Ovidiu Pecican

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Voyages. A Propaedeutics. Types of Travels in the Romanian Middle Ages

Abstract: The paper focuses on the perception of space in the medieval Romanian culture. The orientation and the role attributed to the geographical axes are a sample of the Orthodox, namely, Eastern-European vision of the world in the Middle Ages. Verticality is seen more as an invitation to a metaphysical ascension, while horizontality is reserved to the terrestrial life. Using such abstract coordinates, medieval Romanians organized their travels alternating the rhythms of movement and rest.

Keywords: Travel literature, historical anthropology, Romanian principalities, Middle Ages, horizontal and vertical dimensions of space, movement, rest.

In the following pages, I will try to continue an approach connected to the spatial imaginary of the Romanians in the Middle Ages. But, since speaking of space also means making reference to time, and the two undoubtedly imply movement as well, the topic of traveling, of the voyage, of the dynamic relation to spatiality comes up almost naturally. Deciphering the changes in perception and subjective representation on both an individual and a collective level becomes precious in outlining a possible history that relates the Romanian self – but also the Central and South-East European “beyond the self” – to space. The passage from a space filled with religious symbolism to a pragmatic, but abstract, political space, is projected against the background of the natural eye, which charts the landscape in a linear and circular approach. Looking ahead, and certainly back as well, the medieval man explores the environment directly, with a certain brutality, perceiving it as a proximity decipherable in precise forms, characterized by the direction they represent in relation to the one who is looking (“forward”, “backward”). Thus, the same space deciphered as being placed along one’s direction may mean, according to very precisely contextualized circumstances, an advancement, a sign of triumph and progress, or, quite the contrary, a perilous venture into the potentially dangerous unknown. Similarly, the space one leaves behind can encrypt the sense of overtaking, of back-up spatiality, of an uncertain, shifting background. Eventually, when moving forward means going back, the voyage can be perceived as a circular destiny, as stagnation or regress, as non-creative repetitiveness, or, why not, as overcoming one’s predecessors and triumphing on oneself, and not, as was the case in The Count of Monte-Cristo, as an invitation to revenge.

1. A horizontal world

I investigated some time ago the space configured by the religious and the political dimensions of the Romanian medieval imaginary[1]. One should admit, though, that in the daily life of the ordinary man of those times, those lines were seen as a mere background. The space that the rotating eye could see, which kept its concreteness intact, the horizon of the eye was truly permanent and essential for the rhythms of each day, eschewing the two dimensions mentioned above.

From the very beginning one should state that, during the Middle Ages, this space was dominated by the horizontal. Regardless of whether man lived on the plains, in the hills or in the mountains, tied to the earth not only by his way of life or his property, but primarily though the force of …gravity, the medieval man would swing to and fro, would travel, would embark on horizontal routes. Somewhat present in the lives of the fishermen – swimmers par excellence – and of the miners, or of those living on the coasts of the mountains, physical verticality, primarily in the form of diving of descending into the bowels of the earth, only took the form of ascent in reveries or religious aspirations. The latter were fuelled by widespread apocryphal texts, such as The Journey of the Madonna to the Heavens. On the other hand, diving could find a pattern in the episode of Alexander the Great’s descent below the sea level with the help of a bell, an episode included in some versions of Alexandria. One should say that, in the Romanian world, just as throughout the Christian world in general, the idea of descent had strong negative connotations, making reference to the realm of the devil as opposed to the spiritual ascent of one’s soul.

The biblical myth of the Babel tower warned against the dangers that any bold endeavour to soar would involve. Beyond the physical exercise of the flight, which in the physical world was reserved to birds alone, only the inhabitants of the heavens – seraphim, cherubs, archangels or ordinary angels – enjoyed this privilege. Believing that man, in his transient hypostasis, as flesh and blood, would be called to join them must have appeared as an unheard-of boldness, sanctioned without appeal by the Divine Instance. However, we do not have proof that such an idea would even have crossed the mind of anyone in the Romanian medieval space. The only type of ascent available to the ordinary man would thus have been the climbing of more or less abrupt mountains, or climbing on top of a tree, a church spire or the donjon of a castle. The former, alpine type, as has been noticed, was rather insignificant in the space of the Carpathians, which boasted neither towering heights nor head-spinning wilderness. The latter, domestic type, almost not worth mentioning, meant dominating the horizontal dimension by only a few metres. From such an altitude, the spatial perception would have been practically unchanged.

Undoubtedly, the advantage would have been that given by a feeling of stability and familiarity in relation to the natural world. No spectacular and unexpected leap would have been possible from great to small and from near to far, so that one cannot possibly imagine a Romanian Jonathan Swift who could have conceived the idea of Lilliput. The giants in the Romanian fairy tales are dull and conventional, and often even dumb, as the Devil himself would have been.

The range of plateaus surrounding the heights, which maintain the appearance of plains, as well the fertile valleys inspired Lucian Blaga, as is well known, in his theory of the “mioritic space”, a smooth swaying of the relief which also moulded the inner spatial horizon of the Romanians. This idea was, to some extent, waiting to be discovered, so we should not be surprised either by the similarities between Blaga’s theory and the theory of undulation which Vasile Conta contributed to the advancement of Romanian philosophy, or by Dan Botta’s belief that the philosopher from Lancram had illicitly borrowed from him the idea that made him famous.

At any rate, between the level of the cottage and that of the wooden palace or the rock castle, the differences remain, statistically speaking, negligible, primarily since palaces were not predominant in the Romanian space. In all likelihood, Petru Cercel was the first ruler who built a somewhat taller house in Wallachia, and this took place around 1583-1585. The gaze would then have been primarily inclined towards the horizontal, either from the height of the man or from the superior one of the rider in the saddle, or, in specific cases, from the walls of a stronghold.

The perspective of the man living in the hills or in the mountains would have been less predictable, including the ups and downs following the rhythm of the houses and the haystacks. Here, the gaze would have continuously zigzagged between the valleys and the peaks, between “something higher” and “something lower”, but not merely between up and down.

2. The distances

Speaking of distances means, after all, taking into consideration a reflection on movement. It is this reflection that established the fundamental relation between man and place, man and space, man and relief. The above-mentioned relation remains crucial for a series of institutional evolutions of social life. It operates the first distinction, between the wandering communities – the migrating people – and the settled or sedentary communities, occupying a certain territory and remaining there. It also leads the latter to a certain idea of property, different from the image on property espoused by people belonging to the former category. There is something revolutionary and insufficiently researched by historians in the idea of the sedentary person taking hold of a certain territorial horizon, even in the absence of any mythical or religious explanation referring to the creation of the world and to the governing presence responsible for everything that is included in nature (spirits, totemic animals, gods of the embodiment of the One). Such a thing translates into the symbolic demise of the governing authority for the benefit of man, of a certain man or of a species, branch or community. During premodern times, it always embraced legitimate forms through which the divinity would “entrust” its “chosen one” with ownership of a certain territory, as well as non-legitimate forms, as was the case with usurpers. Armed conquests or family ownership (marriage, inheritance) are also part of the divine plan, being connected to the idea of fate, which bestows upon them legitimacy, despite the suspicion of rapt in the former case of arrangement in the latter.

The size of a property is not only a question of economic, social or political domination or their complex reflex in terms of prestige. It will always be connected to the spatial component, which means the domination and transformation of an ever vaster horizon to one’s own benefit. The adventure of political involvements, which eventually led, here as well, to the emergence of states, always meant primarily trying to establish a relationship between what one saw and what one possessed. The feeling of home could well reside here. The space which means “my home” or which is “mine” is “home. What remains outside my power to control, tempting my gaze or at least my imagination – makes up the rest of the world, an enticing horizon, a possible stake, tomorrow’s prey. But it can be, at the same time, the source of my anxieties, the unknown which could give birth at any moment to great dangers, to wilderness and foreignness.

What strikes us today is how limited the geographic horizon of the medieval Romanians seems. Until the seventeenth century, only the exotic adventure novels, such as Alexandria or the Trojan War allowed a glimpse of the shape of other continents, countries, rivers and mountains, cities and famous towns, among so many fantastic references. Naturally, a privileged source of this type of knowing-unknowing was represented by the biblical books. But how many of them that contain such references were truly known during the Middle Ages in Romania, and by how many people? Reference was usually made to the Gospels, the psalms and a few other books used for divine services. Many of these were learnt by heart by priests and monks, undoubtedly altering, more often than not, the names which sounded very exotic to them and lacked a precise referent. That is the explanation why only the seventeenth-century chronicles include several more precise pieces of information, which indicate – as the chronicles of Ureche and Simion do (we do not know exactly to which of the two the passage I will make reference to belongs) – the fact that many scholars, or perhaps just one of them, knew and used, at certain points, the Western cosmographies of the type we owe to Gerard Mercator.

3. The itineraries, between movement and rest

Only the gaze and the imaginary straight line, projected sometimes, in more advanced ages, along the contours and colours of a map, possess the attribute of directness. And they do not always possess it either. It is well known that we never look at things “naturally”; upon birth we see the world upside down. We only see what we are taught to see; as it were, our eyesight uses conventions of looking which, like all conventions, are mutable cultural encodings with a life of their own, which can be influenced by different circumstances.

And still. Beyond these troubling truths, there is an irrefutable directness in the gaze of man in any age. Only beyond this point do possible interpretations and different “distortions” come in. And if, between the cornea and the concreteness of a middle-age scenery one juxtaposes – more often than not, as the imagological documents and texts show – the supernatural figures of the heavenly messengers or malevolent, frightening visions, it is no less true that the dominating imperative of the age, namely fear in all its forms, forced one to eliminate any sort of mediation and to make the gaze evolve towards a more realistic decryption of the context. It is primarily because of this reason that the schematic nature of the painted backgrounds gives way more and more to the first scenes inspired by authentic natural circumstances during the Renaissance.

The same thing happened to travelling trough space. Ritualistic routes had their own importance, which should not be underestimated even in the places which did not have a large ecclesiastical structure able to impose on its “flock” to strictly abide by the religious norms. Just as rulers Drag and Balc set out for Constantinople in 1391 driven not only by political interests but also by an orthodox religious fervour which made them ask for and obtain the statute of diocese for the monastery under their patronage from Perii Maramuresului, five centuries later, Delavrancea’s Hagi Tudose set out on a pilgrimage to the holy city of Jerusalem, combining a more or less genuine piety with an interest in trading in holy relics. The same pattern applied in the case of pilgrimages to the closer destination of Mount Athos – about which we have rather indirect testimonies in the case of some Romanian rulers – or of eastbound voyages to the great monasteries in the country: Bistriţa, Neamţ and Putna in the case of the rulers of Moldavia, or Cozia, Tismana, Argeş and Dealu in the case of their Wallachian counterparts.

The example of the higher classes was followed, at least on the anniversary of the monastery’s holy patron, by many of the commoners. Such journeys, driven by piety alone, by the hope of a spiritual help coming from those to whom their prayers were addressed, or by the desire of finding refuge and peace, were frequently undertaken throughout the Romanian Middle Ages, and a thorough statistics would reveal the extent to which such customs have been maintained to this day. The fear which, one might think, would swiftly and directly drive its subjects to sheltered places proved, more often than not, to be in itself an opportunity for taking refuge in monasteries. Such was the case of Radu from Afumati, caught by his enemies in the church and murdered there in 1529, and the same happened when Timus Hmelnitchi’s Cossacks attacked the Dragomirna monastery, where many well-off Moldavians had taken shelter in 1647. In 1821, the Eteria organised in the monastery of Secu its last resistance against the Turks, which proved that the holy place was the end of the rope of military adventures, despair, boldness, fierceness, and why not, Orthodox faith before Islam.

The sixteenth century brought about the great change. Certainly, beginning with the previous century, Stefan the Great, the ruler of Moldavia, had sent his emissaries to Venice not merely for strictly political and military reasons, but also for medical or commercial motivations. But the fact remained somewhat exceptional, as it was not repeated for other Western destinations, given that the prince seemed to trust the diplomatic propaganda put up by Matei Corvin’s Hungary or by Poland. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the rulers and aspirants to the throne of Wallachia ended up searching for support at the French, English or Venetian courts, as was the case of Petru Cercel (1583-1585) or the pretender Bogdan, who, during the battle of Calugareni, was waiting to replace Mihai Viteazul (1592-1601). As for the latter, when he gained the throne, he was in Istanbul, while his demise took him to Prague and Vienna. In such cases, the dynamics of travel increased, the destinations made geopolitical and military sense, since they were motivated by diplomacy rather than by geography. The whole criterion that inspired travels was changed; it no longer had anything to do with religious routes or with the directness of singling out spatial contours with the rotating gaze. It is precisely this shift that marks, following the argumentation of the previous pages, the passage from the Middle Ages to modernity, and this can also be found in the larger framework of Europe at the time, in the quasi-utopian, unheard-of projects – without a certain support of knowledge – of Christopher Columbus in 1492. From this point of view, one could say that a whole century was necessary so that the tendencies present at Stefan’s court could gain shape and grow into the complex, politically motivated routes of the Wallachian princes.