While my admiration for Davis’ work remains unchanged‚Äîif anything, hearing her former students’ tributes and watching her in action at her 80th birthday symposium only increased it‚ÄîI do, nevertheless, have one big question for Davis about her portrait of Leo Africanus. I will probably begin my remarks on Martire tomorrow evening by justifying my decision to study his embassy, and I plan to make a claim that Spain’s engagement with the Muslim empires of the Levant left a measurable imprint on development of modern Spanish state, society, and culture. In other words, figures like Martire mattered beyond the intrinsic interest of their individual stories. If we take away Ramusio, whose later editions of Leo Africanus’s works were crucial in preserving their author’s historical memory, can the same be said of Leo Africanus? Did his description of Africa demonstrably change Europeans’ impressions of the continent and its peoples? Or does he matter more simply for the possibilities that his individual story reveals? In other words, I suppose I’m asking‚Äîto borrow a distinction beautifully drawn by Jill Lepore in her “Historians Who Love Too Much”¹‚Äîis he a biographical figure, or merely the vehicle for a microhistory of North Africa and Renaissance Rome?

1. Jill Lepore, ‚ÄúHistorians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,‚Äù Journal of American History 88 (2001), 129-144. I should note that I was only reminded of this article, fortuitously, by reading Rebecca Goetz’ terrific syllabus.

In my talk I will focus not on the De orbe novo, however, but rather on another, smaller work which Maritre appended to several of its first printings. Entitled simply Legatio Babylonica, it consists of three humanist epistles which Martire first drafted in 1501‚Äì1502 in the course of his embassy to Egypt on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs. As I’ll attempt to show, the Legatio ought to receive as much attention as the more famous De orbe, for two reasons: first of all, because it reminds us of the relatively greater importance of the Near East vis-?†-vis the Americas in shaping Spanish policy in the early sixteenth century; and secondly, because its record of Martire’s reactions to, and negotiations with, the Mamluk empire offer an opportunity to question much of what we think we know‚Äîwhether from Edward Sa?Ød, or more recent books by Nancy Bisaha and Margaret Meserve, for example‚Äîabout the history of “orientalism” in the Renaissance.

I hope to see you there, and to hear your feedback on my talk!

I was interested to read about Plotz’s experience because it struck a chord with my recent research into biblical antiquarianism of the Renaissance. In many ways, my subjects‚Äîfigures like Benito Arias Montano and Joseph Scaliger‚Äîtraveled much the same intellectual arc as did Plotz. Determined in the first instance to understand the Biblical text, and to “translate” its arcana into useful knowledge for their contemporaries, Renaissance antiquarians and Plotz alike found themselves drawn ineluctably into the study of biblical geography and biblical antiquities.

The existing scholarship on the Renaissance version of this phenomenon is fairly unanimous in attributing the rise of proto-modern biblical archaeology in the Renaissance to Renaissance exegetes’ decision to borrow the antiquarian methods developed by classical scholars like Poggio Bracciolini and Flavio Biondo and apply them to Christian subjects. This makes a lot of sense, as many of the early biblical antiquarians were also accomplished scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity. (Arias Montano, for example, cut his teeth on Roman coinage in the 1540s, long before he wrote his famous critical apparatus to the Antwerp Polyglot Bible in the 1560s and 1570s.) Yet I also think that there is another, parallel tradition inherent within Christian thought that is equally capable of explaining exegetes’ persistent desire to connect the biblical text to its material context.

Most modern travelers to the Holy Land, knowing little or nothing about the early history of the Christian holy places which they visit, probably assume that they have been there forever. In fact, however, this is not the case, and (with the exception of a few Christian cults surrounding the Cave of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Garden of Gethsemane) the vast majority of Palestinian sites that modern Christians venerate as canonical Holy Places had ceased to exist within the first century after Christ‚Äôs crucifixion.¹ Responsibility for erasing the reminders of Christ’s earthly presence lay primarily with Palestine‚Äôs Roman governors. Their periodic anti-Christian persecutions, the emperor Titus’ destruction of the biblical Jerusalem in 70 AD, and Hadrian‚Äôs decision to reconstruct the city west of its original site in 135 AD, renaming it Aelia Capitolina, all guaranteed that most all of the places that Christians might reasonably have claimed as sacred spaces had disappeared.²

Quite remarkably, however, a significant portion of the blame could also be attributed to Christians themselves. Their commitment to the notion of their Church as a universal and purely spiritual entity led them to supress the worship of concrete sites or material remains as sacred.³ In Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony‚Äôs apt phrasing, when it came to memorializing the Christian Holy Sites ‚Äúthe pursuit of the culte de m?©moire was a delicate matter, provoking‚Äîsometimes simultaneously‚Äîharsh theological, political, and personal declamations.‚Äù⁴ Early Christian theologians read the New Testament, and particularly John 4:21‚Äì22, Ephesians 2:20‚Äì22, and Galatians 4:11, as calling Christians to abandon traditional concepts of sacred space. Theirs was to be a religion of the Spirit that filled the whole world, ‚Äúa universal religion of the whole oecumene without geographical boundaries.‚Äù⁵ Animating this opposition to localized devotion was the Christian community‚Äôs great concern to distinguish the new faith from Judaism, which theologians concluded could be defined as much by its veneration of sites of religious-historical importance as by its adherence to the Law. Consequently many of the most influential early theologians, like Tertullian and Origen, denounced the worship of Palestine as a Christian ‚ÄòHoly Land‚Äô as Judaizing. Indeed, several eschewed Palestine as a wicked land, polluted rather than sanctified by Christ‚Äôs Crucifixion and burial on its soil. This was an argument derived as much from practical observation as from textual tradition‚Äîthe tragic and confused state of Palestinian affairs under the late Empire confirmed for many Christians familiar with Josephus the futility of venerating the fallen, and therefore sinful, land of Judea.⁶

For more, continue reading “Digging the Bible, II” …

1. Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 20.
2. C. Saulnier, “La vie monastique en Terre Sainte aupr?®s des lieux de p?®lerinage (IVe s.),” in Miscellanea Historiae Ecclesiasticae, vol. 6: Congr?®s de Varsovie, 25 juin‚Äì1er juillet 1978 (Brussels: ?âditions Nauwelaerts, 1983), 223‚Äì248, here at 224.
3. Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred; P.W.L. Walker, Holy City, Holy Places? Christian Attitudes to Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the Fourth Century (Oxford, 1990); Robert L. Wilken, ‚ÄúEarly Christian Chiliasm, Jewish Messianism, and the Idea of the Holy Land,‚Äù The Harvard Theological Review 79 (1986): 298‚Äì307; W.D. Davies, The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974); Marcel Simon, ‚ÄúLes p?®lerinages dans l‚Äôantiquit?© chr?©tienne,‚Äù in F. Raph?§el, ed., Les p?®lerinages de l‚Äôantiquit?© biblique et classique ?† l‚ÄôOccident m?©di?©val (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1973), 97‚Äì115; idem, Verus Isra?´l. ?âtudes sur les relations entre chr?©tiens et juifs dans l‚Äôempire romain (135‚Äì425), 2nd ed. (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1964), 203‚Äì207.
4. Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred, 14.
5. Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred, 21.
6. Pierre Maravall, ‚ÄúSaint J?©r?¥me et le p?®lerinage aux lieux saints de Palestine,‚Äù in Yves-Marie Duval, ed., J?©r?¥me entre l‚ÄôOccident et l‚ÄôOrient: XVIe centenaire du d?©part de saint J?©r?¥me de Rome et de son installation ?† Bethl?©em. Actes du Colloque de Chantilly (septembre 1986) (Paris: ?âtudes Augustiniennes, 1988), 345‚Äì353, here at 347. See Jerome‚Äôs epistle 46.8, in which he says that certain people considered the Holy Land to be a wicked place ‚Äúbecause it had drunk in the blood of the Lord.‚Äù

This history of destruction and disregard was only reversed in the fourth century, well after all memory of the actual localizations o the Holy Places had been forgotten. What accounts for the resuscitation of interest in the Holy Land was the Christianization of the empire under Constantine (ca. 280‚Äì337). The surge of official interest in localizing the Holy Sites and relics of Palestine, some historians have conjectured, may have been orchestrated for the purposes of increasing imperial prestige. Throughout the 320s and 330s Constantine and his mother, S. Helena, carried out an aggressive campaign to recover and restore places of biblical and/or Christian significance throughout Palestine, and particularly those in the vicinity of Aelia Capitolina (which Constantine rebaptized Jerusalem in 325). In these early days, this meant essentially the excavation of buildings and objects in neighborhoods loosely thought to have been of some biblical significance, the ‚Äúidentification‚Äù of the resulting discoveries as authentic Holy Places and relics, and the construction of new, commemorative churches over them.¹ While on pilgrimage in 328‚Äì329, for example, Helena presided over the excavation of Calvary and the Holy Sepulcher, the discovery of the True Cross, and the erection of basilicas in Bethlehem and on Mount Sion.² Eusebius of Caesaria (ca. 260‚Äìca. 340), Constantine‚Äôs contemporary and the first Church historian, accordingly memorialized Constantine as the inventor of the Holy Land in his Vita Constantini.³

Within Constantine‚Äôs lifetime, the burgeoning number of Palestinian Holy Sites began to attract the attention of the wider Christian community, and pilgrims and ecclesiatical authors alike began what was to be a long process of describing and memorializing them in written texts. The principal objectives of these textual commemorations were to attest the authenticity of the Holy Sites from ‚Äòeyewitness‚Äô experience, and to publicize them to the wider Christian world in the interest of stimulating devotion to them and, ideally, pilgrimage. In so doing, these texts had the ancillary effect of weaving these sites together into a composite portrait of ‚Äúthe Holy Land.‚Äù This process of historical and topographical bricolage arguably begins with Eusebius’ Vita Constantini (cited above). In order to praise the result of Constantine and Helena‚Äôs program of excavation and church-building, Eusebius made a conscious attempt to reduce and conform the complex reality of fourth-century Palestine to a Christian Holy Land.⁴ According to Jonathan Z. Smith, ‚Äúwhat Constantine accomplished with power and wealth was advanced by rhetors like Eusebius, who built a ‚ÄòHoly Land‚Äô with words.‚Äù⁵

Overcoming Christians’ reluctance to venerate Palestine was not, however, solely a matter of ‘rediscovering’ the holy places, unearthing relics, and erecting grand basilicas. Christian theologians maintained their objections, in spite of the Constantinian restoration of the Holy Places. Their aversion was founded on scriptural, pragmatic, and theological grounds, a combination marshaled perhaps most trenchantly in the works of Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335‚Äìpost 394). Gregory, who was born after the Constantinian restoration, delivered nothing short of a blistering attack on monastic pilgrimage as unbiblical, practically dangerous, and intellectually misguided in his letter On Pilgrimages (379).

As Gregory notes at the outset of his letter, ‚Äúit is right that we should apply … a strict and flawless measure … ‚ÄîI mean, of course, the Gospel rule of life.‚Äù And so he first puts pilgrimage to the test of Holy Writ:

There are some amongst those who have entered upon the monastic and hermit life, who have made it a part of their devotion to behold those spots at Jerusalem where the memorials of our Lord’s life in the flesh are on view; it would be well, then, to look to this rule, and if the finger of its precepts points to the observance of such things, to perform the work, as the actual injunction of our Lord. But if they lie quite outside the commandment of the Master, I do not see what there is to command any one who has become a law of duty to himself to be zealous in performing any of them.

Pilgrimage, of course, fails this test: “When the Lord invites the blest to their inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, he does not include a pilgrimage to Jerusalem amongst their good deeds; when he announces the Beatitudes, he does not name amongst them that sort of devotion.”

Things are no better when Gregory moves on to the purely practical arguments against pilgrimage. According to Gregory, the practical demands of Near Eastern travel demand the mixing of the sexes, which invites sexual sin and detracts from the Christian‚Äôs devotion. Not that there was good reason to avoid such sin on the journey‚Äîshould one manage to arrive in Palestine with virtue intact, writes Gregory, Jerusalem itself will soon steal it. For Gregory and his followers, Jerusalem had become a dangerous den of sin and iniquity, a cesspool that threatened the pilgrim‚Äôs body and soul. This was a direct consequence of Christ‚Äôs Crucifixion, which was said to have “cursed” the city‚Äîin the words of Jerome, “because it has drunk the blood of the Lord.”⁶ Thus,

there is no form of uncleanness that is not perpetrated amongst them [ie. the inhabitants of Jerusalem]; rascality, adultery, theft, idolatry, poisoning, quarrelling, murder, are rife; and the last kind of evil is so excessively prevalent, that nowhere in the world are people so ready to kill each other as there; where kinsmen attack each other like wild beasts, and spill each other’s blood, merely for the sake of lifeless plunder.

Ultimately, however, it was the theological argument against pilgrimage that Gregory found most compelling. Like his fellow patristic theologians, exceptionally concerned with ‘judaizing,’ Gregory considered it a damnable fallacy to think that the Holy Sites were somehow still imbued by a residual holiness dating to Christ’s physical presence there:

What advantage, moreover, is reaped by him who reaches those celebrated spots themselves? He cannot imagine that our Lord is living, in the body, there at the present day, but has gone away from us foreigners; or that the Holy Spirit is in abundance at Jerusalem, but unable to travel as far as us. Whereas, if it is really possible to infer God’s presence from visible symbols, one might more justly consider that He dwelt in the Cappadocian nation than in any of the spots outside it. For how many Altars there are there, on which the name of our Lord is glorified!

Gregory could speak with authority on these matters, for he had traveled to Palestine on ecclesiastical business; and even after having seen Jerusalem, still he could affirm that

We confessed that the Christ Who was manifested is very God as much before as after our sojourn at Jerusalem; our faith in Him was not increased afterwards any more than it was diminished. Before we saw Bethlehem we knew His being made man by means of the Virgin; before we saw His Grave we believed in His Resurrection from the dead; apart from seeing the Mount of Olives, we confessed that His Ascension into heaven was real.

In fact, he and his traveling companions ‚Äúderived only thus much of profit from our travelling thither, namely that we came to know by being able to compare them, that our own places are far holier than those abroad.‚Äù His conclusion? “O ye who fear the Lord, praise Him in the places where ye now are. Change of place does not effect any drawing nearer unto God, but wherever thou mayest be, God will come to thee, if the chambers of thy soul be found of such a sort that He can dwell in thee and walk in thee.”

What finally turned the tide against the objections of theologians like Gregory was not the imperial archaeology of Constantine, but rather scholarship (and here we return to the theme with which I opened this post). From the very earliest days of pilgrimage‚Äîeven prior to Constantine’s accession‚Äîone argument alone had redeemed Holy Land pilgrimage from critics like Gregory. That was the need to study the Holy Land, so as better to understand Scripture. Here the model is certainly Gregory’s great contemporary S. Jerome (d. 419), the Holy Land’s model student.

Along with Origen and Eusebius, Jerome was one of the first Christian intellectuals to advocate for the centrality of eyewitness topographical knowledge to intelligent exegesis. Against the criticism of influential contemporaries like Gregory, Jerome argued that one could not understand the historical narrative encapsulated within the Bible without first familiarizing oneself with the historical sites of Old- and New-Testament Judea.⁷ In the Preface to his Latin translation of the Septuagint‚Äôs version of the Book of Chronicles (Paralipomenon), written in 387, Jerome argued that

In the same way that one understands better the Greek historians when one has seen Athens with his own eyes, and the third book of the Aenead when one has journeyed from Troade to Sicily and from Sicily to the mouth of the Tiber, so one understands better the Holy Scriptures when one has seen Judea with one‚Äôs own eyes and contemplated the ruins of its ancient cities.⁸

Jerome repeated the comparison five years later, in a letter sent from Bethlehem to the Roman aristocrat Marcella in the hope of persuading her to join him in the Holy Land. Writing in the name of his charges Paula and Eustochium, he lauded ‚Äúthe bishops, the martyrs, the divines, who have come to Jerusalem from a feeling that their devotion and knowledge would be incomplete and their virtue without the finishing touch, unless they adored Christ in the very spot where the gospel first flashed from the gibbet. If a famous orator [ie. Cicero of C?¶cilius] blames a man for having learned Greek at Lilyb?¶um instead of at Athens, and Latin in Sicily instead of at Rome (on the ground, obviously, that each province has its own characteristics), can we suppose a Christian‚Äôs education complete who has not visited the Christian Athens?‚Äù⁹ Similarly, in a letter to Paulinus of Nola, Jerome compared the Holy Land pilgrim to the Apostle Paul, whose willingness to “go up to Jerusalem” (Galatians 1:18) proved that he was the kind of admirable man, like Pythagoras or Plato, who had “traversed provinces, crossed seas, and visited strange peoples, simply to see face to face persons whom they only knew from books” and thereby to “find something to learn” and “become constantly wiser and better.”¹⁰

Thus it was every serious Christian‚Äôs duty to study the topography of Palestine, God‚Äôs classroom, without knowledge of which the living drama of the Bible would remain an abstract document. In an effort to encourage such studies, Jerome translated Eusebius‚Äô Greek Onomasticon (ca. 330), a gazetteer of biblical place names, into Latin as the De situ et nominibus locorum Hebraeorum.¹¹

As E.D. Hunt has shown, this belief in the scholarly value of travel was one that Jerome and his peers had inherited from the classical culture in which they were raised.¹² Hunt speculates that this early Christian practice of scholarly pilgrimage is a continuation of an ancient pagan tradition of “erudite, investigative tourism favoured by leading men of learning and leisure, and reaching its heyday in the freedom of mobility afforded by the pax Romana.”¹³ He cites the examples of Demetrius from Tarsus (Cilicia) in Plutarch’s dialogue On the Decline of Oracles, who is said to have traveled on imperial orders as far as Britain “for the purposes of investigation and sightseeing,” as well as the group of Roman travelers who congregate at Delphi in another of Plutarch’s dialogues, The Oracles at Delphi.¹⁴ Perhaps the best example, however, is Pausanias’ Description of Greece.¹⁵ Hunt notes that Pausanias’ work is much less a guide to modern Greece than it is a “panorama … dominated by the vestiges of Greek antiquity,” “a committed search for what he perceived to be the roots of Greek culture and identity.” He also notes that John Elsner “has made illuminating comparisons between Pausanias’ quest for … religious self-identity [in Greece] and the Christian traveller’s immersion into the biblical landscape of the Holy Land.”¹⁶

1. For an overview of Christian imperial construction in Jerusalem, see G?ºnter Stemberger, Jews and Christians in the Holy Land: Palestine in the Fourth Century, trans. Ruth Tuschling (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000), 48‚Äì120.
2. Jan Willem Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and her Finding of the True Cross (Leiden: Brill, 1992). S. Helena‚Äôs time in Jerusalem is described in Eusebius’ Vita Constantini, III.42‚Äì47, and Rufinus of Aquilea’s Historia Ecclesiastica, X.7‚Äì8.
3. Eusebius of Caesarea, Life of Constantine, ed. & trans. Averil Cameron & Stuart G. Hall, Clarendon Ancient History Series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).
4. Robert L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 81.
5. Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago, 1987), 79.
6. Maravall, “Saint J?©r?¥me et le p?®lerinage,” 347.
7. Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred, 69; F.M. Abel, “Saint J?©r?¥me et J?©rusalem,” in Vincenzo Vannutelli, ed., Miscellanea Geronimiana (Rome: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1920), 138‚Äì139.
8. Jerome, Praefatio in Librum Paralipomenon de graeco emmendato (395), in Biblia Sacra iuxta Latinam Vulgatam Versionem ad codicum fidem … , vol. 7: Liber Verborum dierum (Rome, 1948), 7‚Äì10. ‚Äúquomodo grecorum historias magis intellegunt qui athenas uiderint, et tertium uergilii librum qui troade per leucaten et acroceraunia ad siciliam et inde ad ostia tiberis nauigarint, ita sanctam scripturam lucidius intuebitur qui iudaeam oculis contemplatus est et antiquarum urbium memorias locorum que uel eadem uocabula uel mutata cognouerit.‚Äù
9. Jerome, Ep. 46, ¬?9.
10. Jerome, Ep. 53, ¬?1‚Äì2: ‚ÄúWe read in old tales that men traversed provinces, crossed seas, and visited strange peoples, simply to see face to face persons whom they only knew from books. Thus Pythagoras visited the prophets of Memphis; and Plato, besides visiting Egypt and Archytas of Tarentum, most carefully explored that part of the coast of Italy which was formerly called Great Greece. … Again we read that certain noblemen journeyed from the most remote parts of Spain and Gaul to visit Titus Livius, and listen to his eloquence which flowed like a fountain of milk. … Apollonius too was a traveller‚Äîthe one mean who is called the sorcerer by ordinary people and the philosopher by such as follow Pythagoras. He entered Persia, traversed the Caucasus and made his way through the Albanians, the Scythians, the Massaget?¶, and the richest districts of India. At last, after crossing that wide river the Pison, he came to the Brahmans. … After this he travelled among the Elamites, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, the Medes, the Assyrians, the Parthians, the Syrians, the Phoenicians, the Arabians, and the Philistines. Then returning to Alexandria he made his way to Ethiopia to see the gymnosophists and the famous table of the sun spread in the sands of the desert. Everywhere he found something to learn, and as he was always going to new places, he became constantly wiser and better. … But why should I confine my allusions to the men of this world, when the Apostle Paul, the chosen vessel the doctor of the Gentiles‚Äîwho could boldly say: ‚ÄòDo ye seek a proof of Christ speaking in me?‚Äô knowing that he really had within him that greatest of guests‚Äîwhen even he after visiting Damascus and Arabia ‚Äòwent up to Jerusalem to see Peter and abode with him fifteen days.‚Äô‚Äù
11. Onomasticon: The Place Names of Divine Scripture, including the Latin Edition of Jerome, ed. & trans. R. Steven Notley & Ze‚Äôev Safrai (Leiden: Brill, 2005). See also John Wilkinson, ‚ÄúL‚Äôapport de Saint J?©r?¥me ?† la topographie de la Terre Sainte,‚Äù Revue Biblique 81 (1974): 245‚Äì257.
12. E.D. Hunt, “Travel, Tourism and Piety in the Roman Empire: a Context for the Beginnings of Christian Pilgrimage,” Echos du Monde Classique/Classical Views 28 (1984): 391‚Äì417; idem, “Were there Christian Pilgrims before Constantine?,” in Pilgrimage Explored, ed. J. Stopford (Suffolk: York Medieval Press, 1999), 25‚Äì40.
13. Hunt, “Were there Christian Pilgrims,” 36.
14. Plutarch, De Defectu Oraculorum, 419–420; idem, De Pythiae Oraculis, 395a, 397e, 400d–e; both in his Moralia, trans. F.C. Babbitt, 15 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, YYYY), 5:260, 276, 292, 402–404.
15. Hunt, “Were there Christian Pilgrims,” 37. On Pausanias, see C. Habicht, Pausanias’ Guide to ancient Greece (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 1‚Äì27.
16. John Elsner, “Pausanias: A Greek Pilgrim in the Roman World,” Past & Present 135 (May 1992): 3‚Äì29.

Agust??n was educated at the Spanish college of Bologna, founded by Cardinal Gil de Albornoz in the 14th century. From there, he became Auditor of the Sacred Rota in 1544.

Agust??n was most famous in his own time as a legal scholar, and without a doubt his most famous work is his De legibvs et senatvs consvltis liber (Rome, 1583). Most interesting to me, however, is his 1587 Di?°logo de medallas, inscriciones y otras antiguedades, essentially a manual for teaching antiquarian methodology.¹

Agust??n’s Di?°logo is well known to historians for its vituperative opposition to Annius of Viterbo’s famous forgeries, the Antiquitatum Variarum, published in 1498 at Rome by Eucharius Silber and republished many more times throughout the sixteenth century, including by the vaunted Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija at Burgos in 1512. (Readers may recall that Annius’ invented chronicles play an important role in Anthony Grafton’s study of academic forgeries.)² Agust??n‚Äîlike Pietro Ricci, Marcantonio Coccio, Raffaello Maffei, Erasmus; Jacques Lef?®vre d’?âtaples, Juan Luis Vives, Beatus Rhenanus, Melchor Cano, Antonio Agust??n, Gaspar Barreiros, J. J. Scaliger, and Isaac Casaubon‚Äîrefused to believe in Annius’ texts. As Agust??n related,

A. … Latino Latini, a citizen of Viterbo, a learned and trustworthy man, told me that fr. Johannes Annius had sculpted certain characters on a slab, and he had it buried in a vineyard near Viterbo that was soon to be excavated. And when he heard that there were excavators in the vineyard, he had them excavate around the spot where he had buried his slab, saying that he had read in his books about a temple, the oldest in the world, that had stood in that area. And as they excavated near the slab, the first person to hit upon the stone came to Annius to tell him; and he had them uncover it bit by bit, and he began to marvel at the stone and its characters. And, making a copy of it, he went to those in charge of the city, and told them that it would bring great honor on the city to put that stone in the most honorable part of it, because it proved the foundation of Viterbo, which preceded Romulus by two thousand years, since Isis and Osiris founded it; and he told them his fables. And everything that he wished was done. And there are molds of this stone in circulation, and I think that it begins, ‘EGO.SVM.ISIS,’ etc.

C. This must be the authority that Florian de Ocampo adduced, saying that he glossed Berosus [the Chaldean]. I would have considered his work a fraud, if it weren’t for the fact that he dedicated it to the Catholic Monarchs of immortal fame.

A. Luis Vives says of Berosus and of the friar, ‘Alter mulget hircum, alter supponit cribrum,’ which saying Lucian applied to a different end. Giovanni Pontano, Pomponio Leto, Giovanni Camerte, and Cyriac of Ancona were no less ingenious, but they invented their fictions with more elegance; and I don’t know if there are others who forged inscriptions and had medals made with a certain amount of learning.³

1. The Di?°logo was reprinted in 1592 in Italian translation as the Dialoghi … intorno alle medaglie, inscrittioni et altre antichit?†.
2. Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
3. Di?°logo, 447‚Äì449.

Entering the palace’s outer courtyard, Latour was met by a rather shabby looking porter, who volunteered to lead Latour on a guided tour of the premises. While Latour seems to have been most interested in the house’s Mud?©jar architecture, his guide, it would appear, was much more concerned to highlight the typological similarity between Enr??quez de Ribera’s simulated Sevillan Via Crucis and the actual Via Dolorosa of Jerusalem. “When I arrived at the first floor,” wrote Latour, my guide called my attention to a small recess that concluded in a narrow window and served, on the right, as the back for a tiled bench. ‘There,’ he told me, ‘is where S. Peter was seated when he denied Jesus. And there,’ he added, indicating across the way a peephole covered with a grate, hidden in the wall, ‘is where the servant-girl who recognized him paused.’”

As the tour progressed, Latour noted, he became progressively more concerned about his guide, who seemed to lose the ability to distinguish between Enr??quez de Ribera’s house and the ‘real thing’ with each passing room. “After reciting the same stories for forty years,” lamented Latour, “the simpleton has doubtless forgotten that that which he is showing to travelers is nothing more than a copy of Pilate’s house. … Back out in the street, my guide, following me still, pointed out to me a window in a wall behind us with a stone balcony: “It’s there,” he told me, “that Jesus was shown to the people wearing the crown of thorns and a scepter of reeds!” Below was another window: “It belonged to the prison where Christ was held for several hours.” Latour, noting that “The brave man’s illusion seemed to augment as my visit grew longer,” was happy finally to escape from the urchin’s demented tour.

It is safe, I think, to assume that Latour’s account of his visit to the Casa de Pilatos contains a fair quantity of fiction and exaggeration. The delusional porter may very well have been a figment of Latour’s literary imagination, a device to heighten the contrast–one of the themes of his entire book–between French rationality and Spanish benightedness. Yet even literary fictions, like many stereotypes, must contain a grain of truth if they are to be believed, and therefore to be effective. What Latour describes as the Spaniard’s confusion or “illusion,” therefore, must have been plausible to his readers as the way in which an uneducated porter might really view the world. His inability to distinguish between reality and received opinion had to ring true.

I think, therefore, that we can read Latour’s visit to the Casa de Pilatos as an attempt to contrast not just France and Spain, but also two fundamental ways in which real, premodern people encountered their world. On the one hand there is Latour’s prized rationality, a way of seeing the world that is fastidious about chronological and geographical accuracy and prizes eyewitness observation above all other testimony. On the other hand, there is the porter’s way of seeing, which emphasizes collective memory over immediate, eyewitness evidence. This way of seeing strives to create an aura of immanence by erasing the difference between Spain and Jerusalem, present and past. It seeks to convince the seer that it is possible to reproduce, or ‘relive,’ the past.

It is especially appropriate that Latour chose to mark this contrast with a vignette about the Casa de Pilatos, for its very origins in the sixteenth century embody simultaneously these two ways of seeing the world. Fadrique Enr??quez de Ribera visited the Holy Land and measured the precise distances along the length of the Via Dolorosa, reproducing those measurements in his Sevillan Via Crucis. At the same time, however, the fact that he believed that the pile of rubble he was shown in Jerusalem was the Casa de Pilatos, and that one could ‘relive’ the Passion by walking a course paced out through the streets of Seville.