in Early Modern and Enlightenment Europe led by PI Yaakov Mascetti. The author would like to thank Yaakov and his team for hospitality and inspiring conversations.

[2] For convenience, all page references are to John Sanderson, The Travels of John Sanderson in the Levant 1584-1602 / John Sanderson., Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society 2nd Series ; No 67 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1931).

[3] For William Biddulph’s journey through the same landscape, see Gerald MacLean, “Strolling in Syria with William Biddulph.” Criticism 46, no. 3 (2004): 415–39. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23127325.