?John Moschos did what the modern travel writer still does: he wandered the world in search of strange stories and remarkable travellers? tales.?
Note that Dalrymple did not say that travellers go to discover new things, or places, or people. He sets the modern travel writer on a different plane, as one who adventures through human narrative by means of travel.
That is certainly true of the opulent works of Dalrymple, for whom travelling to places is merely a starting point for an intellectual journey through past civilizations and cultures.
At his best Dalrymple delivers writings that reveal intellectual continents, through which run his riveting historical and moving personal revelations.
When Dalrymple spoke of travel writing and John Moschos, he was referring to an ancient traveller whose footsteps he would retrace in his quest, from Greece through the Levant to Egypt, to find the monasteries and cities that Moschos had previously written about. With John Moschos? book, entitled The Spiritual Meadow, in hand Dalrymple journeyed to the ports of Sidon, Tyre, Beirut, Alexandria -- to see what Moschos had seen, or to discover if anything Byzantine was still there in any incarnation at all.
A huge gulf of time separated Dalrymple from Moschos and yet in several appealing ways they had much in common.
An Oxford graduate from the leisured classes of Scotland, when Dalrymple set out for Byzantium he had already written a best-selling travel book In Xanadu: A Quest. For this he travelled to China while an impecunious student accompanied by relays of girlfriends. He had also written City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi based on an uneasy year he spent in the city with his young artist wife, Olivia. In his much later book White Mughals it would emerge that Dalrymple's Anglo-Indian origins were the reason for his fascination with India.
Prior to setting out to discover Byzantium, Dalrymple consulted with a veritable slate of geniuses and eccentrics: Sir Steven Runciman, Robert Lacey and Robert Fisk among them. On his Byzantium odyssey Dalrymple started his journey at the monastery of Mount Athos on the Greek mainland in 1994. He began here because he went to see an early Greek manuscript of Moschos's book.
John Moschos began his journey from the gates of the great desert monastery of St Theodosius overlooking Bethlehem. The year was 578 A.D., nearly 1500 years before Dalrymple set out from Mount Athos. Moschos was ?an almost exact contemporary of Mohammed.? This ?wandering Jew of a monk? as a biographer of Moschos wrote, travelled with his pupil Sophronius, who in old age would become Patriarch of Jerusalem, and ?it was left to him to defend the Holy City against the first army of Islam as it swept up from Arabia, conquering all before it.?
Moschos wanted to see and write about Byzantium when it was under assault. Justinian's efforts to re-establish the Roman Empire had failed. Now Byzantium was threatened in the west by Slavs, Goths and Lombards and from the east by ?desert nomads and the legions of Sassanian Persia?.
Dalrymple wanted to write about a civilization that is largely forgotten and its remnants growing few and remote from modern life. It is not commonly realized that for 300 years Byzantium was the dominant culture of Eastern Europe and the Levant. It was a distinct cultural era between Rome and Islam, and yet so little of it remains in the Western consciousness, except in Eastern Orthodox religious traditions.
Both Dalrymple and Moschos wanted to recover, record and preserve a phase of history most remembered in the adjective ?Byzantine? or faintly remembered from the portraits in mosaic of Justinian and Theodora at Ravenna.
John Moschos and his companion ended their journey in Constantinople where he wrote his book. It was hailed as the masterpiece of Byzantine travel writing even then and in a generation or two was translated into several languages.
William Dalrymple ended his journey in Egypt and sojourned in the home of a friend in Somerset, England where he wrote his book. With From the Holy Mountain Dalrymple came of age as a writer. Some would say it was his greatest work. Today Dalrymple the family man divides his time between a farm outside Delhi, London and Edinburgh.
With From the Holy Mountain he did what he wanted to do. ?I wanted to see wherever possible what Moschos and Sophronius had seen, to sleep in the same monasteries, to pray under the same frescoes and mosaics, to discover what was left, and to witness what was in effect the last ebbing twilight of Byzantium.?
Early in the fourteenth century there was something in the air. In 1336 Petrarch, an Italian scholar wrote the first European travel account. His journey was modest: he merely climbed a mountain and looked down from the peak at his companions who had refused to follow him. He wrote disparagingly of his cowardly friends and so a rich tradition of European travel writing was born. Little did Petrarch know, as he toiled up Mount Vetoux, that the first and arguably the greatest ever Islamic traveler and chronicler of times and places Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta was engaged in a journey that would take him 29 years. It would also make him a legendary travel writer, respected in Islamic history for taking the message of Islam wherever he went.
A great historian, traveler and storyteller of our own era, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, has made Ibn Battuta's name famous in the West over the past decade. In 2001 his book Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battuta was published by John Murray, London. It is an account of his journey following the first leg of Ibn Battuta's epic journey (just from Tangier to Constantinople ? Ibn Battuta eventually covered three times the ground covered by Marco Polo) and is a marvelous transportation both across a territory largely unknown to the Western reader, namely north Africa and the near East, and between the 14th century and the present day. The book spread Ibn Battuta's name more widely than ever before.
Not much is known about Ibn Battuta; all that we know of him he tells us himself. He was born in 1304 and died some time between 1368 and 1377. He was a Berber Sunni Islamic scholar and jurisprudent from the Maliki Madhhab, a school of Fiqh (Sunni) law and at times a Qadi or judge. But it is his work as an explorer and travel writer that earned him lasting fame. His various accounts document his travels and excursions over a period of almost thirty years, covering some 73 000 miles (117 000 km). Ibn Battuta's journeys covered almost the entirety of the known Islamic world at that time, and beyond. His travels took him through north and west Africa, through southern and eastern Europe, the middle east, the Indian subcontinent, central and south-east Asia and China.
At the insistence of the Sultan of Morocco, Abu Inan Faris, Ibn Battuta dictated accounts of his travels to a scholar named Ibn Juzayy, whom he had met while in Granada, the seat of Islamic Spain. The account, written by Ibn Juzayy and interspersed with the latter's own comments, is the primary source of information about his journeys. The title of the work may be translated as A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling, but is most often referred to simply as the Rihla or Journey. While apparently fictional in part, the Rihla still gives as complete an account as exists, of these parts of the world in 14th century. For centuries his book was practically unknown even in the Islamic world, but in 1800 it was rediscovered and translated into several European languages.
Although hazardous in the extreme, Ibn Battuta survived all his journeys unscathed. He died in Morocco at a ripe old age (for those times) of over 60. He succumbed to the same disease that claimed his mother's life -- the Black Plague.
Justine Richards has sinced written about articles on various topics from Travel and Leisure, Writing and Cheap Travel Insurance for. Justine has been a journalist for 20 years and is a contributor to the online luxury travel magazine for independent travelers.. Justine Richards's top article generates over 12100 views. to your Favourites.