3 - Establishing lay science: the merchant and the humanist

Summary

THE TRAVELLER IN ITALY: A FLORENTINE ENCOUNTER

The concern for establishing the centre of the world in a Christian perspective had strongly influenced the geographical literature of the European Middle Ages. This was, to a great extent, the result of the clerical control over culture. The starting point for a medieval traveller was the figure of the pilgrim, and it still remained so with the narrative of John Mandeville. However, the new genres of the expansion of Europe in the Renaissance tended to develop more like Marco Polo's book of marvels than Mandeville's natural-Christian synthesis. After the fifteenth century, the pilgrim lost ground steadily to more secularized travellers – to the practical reporter with specific aims, and eventually to a first-person curious observer free from any obvious external sources of authority. This transition did not come as a direct result of the discourse created by merchants living in the East like Marco Polo and Nicoloó Conti, but rather through the legitimizing power of a new kind of attitude among the elite.

The fifteenth-century report given by the Venetian merchant Nicoloó Conti (c. 1385–1469) was an important contribution to this process, and exemplifies the mechanism through which a non-clerical erudite culture and travel literature became connected. It is significant that Conti did not write an account of his travels in Asia on his own initiative, but was instead requested to describe his journey to Pope Eugene IV's secretary, the humanist Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459).