Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of EducationBates, E. S. (Ernest Stuart)
History
Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of Education
Bates, E. S. (Ernest Stuart)
Europe -- Description and travel; Europe -- Social life and customs; Travel -- History
Outside Europe fresh estimates have to be quoted. The fare to Jaffa
and back by the pilgrim-galley varied from fifty to sixty ducats [say
£100]: this included food. Additional expenses brought the ordinary
cost of a visit to Jerusalem from Venice under these earlier conditions
up to three or four hundred pounds in present-day values. This, of
course, omits the expenses of the pilgrim between his home and Venice.
The minimum recorded cost for this period is represented by the two
hundred and twenty crowns [£350] spent by one Switzer in thirty weeks,
and two hundred and twenty-eight crowns spent by another, a barber, in
eleven months (1583-84),[123] of which times only about three months,
in each case, was taken up by the voyage from Venice to Jerusalem and
back, the remainder being devoted to Italy. The pilgrimage may be
considered as accounting for but little more than two hundred pounds
of the expenditure of each. Many went, moreover, who never possessed
this much, since it was common for one man to go as deputy for several,
who jointly defrayed his expenses; and it was also a common form of
charity for rich pilgrims to pay for poor ones. Later, in fact, they
were often forced to do so by the Turks when the latter had reduced to
beggary those who had come away with too little, which led to there
arising a custom among pilgrims of showing each other their money; if
one refused, the others avoided his company to escape the possibility
of being compelled to pay for him.
With the cessation of the pilgrim-galley the cost of the pilgrimage
doubled itself, what with the increased length of the journey due to a
roundabout way having to be taken, and, still more, to its increased
duration, owing to the uncertainty; especially as every day additional
brought its own additional risks and extortions. Moryson and his
brother spent four hundred and eighty pounds [nearly, if not quite,
£3000].
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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