Excerpt…
Gaza, November, 1323
The good captain had his mast re-stepped and re-rigged four days following the arrival of Johanna and company, after which they were forced to wait two interminable weeks for a favorable wind.
His pilgrims, thoroughly bored with the delights of Gaza’s bazaars and women, were impatient to depart. They said so, in steadily increasing volume, and with mounting threats to inform the authorities of his malfeasance once they were back in Venice. There were some truly colorful phrases that polyglots Johanna and Jaufre were quick to commit to memory. English was a great language for oaths.
Dana sez–
The pilgrim scenes in Silk and Song were inspired by Memoirs of a Medieval Woman: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe by Louise Collis. I pulled it down to write this post and six pages later I pulled myself together and got back to work. Margery was an Englishwoman who lived roughly between 1373 and 1438. She was married, with 14 children. Beset by demons and devils possibly brought on by postpartum depression (and no wonder) she abandons her family to travel to various religious shrines from Prussia to Compostela to Jerusalem itself, seeking absolution or revelation or validation or, who knows, maybe just a cure for what ailed her. (You can tell how sympathetic I feel toward her plight.)
When one reads of the visions and hallucinations and hysteria Margery suffered, manifested all too often in ear-splitting shrieks, one wonders just how relieved her family was to see the back of her when she left. Certainly her fellow pilgrims should have been awarded the medieval equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize for not murdering her outright their first night together on the road.
But the book is about much more than Margery, providing a marvelous collection of details and trivia concerning travel in Europe in the time of Edward III (who you will meet as a boy in Silk and Song). Here’s a lovely tidbit that will sound familiar to any captain of a cruise ship today.
One feels for the galley captain, to whom the mere thought of another holy place, another lot of Saracens, fees, donkeys, lodgings, provisions, miracles, devotions, must have become altogether repugnant...A smart man could make money in the tourist business, certainly, but he had to work for it. If the Moors were awkward and the programme was held up, his charges immediately turned on him, brandishing their contracts with accusations of theft, bribery, sharp practice and corrupt dealings with infidels.
You want to see how the sausage gets made? Here you go.
