Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe

Thomas Betteridge, Thomas Betteridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351954914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Early modern Europe was obsessed with borders and travel. It found, imagined and manufactured new borders for its travellers to cross. It celebrated and feared borders as places or states where meanings were charged and changed. In early modern Europe crossing a border could take many forms; sailing to the Americas, visiting a hospital or taking a trip through London's sewage system. Borders were places that people lived on, through and against. Some were temporary, like illness, while others claimed to be absolute, like that between the civilized world and the savage, but, as the chapters in this volume show, to cross any of them was an exciting, anxious and often a potentially dangerous act. Providing a trans-European interdisciplinary approach, the collection focuses on three particular aspects of travel and borders: change, status and function. To travel was to change, not only humans but texts, words, goods and money were all in motion at this time, having a profound influence on cultures, societies and individuals within Europe and beyond. Likewise, status was not a fixed commodity and the meaning and appearance of borders varied and could simultaneously be regarded as hostile and welcoming, restrictive and opportunistic, according to one's personal viewpoint. The volume also emphasizes the fact that borders always serve multiple functions, empowering and oppressing, protecting and threatening in equal measure. By using these three concepts as measures by which to explore a variety of subjects, Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe provides a fascinating new perspective from which to re-assess the way in which early modern Europeans viewed themselves, their neighbours and the wider world with which they were increasingly interacting.

PART I
Borders

Chapter One
Highways, Hospitals and Boundary Hazards

Margaret Healy

Always and ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of man to and fro, so that they may get to the other banks … the bridge gathers as a passage that crosses. (Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’)¹

Heidegger's lyrical observation about ‘passage’ points, like bridges, which ‘gather’ and ‘escort’ travellers to ‘other banks’, seems particularly resonant in relation to descriptions of the location of hospitals in the borders of medieval and early modern towns. Strategically placed, at such funnelling points to and from cities, ‘spitals’ were usually the first large ambivalent structures, or indeed obstacles, that travellers encountered and had to negotiate – in the form of almsgiving – prior to their effective ‘passage’ onwards. Erasmus's colourful dialogue about a pilgrimage to and from Canterbury c. 1514 conjures a vivid picture of the hazards of hospitals and boundary crossing:

Then as we whent toward London not farre from Canterbury, we came into a great hollow and strayt way, morover bowyng so downe with hylls of eyther syde that a man cannot escape, nor it cannot be avoyed, but he must nedes ryde that way. Upon the lefte hand of the way, ther is an almes howse for olde people; frome them runnyth on[e] owt, as sone as they here a horseman commynge; he casteth holy water upon hym, and anone he offereth hym the over lether of a shoo [a relic of st. Thomas Becket] …²

This unwelcome and costly encounter (pilgrims were obliged to give alms), which could not be avoided, was with the old leper hospital of St Nicholas Harbledown, by Erasmus's time occupied by the elderly infirm.

But hospitals were not always, and had not always been, such unwelcome sights for European travellers: indeed, etymological study reveals their origins intimately bound up with ‘hospitality’ to strangers. These charitable institutions seem to have emerged and flourished first in the Byzantine Empire. Xenone was the name for a hospital, and this derived from xenos, meaning stranger, guest or traveller. Bishop Rabbula of fifth-century Edessa labelled his institution for both healthy travellers and the sick a xenodocheion. The late Latin word derived from Greek and used occasionally until the sixteenth century, xenodochium, denoted a place for the reception of strangers.³ Similarly, Latin hospes meant guest, but host too. The ‘Hospitallers’ – the knights of St John of Jerusalem who were intimately connected with the care of crusaders – seem to have lent their name to the modern word ‘hospital’.⁴ In the twelfth century, hospitals proliferated and differentiated, but they were always monastic, charitable foundations, strongly associated with the collection and distribution of alms. Some seem to have specialized in providing board and lodging for pilgrims, some catered for the sick too, while others provided refuge for the elderly infirm and beggars, or for foundling children, and yet others housed lepers, and subsequently plague victims or syphilitics. It is not difficult to see how the ‘hospital’ or, more commonly, ‘spital house’, evolved its deeply ambiguous and, in some contexts such as pre-Reformation England, negative connotations. These were, as we have seen, not always to do with the physical health hazards located in these marginal social spaces. But ancient healing places, situated on the peripheries of human settlements or just outside, had rather more propitious associations. As Mary Douglas's work reminds us, the geographical borders and margins of structured social spaces are not only imagined as hazardous, they are, paradoxically, frequently associated with positive ‘powers’ too.⁵ A consideration of pre-Christian healing places, many of which eventually evolved into spas and hospitals, illuminates this well.

The Healing Traveller: Asclepius's Powerful Shrines

Fertile wooded valleys containing hot or cold springs, rivers and caves have long been associated with good spirits, cleansing powers and healing divinities – Asclepius of Thessaly most famously.⁶ This supreme ancient healing god of travellers, usually depicted by his iconic statues as a serene, middle-aged pilgrim leaning on a snake-entwined walking staff and accompanied by his faithful dog, has many mythical origins. In Pindar's fifth-century BC Pythian Ode, Asclepius emerges as the heroic, gifted son of Apollo and a mortal mother, Coronis, daughter of a Greek king. He is also mentioned in Homer's Iliad, though here he is the progeny of two human parents and is himself the father of two important healers who served the Greek coalition against Troy.⁷ For obvious reasons, then, springs and caves, close to towns and often connected to them by sacred paths, formed the sites of his earliest shrines. Asclepian cult worship began simply with sick and anxious supplicants making their way to his sacred precincts, perhaps sheltering in the cave hoping for a communication from this powerful god, and making a votive offering. Epiphanies and curing prescriptions apparently came in the form of dreams, often mediated through a vision of a snake or dog, with which Asclepius's healing powers were closely associated. The cult of Asclepius appears to have spread south from Thessaly, until by 430 BC he was considered powerful enough to become the focus of a temple complex in Epidaurus.⁸ It was not long (420s BC, coinciding with the devastating plague) before Asclepius's wooden image was shipped, literally, to Piraeus, and so on to Athens itself. Interestingly, his cult gained ground and flourished in tandem with Hippocratic medicine: any clash was avoided by the healing god conveniently adapting his oracular cures along Hippocratic, humoral lines.⁹ Indeed, the Hippocratic travelling craftsmen fortuitously appropriated the powerful god as a sort of divine patron. Meanwhile, six miles outside Epidaurus in a broad valley, the Asclepion began to evolve into a destination of international pilgrimage – a pan-Hellenic healing centre.¹⁰

This impressive institution functioned as what might today be described as a centre of holistic healing. Of course, it housed, at its core, a statue of Asclepius, tables for food offerings and an altar and fire for sacrifices (cocks were the favourite gift) in front of the temple door. Those undergoing the healing regime – ‘incubants’ – went through a series of ritualistic activities including cleansing baths, prayers, and the presentation of offerings; the climax was a night spent sleeping in alcoves in the shrine itself around the (possibly) gold and ivory statue of the god. In addition, however, there was a porticoed building or abaton located close to the precinct's sacred well and bath house, which provided accommodation for pilgrims.¹¹ If incubants felt themselves to have been healed by their visit to the shrine, tradition dictated that they buy a plaque for their testimonial which, displayed around the precinct, recorded the achievements of Asclepius for the purposes of veneration but also for the benefit of future supplicants.

By the second century AD at Epidaurus there were further huge hostels, containing 180 rooms in four courts, a stadium, gymnasium and banqueting hall. During Roman times, such structures throughout the Empire became spa complexes combining sacred worship with festivals, athletic events, choral singing and theatrical performances. It is interesting in this respect that the cult of Asclepius was closely connected with that of Dionysius. Asclepius continued to communicate via nocturnal oracles, but his cures increasingly incorporated Galenic remedies (Roman orthodox medicine) together with demands for supplicants to compose songs, comic skits and odes.¹² Creative, mirth-giving activities were part of the god's healing strategy, but ‘keeping the spirits up’ was key to humoral re-balancing, and thus to Galenic regimen too. This attractive cocktail of festive healing presided over by Asclepius was soon, however, to undergo an extremely serious challenge by a rival healing cult – that of Jesus Christ. As we shall see, the springs and rivers that were associated with pagan healing rites were rapidly appropriated by Christianity – a sect that valorized suffering rather more than mirth.

Christ the Pilgrim and His ‘Holy Hospitals’

Then shall the king say to them on his right hand, Come ye blessed of my father: take the inheritance of the kingdome prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungred, & ye gave me meat: I thirsted, and ye gave me drinke: I was a stranger, and ye tooke me in unto you. I was naked, and yee cloathed mee: I was sicke, and yee visited me: I was in prison, and yee came unto me. (St Matthew, The Last Judgment, 25:34–6)¹³

That this more dour religion, which stressed the spiritual benefits both of suffering and of the care of sufferers – especially needy ‘strangers’ – should find ready recruits among the middle and upper echelons of Graeco-Roman society in the first centuries is perhaps not surprising. From around AD 200, the Mediterranean region began to be blighted by extensive periods of drought, leading to famines and serious disease epidemics. The latter were partly a consequence of increasing commercial interactions with the Far East: during mercantile expeditions along the Silk Road, two separate disease pools came into contact, with dire consequences for both East and West.¹⁴ Travelling itself – especially along this route – became intimately associated with the increased risk and spread of serious sickness. It seems appropriate, therefore, that one of the first Christian xenones to emerge was at Edessa, situated on the caravan route to Persia and India. In 373 this functioned as a guest house for the needy, but by 420 it was joined by another facility for the sick and dying poor – a nosokomeion (the combined enterprise was known as a xenodocheoin).¹⁵ Edessa had long been famous for its healing springs to the south of the city, but by the fifth century these had been well and truly wrenched from the clutches of Asclepius and re-dedicated as shrines to the saints Damian and Cosmas.¹⁶ During the golden age of Byzantium (fourth to sixth centuries), the promotion of Church activities led to the gradual evolution of a welfare state with the foundation of charitable institutions including churches, hospices, hospitals and orphanages.

Some of Asclepius's shrines were destroyed, but many of the ancient healing sites around springs and r...