Route corridors

The route between Kythera, Crete and Rhodes (or onwards to Cyprus) was one frequently taken by pilgrim travellers en route to the Christian Holy Lands, i.e. travellers ‘piggy-backed’ through the Aegean off an existing route network. A not insignificant number of (principally French, German and Italian) travellers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries made this journey (cf. Malamut Reference Malamut, Chrysostomides, Dendrinos and Harris2004 and the statistics listed in Yerasimos Reference Yerasimos1991; see also Droulia Reference Droulia, Villain-Gandossi, Busuttli and Adam1980a) and the route was a fairly standard one. Ships would depart from Genoa or Venice for a seven week voyage. After moving down the Italian coast, pilgrims would make for the Ionian islands, and then on to the Venetian fort at Methone. From there, travellers would enter the Aegean basin proper at Kythera, before stopping at Crete and/or Rhodes, occasionally at Cyprus or Alexandria, and then eastwards (van der Vin Reference Vin1980, 13–18). These routes are clear on the data visualisation maps (Fig. 7c, 7d and 7e), and the large size of the nodes for Kythera, Crete and Rhodes indicates that they were places that were passed through frequently by French, German and Italian travellers.Footnote ²⁴ These nodes are also prominent on maps for the fifteenth through to the seventeenth century (Fig. 6a, 6b, and 6c), but the linear route between them no longer existed subsequently (Fig. 6d, 6e and 6f). This is surprising, but a direct route from Kythera to Cyprus used from the seventeenth century onwards would not show up in the data visualisation here.

The strong edges between these site nodes indicate that the exact same routes were often used by different travellers. Here, there is some possibility that route-making relied on the sharing of information between social groups, particularly on the passing down of information for safe and navigable paths. Already by the thirteenth century there were texts in circulation of instruction and advice for taking sea routes to Jerusalem and Constantinople (van der Vin Reference Vin1980, 13–18), and it is possible (although we have no direct evidence) that charts or similar were passed between travellers. These were routes that were well tested, and they could have been taken along navigable currents and weather systems (Williams, Bandindel and Way Reference Williams, Bandinel and Way1867; Duff Reference Duff1893; Lepschy Reference Lepschy1966). Moreover, they were known to be relatively safe from pirates and bandits (cf. Eisner Reference Eisner1990, 40; Utterback Reference Utterback and Taylor2010). More practically, sailing on the same routes allowed travellers to stop at the same places, such as those that regularly expected pilgrims and could offer food and water supplies:Footnote ²⁵ these were places from which travellers could pick up pilots who knew the routes well. These ‘local’ pilots become largely written out of travellers accounts, but they would have been essential for guiding pilgrims and travellers along commonly charted routes. One imagines that in earlier centuries this was by informal arrangement at places like Chios and Rhodes (i.e. the common stop-over points in the Aegean when heading further east), but by the seventeenth century the practice of employing professional pilots was more formalised on Melos (Tournefort Reference Tournefort1715, 117; cf. Murray Reference Murray1872, 318) and then on Syros. It was infrastructure provided by and knowledge of both places and routes, therefore, that entrenched the same series of journeys into routes taken by different sailors in subsequent centuries. As a consequence, these areas are clearly identifiable in the data visualisation, and they were quite evidently principle corridors of movement.

Another of the main route corridors was around the Cyclades: more specifically, there were two separate route clusters around the northern and southern Cyclades. It was not until the eighteenth century that journeys were made in this region in significant quantity (Fig. 6d, 6e and 6f), and, again, the reason for this change relates to how certain social groups travelled at this time. Until the late seventeenth century, the purpose of travelling, as discussed above, was largely to go from point A to point B, and intermediary stops were functional. From the late seventeenth century, however, travellers set out intending to make lots of short stops, and the purpose of travel was more scientific, to explore and meander (Heawood Reference Heawood1912 contra Penrose Reference Penrose1952). To review just a few select examples: George Wheler and Jacob Spon (Reference Wheler and Spon1682) set out with Pausanias and Strabo in hand to guide themselves to places of classical interest; Bernard Randolph (Reference Randolph1689) aimed to document the ‘present state of the islands’, and to offer a near contemporary history of the people who lived there; Michael Fourmont (Reference Fourmont1729) travelled for the purpose of documenting inscriptions; and Richard Pococke (Reference Pococke1743) sought to write an encyclopaedic volume that reviewed works of architecture, geography and mythology that he found on his travels. What is clear is that each of these travellers went into the Aegean basin with a very set mission statement; travel, for them, was not about passing through but about making a thorough assessment of the places visited (Droulia Reference Droulia1980b, 275–7). The edges of the network were not so important at this time, but rather the nodes themselves. As a result, one sees on the data visualisation a dense cluster of journeys that emerges around this time, in part resulting from this desire to travel more leisurely and to explore a greater number of places.

Furthermore, not only were these islands visited by travellers in a similar order, but in encyclopaedias and guidebooks produced during this period too this same sequence of islands was repeated (e.g. Bursian Reference Bursian1872; Miliarakis Reference Miliarakis1874). With very few exceptions,Footnote ²⁶ island groups as written always started with the Ionian islands, then the Sporades, the north Cyclades, the south Cyclades and finally the Dodecanese. Seemingly, the authors of encyclopaedias were mimicking the order in which the islands were usually traversed: travellers either entered at Kythera having passed the Ionian islands (and, in many cases, they would have stuck to the islands on the southern extreme), or they would come via Athens and they made their first stop on one of the northern Cyclades, moving gradually south.Footnote ²⁷ While the ‘grouping’ of islands taxonomically in encyclopaedias is, to some to degree, an entirely arbitrary exercise, this does demonstrate the extent to which the ‘west–east’ view of the Aegean became well entrenched by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Moving back to the network analysis, the final ‘corridor’ highlighted by the modularity analysis lies to the east of the Aegean, between the coast of Ionia and the Dodecanese islands. These routes appear to have been popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and subsequently in the eighteenth century (Fig. 6a, 6b and 6d). Travellers frequently stopped at Rhodes as they did on the way to places of Christian pilgrimage, and, owing to the node's place in both of these networks, the island has a relatively high betweenness score when compared to its neighbours (Fig. 5b). Many of the reasons given above for the popularity of various routes can also be applied to the east Aegean. On the one hand, it was not so much that travellers wanted to stop here as they needed to make stops on longer routes to either Constantinople (Olivier Reference Olivier1801), Egypt (Belon du Mans 1555 [Glardon Reference Glardon1997]; Sonnini Reference Sonnini1801), or the Levant (Tournefort Reference Tournefort1715; Galt Reference Galt1813; Clarke Reference Clarke1818). On the other hand, just as there had been a sudden interest from scholars of the late seventeenth century onwards in the Greek world, British (Turner Reference Turner1820; Burgess Reference Burgess1835) and French (Chenavard Reference Chenavard1849) travellers around the same time and later expressed a certain passion for areas in the east parts of the Aegean (Stoneman Reference Stoneman1987, 130–5; Bernard Reference Bernard1988; Barthélemy Reference Barthélemy1992). The coast of Asia Minor was, as were the islands, both a ‘stopover area’ and a place of learning and exploration: the engagement of travellers with this region varied according to their ideas and preferences at different times.

Social networks and route-making

As discussed above, from the late seventeenth century the reason for travelling became less functional and more to do with exploration. This shift in mentality is not entirely anecdotal, and around this time formal peer networks were created to encourage, finance and publish travel both in the Aegean Sea and beyond. For example, the establishment of the Royal Society in 1660 and the Society of the Dilettanti in 1734 provided a platform for the sponsorship of British travellers:Footnote ²⁸ members were dispatched to far-off lands, and they were encouraged to assemble publications comprising observation, instruction, and anecdotes that could entertain a wider audience.Footnote ²⁹ Across Europe there was a growing appetite for antiquity and for the classical past: the Académie des Sciences was founded in Paris in 1666, and it fulfilled a similar function in providing backing and instruction for a new cohort of scientists and explorers. In two ways, in particular, these new social networks provided impetus for travel, and for travel to specific places, as seen through the example of the Society of the Dilettanti. First, the Society would issue calls for its members to explore, document, and publish on specific places, promising financial sponsorship: membership of the Society (i.e. privileged access to this social network) gave travellers the opportunity to take up these offers. As an example, at a meeting of the society in April 1764, £2000 was promised to a member who could demonstrate they had the qualification to explore Asia Minor. The Society chose Richard Chandler, and he was issued with a list of instructions relating to his point of departure, to his base at Smyrna, to the recording he must undertake, and to financial matters (Cust Reference Cust1898, 84–7). Second, Society members were encouraged to use the opportunity of travel to make contacts they would not normally encounter in England, and so much is noted in a letter from Joseph Spence to his mother Mirabella dated from February 1741.Footnote ³⁰ Furthermore, Spence wrote to or had guidance from 33 contacts he met through the Society of the Dilettanti during his travels (Klima Reference Klima1964 [1747, 1820, summarised in Kelly Reference Kelly2009, 267–9]), exploiting the peer network that membership of the society provided him.Footnote ³¹ In both of these ways, social networking and travel were very clearly entangled in the early modern period. The creation of societies like these helped to formalise venues at which networking could take place, and this networking had both direct and indirect effects on the route-making undertaken by travellers.

On the other hand, even if peers within a network did not know one another directly, knowledge was inherited and passed on between subsequent generations of scholars and travellers: both copying and reproduction illustrates this concept well. The production of portolan charts in this period goes back at least to the work of the Cristoforo Buondelmonti, a priest from Florence who settled in the early fifteenth century on the island of Rhodes. Buondelmonti travelled at various times around the islands to collect manuscripts and consult documentation (cf. van der Vin Reference Vin1980, 133–5), and in 1420 he sent to Cardinal Giodrano Orsini an encyclopaedic work entitled the Liber Insularum Archipelagi. This volume contained detailed commentary on the situation of the islands, and also maps of the places discussed. The publication of the Liber inspired a new genre of writing at this time (the ‘isolario’), and over subsequent years similar texts were published both by other Italian scholars (Francesco Berlinghieri 1480 [Skelton Reference Skelton1976]; Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti 1485 [Goff Reference Goff1972]) and also by Germans (Henricus Martellus Germanus 1490 [Edson Reference Edson2018]) and French (André Thevet 1584 [Lestringant Reference Lestringant1985]). However, it was not just the genre that was transmitted between authors. In 1528, Benedetto Bordone published an isolario whose text was based very closely on that of Buondelmonti, and whose maps were copied from dalli Sonetti. Similarly, dalli Sonetti's maps were reproduced with few additions or alterations by Antonio Millo in 1590 (Tselikas Reference Tselikas2006), and again by Marco Boschini in 1658; and the map of the Aegean produced by Tomaso Porcacchi (Reference Porcacchi1572) seems to have been based on a similar prototype of another earlier scholar, Sebastian Münster (1540 [McLean Reference McLean2007]) – albeit with the rather whimsical addition of dolphins and various mythical sea creatures. Knowledge of the Aegean and its routes was not only transmitted through the ages, but the very same information was repackaged and reinterpreted in different venues. The consequence of this relates to the more general point made above: that certain outlooks on the Aegean, certain ways in which its islands were grouped together, and certain routes suggested between its various parts became progressively entrenched, and that the exchange of information among peer-groups and cultural networks drove this practice. But, more specifically for this study, the consequence is that certain routes may be somewhat ‘over-represented’: if the same journey or sequence of journeys is repeated between various texts, they will necessarily have been visualised multiple times in the model used.

Economic and political networks

The previous section reviewed the limited and rather uneven evidence for the relationship between human and route networks. It now remains to move the discussion to a much broader scale and consider how macro economic and political networks opened up or closed off certain corridors to early modern travellers.

Economic factors clearly played a role in shaping sailing routes, and they provided a suitable platform off the back of which route-makers could piggy-back. The location of consular posts is a good proxy for trade interactions, and it is productive to map these against journeys made by sailors of a certain nationality. The distribution of British consular posts in the nineteenth century (cf. Gunning Reference Gunning2009, 189–95), for example, and the journeys taken by British travellers at this time follow a similar pattern (Fig. 9). There was a high number of journeys made around the consular posts of the northern Cyclades, or, via Keos, between the posts on Syros and Tinos and at Athens; journeys around Crete, Melos and Thera also map onto the location of these posts (but journeys to and from Melos could have been made for the benefit of picking up ‘professional’ pilots there, as discussed above); and posts at Chios, Samos and Smyrna picked up the main flow of traffic around the eastern Aegean. On the one hand, travellers headed for places that already had well-established contacts in the Aegean, and, on the other, they could join on the journeys that were being made by traders and envoys leaving from these places. Travel depended on these pre-existing networks, and it exploited economic and trade networks. The synthesis of a list of consular trade posts or diplomatic services for all nationalities investigated across all centuries is beyond the scope of this study, however, and this point is made only illustratively of a practice that could have been common across the post-medieval Aegean. Furthermore, without conducting a full and detailed analysis on Capitulations,Footnote ³² shipping tax, freight laws, quantities of products shipped, and changes in pricing over time, it is only possible to make here general comments on economic and trade patterns.

Fig. 9.

Journeys made by nineteenth-century British travellers (black, with node size proportional to the betweenness centrality value of the node), and the location of nineteenth-century British consular posts (red).

Furthermore, the Aegean was a cross-roads for European traders. After travelling into the basin via Kythera from the Ionian Sea, merchants could either continue on the north–south corridor up to the Black Sea, or onwards east to Tyre and Alexandria (summarised by Horden and Purcell Reference Horden and Purcell2000, 138–41). This afforded traders access to grain from the Black Sea, sugar from Crete and Cyprus, spices brought from India, and silk from China, Iran and Lebanon, and it also gave to Aegean communities access to wool cloth, glass, metals and soap brought from Europe (Parry Reference Parry, Rich and Wilson1967, 156–63). As a result, numerous ships passed through the Aegean as part of this trade traffic, both individually and as part of more organised caravane or groups of ships dispatched to conduct economic transactions as a group (Panzac Reference Panzac2004). Economic historians have noted a general pattern that, progressively from the sixteenth century, Mediterranean markets shifted in favour of those from north-west Europe:Footnote ³³ smaller quantities of Levantine grain were imported as sources in the Baltic became more preferable; the import of sugar declined; and English and Dutch textiles were traded in greater numbers on Levantine markets than those manufactured in Venice (Cipolla Reference Cipolla and Pullan1968; Rapp Reference Rapp1975; Glamann Reference Glamann, Rich and Wilson1977). Indeed, the establishment of joint stock shipping companies also significantly changed the trade dynamic in the Mediterranean at this time.Footnote ³⁴ The British–Dutch Levantine Shipping Company was established in 1581 (Parry Reference Parry, Rich and Wilson1967, 186–7) with a principle outpost at Smyrna, while French activities extending from here further east to Syria developed from 1612. This accounts for the creation of a formal port here and the increase of traffic through from the seventeenth century onwards: ships passed frequently through nodes at which central and large-scale trade activities were organised. Owing to a variety of factors, therefore, there was some shift (especially by the late seventeenth and into the eighteenth century) of trade and shipping dynamics in the Mediterranean, and even if shipping lanes did not disappear they were used relatively less intensively than they were in the medieval period (Tabak Reference Tabak2008).

The existence of these intensively used trade routes indicates that the Aegean basin (like the regions around it) was full of ships, and that there were ships available in sufficient number which travellers could join for their journeys. It has been taken somewhat for granted that if a traveller wanted to go to the Aegean (or elsewhere) they would have ships available; but the reality is that travel was costly, and that the price could be well met by transporting together people and goods.Footnote ³⁵ There is, then, some correlation between shipping lanes and the routes that travellers took, and it is clear that economic networks played a role in influencing which places travellers were able to access more easily. The pilgrimage route that passed by Kythera, Crete and Rhodes was similar in form to the main east–west trade route established in the medieval period; (French) commercial activities on the coast of Turkey might account for the popularity of the area for travellers from the seventeenth century onwards (Mantran Reference Mantran1962); and by the eighteenth century, as the intensification of trade activities in the Aegean basin and the Mediterranean basin as a whole was shifting, fewer travellers accompanied the long-distance trade ships, and they sought new routes. In some senses, it was not so much where travellers wanted to go; it was more the case of where they were able to go: economic activity and travel in the early modern period were entangled, and the extent of that entanglement shifted over time.

Moreover, the routes along which it was possible to travel depended on political events. Throughout the fifteenth century the Aegean was already well carved up between different groups: Chios, Lesbos and Samos were controlled by the Genoese; the (Venetian-formed) Duchy of Naxos presided over the central Cycladic islands; and the Dodecanese islands were held by the Knights of St John.Footnote ³⁶ The role that the Knights of St John played in providing services for pilgrims has already been discussed, and also the fact that once the island was under Ottoman rule it was still known as a stopover point on longer voyages. Trade ships were still permitted to pass through the various parts of the Aegean, and, even following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, there was little disruption to seafaring in the region, owing to negotiations conducted between Genoese and Muslim communication networks (Dauverd Reference Dauverd2015). It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, and through the conquering of various Aegean territories by the Ottomans that the face of travel in the region changed most.Footnote ³⁷ Under Ottoman rule, tensions between locals and the new rulers both on the islands and on the mainland led to a rise in privateering – something that was well known to the European travellers (see discussion in Eisner Reference Eisner1990, 52–67). The consequence of this was that some of the travellers passing by en route to the Levant chose to limit their stops in the Aegean, and because of the risks involved in travelling in this area, there was at this time limited travel within the Aegean basin.

Changes in the political-economic environment of Greece in the nineteenth century also had an effect on the way people travelled. Up to the start of the nineteenth century, Greek shippers had for the most part been ‘middleman’ traders in the Ottoman Empire, under the rules and protections of the Capitulations (Harlaftis and Laiou Reference Harlaftis, Laiou and Mazower1988, esp. 17–18). But following the rise of the Greek state, independent Greek trade activities could increase significantly, such that the Greek fleet was the largest set of naval traders in the Mediterranean by the early 1900s (Harlaftis and Kostelenos Reference Harlaftis and Kostelenos2012). The major port of Syros was established in 1822,Footnote ³⁸ at which the Hellenic Steamship Company (HSC) – for which the National Bank paid sizeable capital investment – was based.Footnote ³⁹ Soon after, the port at Piraeus received similar expansion,Footnote ⁴⁰ and the main shipping activities in and around the Aegean were concentrated around only a few key ports that were served by steamers: Andros, Kalamata, Kephallonia Nauplion, Piraeus, Smyrna, Syros and Volos (Kardassis Reference Kardassis1997, 115–16). Clearly, given that the journeys of travellers depended on ‘piggy-backing’ off existing routes, the major shift in the organisation of economic networks at this time changed the way traveller routes were planned. The handbook compiled by John Murray (Reference Murray1872, 325–6) from other contemporary travel accounts is instructive in this way, recommending to readers at which (English-speaking) hotels to stay on Syros, and of the weekly steamer timetables according to season. Travellers spent less time meandering around the islands, and they moved hastily through this region, with the aim of travelling much further distances.Footnote ⁴¹

Summary

What becomes clear from this discussion is that routes in the early modern Aegean were entangled with other sorts of networks. As discussed above, the most effective means of travelling through the Aegean Sea was to join existing voyages, either those that were sailing for pilgrimage (van Ghistele 1482–3; Le Saige 1518; Belon 1547 [all in Yerasimos Reference Yerasimos1991]) or for trade (cf. Fig. 9). These routes, however, were variously hindered or made more navigable by contemporary political events, yet writers seldom acknowledged that anyone apart from themselves had any sort of agency over route-making.Footnote ⁴² Notably absent from travel accounts are local people employed as pilots or navigators, those who were necessary for navigation in the early modern period, but seldom acknowledged. Furthermore, there is some circumstantial evidence that knowledge was passed on between travellers. Travellers (or their captains) communicated where to stop over on longer voyages to one another either directly or through the production of portolan charts (dalli Sonetti 1485 [Goff Reference Goff1972]; Seller Reference Seller1669 and Reference Seller1671). And through the establishment of elite travelling clubs and the widespread publication of their travel literature, scholars of a certain class were inspired to travel far and wide (Stuart and Revett Reference Stuart and Revett1762; Wood Reference Wood1767; Chandler Reference Chandler1776). Evidence for the sharing of routes between peer networks is circumstantial and often invisible; furthermore, this practice, even though important on a case-by-case basis, played less of a role than the ‘piggy-backing’ outlined above for entrenching the ‘known’ routes along the maritime highways. Corridors of movement were carved out by other sorts of networks, and travellers merely followed routes that had already been set. To a greater or lesser extent, routes and networks, places and journeys were all intertwined across history: the connectivity of places is as much a story of the connectivity of people.