Great Cities Through Travelers' Eyes Read online

  About the author

  Peter Furtado has edited a number of bestselling history books including Histories of Nations: How Their Identities Were Forged and 1001 Days That Shaped the World. He was editor of History Today magazine from 1998 to 2008 and in 2009 was awarded a DLitt by Oxford Brookes University for his contribution to the popularization of history.

  Other titles of interest published by

  Thames & Hudson include:

  Histories of Nations: How Their Identities Were Forged

  History Day by Day: 366 Voices from the Past

  The Great Cities in History

  Cities That Shaped the Ancient World

  See our websites

  www.thamesandhudson.com

  www.thamesandhudsonusa.com

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  NOTE TO THE READER

  ALEXANDRIA

  AMSTERDAM

  ATHENS

  BAGHDAD

  BEIJING

  BERLIN

  CAIRO

  CHICAGO

  DAMASCUS

  DUBLIN

  FLORENCE

  GUANGZHOU

  HAVANA

  HONG KONG

  ISTANBUL

  JERUSALEM

  LHASA

  LONDON

  MADRID

  MECCA

  MEXICO CITY

  MOSCOW

  MUMBAI

  NAPLES

  NEW YORK CITY

  PARIS

  PRAGUE

  RIO DE JANEIRO

  ROME

  ST PETERSBURG

  SAMARKAND

  SAN FRANCISCO

  SYDNEY

  TIMBUKTU

  TOKYO

  VENICE

  VIENNA

  WASHINGTON D.C.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  SOURCES & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  A city can be all things to all people. One person will find myriad opportunities for profit and advancement where another sees nothing but a crowded cacophony of pressing humanity. One person sees the city as a seat of government and law, the opportunity to display unchallengeable power, while another sees it as a place of freedom and anonymity. A city can be the location for cultural or spiritual expression, a destination for people seeking meaning in their lives, or a place of crass and oppressive materialism; a playground for those with spectacular wealth, or a prison for those suffering unimaginable poverty and pain. Cities are sites of decisive conflict: wars and revolutions are decided by whether key cities fall or resist attack.

  It has ever been thus. Today, almost half of us live in cities, and the rest of us rely on them to some degree. But cities have been with us for thousands of years, and they have nurtured civilization itself. Places like Ur and Sumer in Mesopotamia, Damascus and Jericho in the Levant, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in the Indus Valley, Erlitou and Luoyang in China and Tres Zapotes and Chavín de Huántar in the Americas – the growth of these towns marks the development of a complex society with its own identity and organization that dominated the region around and led to the emergence of the world’s first civilizations. Our very word ‘civilization’ derives from civis, the Latin word for a citizen or inhabitant of a city.

  Cities cannot exist in isolation from the world around them. Every day, people from the surrounding countryside have come and gone through the city’s gates, bringing raw materials, produce or labour, and returning with cash or goods, perhaps luxuries that can only be found where craftspeople and traders congregate. Cities send out soldiers to dominate surrounding regions or conquer other cities, traders to bring back precious goods, emissaries to seek knowledge or build connections with others. Cities attract visitors, sometimes from distant lands; and even if some cities have been devastated or even eradicated by the attentions of enemy armies from afar, others are endowed with sights distinctive enough to make a special journey worthwhile and can thrive on peaceful pilgrims or tourists enduring long and arduous journeys to see them.

  And many cities – Damascus, Rome, Athens come to mind – are among the most truly enduring – the most alive – of all historical artefacts, not only preserved as museum pieces but remaining vital for thousands of years, each with a unique identity and appeal that has changed and grown with the vicissitudes of the centuries. The cultural and physical edifices of such cities are a palimpsest or patchwork of historical legacy and modern need. Over the centuries, they have seen all kinds of visitor – sometimes welcome, sometimes less so.

  But whether a city is predominantly antique or entirely modern, travellers are frequently impressed and amazed by what they find. Whoever has made a long and difficult journey to a city will arrive full of expectation and attention, alert to whatever is impressive, strange or new. And what the visitor sees depends not just on what exists there to be seen, but on their own expectations and interests. Some will experience a direct assault on the senses, a riot of colour, texture and sound, a barrage of smells; but others, arriving in the self-same place, may come so laden with preconceived ideas and associations that what they see exists almost entirely in their imagination. Some visitors arrive in an unknown city and notice its buildings and streets, its government, its organization and the way that it treats the new arrival; a different visitor will be struck by the faces, voices and gestures of the men and women who live there, and note glimpses of unfamiliar ways of life, mysterious, alluring or even frightening.

  Some of those travellers who see and feel this heightened excitement, this novelty, this danger that only the city can bring, have captured their experience in words and pictures. When set down immediately in diaries and letters, the urgency can burn off the page; even when written down months or years later in memoirs or reports, the picture can have greater polish, yet be all the more vivid for that. Then there are the travellers whose personal experiences and insights are transmuted into the universality of poetry or fiction.

  The earliest accounts of travellers encountering alien cities are found in religious and epic texts: Joshua outside the walls of Jericho, the Achaeans at Troy. But memorable though the verses of the Bible and Homer may be, they are not the words of Joshua and Achilles themselves. And even in the Classical world, there are rather few descriptions of cities and visits to them, and those that do exist tend to be brief – for example, the earliest mention of Paris comes from the Roman soldier Julian, who was proclaimed emperor there in AD 361; his comment, though memorable, used just two words, ‘cara [sweet] Lutetia’, using the name the Romans gave to their settlement by the Seine. Herodotus, who was a great traveller, tended to write about the peoples he encountered, not the places he went. Conversely, geographers like Strabo gave more detailed though often dry factual accounts of cities, and it is rare to find indications they had personally visited the places in question.

  It was only in Europe’s Middle Ages that a genre of writing akin to travel literature arose, initially with books written by and for pilgrims to the great religious sites, especially Jerusalem and Rome. But at the same time, Muslim writers wrote about their travels, among them the greatest pre-modern traveller of all, the Moroccan Ibn Battuta, who covered more than 70,000 miles over thirty years in the mid-14th century, and who gave detailed and personal accounts of the people he met, the places he went and the hardships of getting to them. These centuries, when the Silk Road was at its height, also saw a steady trickle of travellers from Europe to China (most famously Marco Polo, whose account of his travels became Europe’s first-ever bestselling book), as well as in the other direction, including the Chinese Christian monk Rabban Bar Sauma, who wrote vividly about his visit to western Europe
in the 13th century.

  Travel literature as we know it – whether we mean books written to assist the prospective traveller, self-aware accounts of travelling or reports of significant journeys – became more common from the 16th century. Whether it was the European exploration and colonization of the world, the increasing scope of commercial and military activities in distant climes, the advent of the Grand Tour and other cultural or intellectual journeying, the dispersal of imperial personnel to their postings around the world or the development of mass tourism, all these and many more personal motives made travelling, and writing about travelling, a rich seam for writers and readers to mine.

  In this book, several dozen of the world’s greatest cities are portrayed through almost two hundred extracts from writers who visited them over the centuries. To ensure the sense of change through time, the cities included here all still flourish: ancient cities that survive purely as archaeological sites – places such as Knossos or Machu Picchu – attract a very different kind of writing. The mix of period, reasons for travel, experiences and encounters, sights and insights provide a series of illuminating shafts that add up to a surprisingly complex sketch of each city over its history, while the reactions of the writers – many of them household names – reveal as much about their own characters and interests as about the cities themselves.

  So far as possible, there is a mix of not only period, cultural background and reason for their journeys and for recording them, but also ethnicity, country of origin and gender. Each extract, though, is vivid, accessible, well written and more or less self-explanatory – although some may be misleading or inaccurate in the information they offer; no one should treat this book as an entirely reliable guide to the modern city and its sights.

  Many of our contributors grumble. They dislike muddy streets, bad drivers, dishonest taxi drivers, officious border guards, surly shopkeepers, importunate beggars, irritating tourists, storms, rain, sun and wind – though they can be fairly sanguine about surviving earthquakes. Some stick to the tourist trail and cling to the sanctuary of the hotel with its familiar food and creature comforts. Many others, however, just plunge into the back streets. But whether timid or bold, the travellers celebrate a great deal of what they see – a grand vista, a bustling market, a generous gesture, an alluring glance, a gracious grandee, a death-defying acrobat – and use vivid and immediate language to convey it.

  Some extracts are of letters or diaries, others come from memoirs or reports; a few are taken from novels but are closely based on the author’s own experience of travel. Some writers visited for a few weeks, days or even hours before moving on, others never left – but in the extracts chosen they behave as hosts showing a newly arrived guest around their adopted town. Natives or those who arrived as children are not travellers to their home cities, though, and their insights are not included. Thus, we learn about what Charles Dickens saw and felt on his brief visits to New York and Rome, but not London, which he knew far too well from the inside.

  All human life – and prejudice – is here: some writers experience the places they visit as ‘other’ and fail to understand the people they meet on their own terms, but instead project fantasies of exoticism, mystery or depravity on them. A few reveal their racial or religious prejudices, others embrace the opportunity to experiment with drugs or indulge sexual fantasies. It should go without saying that all this says more about the author and the prejudices of his or her day, than about the places they purport to describe. This is one undoubted aspect of, and sometimes motivation for, travel in the past, especially perhaps to Middle and Far Eastern (‘oriental’) locations – and for this reason it is represented here. Reassuringly often, however, contributors express genuine sympathy towards and interest in their subjects, and many demonstrate admirable traits, including anger at cruelty, or compassion for the suffering they encountered, as well as exhibiting real bravery in perilous circumstances as lone travellers far from home.

  Travel literature as a genre flourishes today, but it has changed. Since the 1980s the experience of travel has become very different, for two great reasons: the cut-price airlines have made city breaks – even to cities on another continent – almost commonplace; and the rise of Google and review sites like TripAdvisor means that nowhere on Earth today need be truly remote or even surprising. Additionally, the prevalence of social media and blogging has changed the experience of both reading and writing about travel to such an extent that travelling to the great cities of the world today has become a very different experience from even half a century ago. The latest entries in this book, therefore, date to the 1980s.

  Of course, not every traveller thrills to cities: some prefer solitude and silence, to wander remote fastnesses, cross oceans and deserts, climb mountains, plunge through forests, or visit people whose way of life has survived unchanged for millennia, but even these explorers will pass through cities en route to the wilderness, and will eventually return to cities and city-based civilization. Yearn to escape them as you may, everyone – the traveller no less than the rest of us – needs, and in many ways loves, cities. Perhaps, through this book, we can learn to experience them afresh.

  Peter Furtado

  NOTE TO THE READER

  The extracts in this volume date from many periods and places. Some are translated, others written in an English that seems more or less archaic to us now. Where possible, we have sought to present the translated texts in reasonably modern idiom, whereas archaic English has been left intact in most respects, except for some spelling and punctuation.

  Even so, there are marked inconsistencies in spelling between the different extracts. This can be irritating when it is a question of American or British English spellings, but is far worse with regard to the spelling of place names and the transliteration of foreign words into English. Do Muslims undertake the Haj or Hajj, to visit the Kaaba, Kaba or Kabah, the sacred stone in the heart of Mecca or Mekkah? Are they, indeed, Muslims, Moslems or Mussulmans, followers of the Prophet Muhammad, Mahomet or Mohammed?

  Some of the archaic forms used are seen as disrespectful, ignorant or worse by modern sensibilities. Nevertheless, this is a work of history, and the choices of our mostly long-dead authors are the ones we have reproduced without comment – even when a British traveller was disrespectful enough to visit an American president in the White House and then misspell his name (page 345).

  Further, many places have changed their names through history. We probably all know that Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul refer to the same city on the Bosphorus. But fewer are aware that the Chinese cities of Yan, Zhongdu, Khanbaliq, Cambaluc, Dadu, Tatu and Beiping all once flourished on the site we now know as Beijing (though older readers may occasionally still use the older forms of transliteration, such as Peking or Pekin). For clarity, this book lists cities under their familiar modern names, even if their visitors knew them under different designations. Historic regions like Mesopotamia or Persia no longer have any reality and these names may be obscure to new generations of reader. Again, we cannot force consistency onto the genuine diversity of history – but we have tried to clarify these confusions for the reader wherever it seems helpful.

  ALEXANDRIA

  Alexandria, on the mouth of the Nile, was founded by Alexander the Great in 332 BC and was the capital for Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. Famous in antiquity both for its Pharos, or Great Lighthouse, and for its Museum and Library, it fell to the Arabs in AD 642 and lost much of its cultural glory. Nevertheless, Islamic Alexandria thrived as a trading post, linking North Africa with the Middle East, and was an increasingly important naval base for the Arabs.

  Alexandria’s fortunes were revived by the appointment of Muhammad Ali as Ottoman viceroy and pasha in 1805; he began the modernization of the Egyptian economy and made Alexandria a banking centre. It was also the point of departure for many European visitors to Egypt and travellers to India, a role that became increasingly important — first with the opening of the Suez Canal
in 1869, then under British control from 1882 — until after the Second World War. It remained a Levantine cultural and linguistic melting pot through the 20th century, although after Egypt’s nationalist revolution led by Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1952 it became increasingly dominated by Arabic-speaking Egyptians.

  20 BC STRABO

  The Greek geographer Strabo (64 BC–AD 24) travelled widely in Africa and the Middle East, and based his encyclopaedic and influential Geographica (c. AD 17) on what he saw on his travels. The work proved a highly influential source of knowledge during the Renaissance.

  Pharos is a small oblong island, quite close to the continent, forming towards it a harbour with a double entrance. The coast has two promontories projecting into the sea; the island is situated between these, and shuts in the bay.

  Of the extremities of the Pharos, the eastern is nearest to the continent and to the promontory in that direction, called Lochias, which is the cause of the entrance to the port being narrow. Besides the narrowness of the passage, there are rocks, some under water, others above it, which increase the violence of the waves rolling in from the sea. This extremity itself of the island is a rock, washed by the sea on all sides, with a tower upon it of the same name as the island, constructed of white marble, with several storeys. Sostratus of Cnidus erected it for the safety of mariners, as the inscription imports.…

  When Alexander arrived, and perceived the advantages of the situation, he determined to build the city on the harbour.… The advantages of the city are of various kinds. The site is washed by two seas; on the north, by what is called the Egyptian Sea, and on the south, by the sea of the lake Mareia. This is filled by canals from the Nile, through which more merchandise is imported than by those communicating with the sea. Hence the harbour on the lake is richer than the maritime harbour. The exports by sea from Alexandria exceed the imports, as any person may ascertain by watching the arrival and departure of the merchant vessels, and observing how much heavier or lighter their cargoes are when they depart or when they return.…