Croatian Regions, Cities-Communes, and Their Population in the Eastern Adriatic in the Travelogues of Medieval European Pilgrims

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

The information gathered from the diaries and travelogues of medieval European pilgrims to the Holy Land, which refers to the regions, people, and communes of the Eastern Adriatic and their customs, language, and piety, largely depended on the true motives behind the pilgrimage, the social status of the pilgrim, and even the sex of the authors. Considering the dozen works analyzed in this paper, it can be concluded that those pilgrims who were motivated by genuine piety were less interested in describing the cities, region, people, and communities they encountered on their way, whereas those whose pilgrimage was primarily an adventure or an occasion for making business contacts presented rather interesting data regarding various aspects of daily life of inhabitants of East Adriatic communes. The religiously inspired pilgrims saw their journey as a true peregrinatio ad Dominum, and some of the diaries even give an impression of resignation with the world and a longing to reach the Holy Land as a sort of ﬁnal deed in their earthly life. Regarding their social status and education, the learned pilgrims from higher social strata, whether secular or clerical, were more inclined to express prejudice and complain about the quality of food and lodging, contrary to those with lower social standing or the Mendicants, especially Franciscans, who showed far more understanding for cultural, ethnic, linguistic, or even ecclesiastical differences. Eventually, unique cases such as Margery Kempe, whose motives were deeply religious and even mystic, barely mentioned or were interested in these differences, at least in the spiritual atmosphere in which they experienced their journey ad sanctum sepulchrum Domini. Nevertheless, all the analyzed travelogues, with the exception of Margery Kempe, clearly show to a greater or lesser extent that the era of striving towards the pax Christiana and a unique cultura religionis Christiane, which was an ideal of Western Christianity from the mid-eleventh until the late thirteenth century, was gone forever, and that the late Middle Ages was a period of ethnic kingdoms, states, and other territorial entities. In such circumstances, the late medieval and early Renaissance period abandoned the ideal of Christian universalism in favor of ethnic sensibilities. For this reason, the experience of otherness in pilgrim diaries was no longer limited to the inﬁdels – Saracens, Turks, or Mongols in Palestine and Asia Minor – and not even to the Christians who belonged to the Slavia Ortodoxa or on the issue of pax Christiana and cultura religionis Christiane Byzantium, but extended to the social communities and individuals who belonged to Western Christianity, yet differed in some respects (language, tradition, habits, anthropological features, and so on) from people in their own lands. Eventually, one should say that in the ﬁfeenth century, and especially its latter half, Western European pilgrim diaries increasingly reveal the inﬂuence of humanism, expressed, for example, in various attempts to use ancient etymological explanations for the origin of people, place names, legends and myths, or gentile and ethnic groups. Te deeper one goes into the era of humanism and Renaissance, diaries and travelogues tend to abandon the old Ptolomean geography of the world, which implied Jerusalem as the “centre of the world” and begin to exhibit traits of the new, Galileian interpretation of geography, where the Earth was no longer the centre of the universe, which also had an impact on the religious dimension and signiﬁcance of the Holy Land.