In these times of involuntary immobility and the sense of disconnection from loved ones it has brought, it might be consoling, or at least therapeutic, to think about the challenges of early modern travel to the Levant. At times I feel almost lucky to be reading on a daily basis about how cumbersome, dangerous, and uncomfortable it was, quenching my own wanderlust in the process. We should also keep in mind, however, that despite all their outlandish, picaresque and exotic content, travel accounts were also catering to the tastes of armchair travellers, cosied up in their warm studies, or otherwise, in the case of these particular Isles at this time of year, confined to their increasingly chilly rooms. By the seventeenth century, as Gerald MacLean has taught us, British readers no longer had to rely solely on continental books about the Ottomans, but could turn to English travelogues and guidebooks to take them there.^[1] Travel to the Ottoman Empire never became common for leisurely purposes in this period, but remained the domain of the intrepid. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, the Ottoman Empire had become a destination and centre of British trade important enough to warrant the re-publication of James Howell’s Instructions and Directions For Forren Travell (first published in 1642, new ed. 1650), which now included a ‘new Appendix for Travelling into Turkey and the Levant parts.’

Howell’s book advertised itself as a useful and practical guide, ‘Shewing by what cours, and in what compas of time, one may take an exact Survey of the Kingdomes, and States of Christendome, and arrive to the practicall knowledge of the Languages, to good purpose.’ The second edition continued to be dedicated to Prince Charles, despite its author having spent the preceding eight years, in the aftermath of the Civil War in Fleet prison due to his financial troubles and Royalist leanings. Howell’s later literary reputation has suffered from his free appropriation of earlier texts, a practice not uncommon among Western books about the Ottomans.

Even if he had not set foot in the Levant himself, Howell had travelled extensively in continental Europe as a young man as an acquisitions agent for a glass manufacturer, a tutor, and an embassy member, even participating in the planning of the ‘Spanish match’, the proposed marriage between Prince Charles, the son of King James I and Infanta Maria Anna of Spain. Having tried numerous times to create jobs for himself – among them, a failed proposition to establish an office for the registration of foreigners living in England – Howell ended up on the wrong side of the political and religious divides, with his supporters and patrons exiled, and friends scarce. This has been suggested as the reason for his prolific literary production, earning him the reputation as ‘one of the earliest English writers to have earned his living almost solely from the proceeds of his pen.’^[2]

Howell’s ‘Turkey appendix’ was certainly not revolutionary, recycling familiar early modern tropes about the Ottoman Empire, Islam and the ‘tyranny’ of the ‘Turks’, arguing for its usefulness because the Ottoman sultan ‘is the sole Earthly potentat, and fatallst foe of the Crosse of Christ’ (p. 129). By way of practical advice, it suggested Levant travellers chose one of two established routes. The first route transported the traveller with ‘our company of Turky Marchants’ in their ships that departed in the spring and took roughly three months to reach Istanbul. The second was via Venice, and involved hiring a Janissary who would transport them via a land route in a caravan. Once in ‘Constantinople’, the traveller could witness how the country was taken over by ‘barbarisme and ignorance, with slavery and abjection of Spirit,’ here echoing the earlier words of Anthony Sherley, another English traveller to the East.

An attentive reader quickly notices that Howell’s book emulated and copied themes and topics, paraphrasing entire passages from earlier accounts such as Sherley’s, or Henry Blount’s A Voyage into the Levant (1636).^[3] To speak of plagiarism in the context of the early modern period wouldn’t sit right, partly because it was common to accumulate new knowledge on top of old, leaving both in view.

Ironically enough, Howell defended the worth of both eye-witnessing and short-term travels, even if he had never set his own eyes on the Ottomans. In a short section entitled ‘The first sight makes the firmest impressions’, he argued that a short-term passenger dropped off in Istanbul harbour would be able to ‘take in’ more than a long-term resident would – be them a Levant Company merchant, chaplain or ambassador:

Now as the first glance makes the smartest impression of the object, so a fresh Commer to any strange place apprehends things with a cleerer judgment, with a greater pleasure & a greedier desire then when the object is grown stale & familiar unto him, therefore in this respect, he who arrives suddenly from ship to shore at any great Town, in a strange Countrey, hath a greater advantage, then he who passeth by degrees from the skirts thereof to the centre (p. 132).

Henry Blount had claimed in his  A Voyage into the Levant (1636) that his own information derived ‘from mine owne eye not dazled with any affection, prejudicacy, or mist of education, which preoccupate the minde, and delude it with partiall ideas, as with a false glasse, representing the object in colours, and proportions untrue’ (p. 4). This despite the fact that he had clearly consulted previous authors of travel advice, including Lipsius, Moryson, Knolles, and Nicolay, before putting his own pen to paper, and who would not have done the same?

Even if Howell’s adaptation of Blount is relatively subtle, the structure and sequence of his work gives him away as a copy-cat. He echoes not only his predecessor’s themes and topics, but also follows his itinerary, ending his book in Cairo, just like Blount had done. Howell’s conclusion, after a short guide to ‘Globism’ (i.e. the art of calculating distances and latitudes), was perhaps shaped by the approaching twilight of his years. Howell’s traveller, like Blount, would also have gathered their information ‘not by hear-say only, or through the mist of other mens breaths’ – a worrying thought in our Covid-19-ridden times – but instead ‘through the cleere casements of his own optiques (p. 139).’ According to him, after all that ordeal and eye-witnessing, ‘having now breath'd the fiery aires of Afric’ and the ‘sweete breeses of Asia, and Europe’, a weary traveller was surely now ready to retire back home and ‘be contented to live and dye an Islander without treading any more Continents (p. 139-40).’

Especially in light of current events, I am, unlike Howell, more than willing to continue my wanderings when restrictions, contagions and troubles finally subside.

[1] Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel (Palgrave, 2004).

[2] See D.R. Woolf, ‘James Howell,’ (1594?–1666), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13974

[3] On Blount and his book, see Eva Johanna Holmberg, ‘Avoiding conflict in the early modern Levant: Henry Blount’s adaptations in Ottoman lands,’ in Gabór Gelléri and Rachel Willie (eds.), Travel and Conflict in the Early Modern World (Routledge, forthcoming in November 2020). For Knolles and the ‘Turkish histories’ in this period, see Anders Ingram, Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2015).