Babylon of Egypt. A strange muddle of a name used by medieval pilgrims visiting the lands of the Bible. The notion that there was a ‘Babylon’ in Egypt where Nebuchadnezzar cast Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego into the fiery furnace (Daniel 3.20) was often repeated in accounts by early travellers from Europe. There have been various reasons put forward for this quaint belief. It seemed that since the days of the exile from Babylon (597–538 BC) Jews had lived by the Nile on the site of what is now Old Cairo. Furthermore, Strabo (Geography17.1.36) spoke of ‘Babylon’ as being...

Even if the sporadic fires of the Crusades had mostly subsided by the end of the thirteenth century, the glowing embers occasionally erupted when they were fanned into life by mutual hostility. Arab and European versions of the Crusades differed since opinions on both sides were rooted in ignorance and suspicion. ‘Abdal-Rahman, known as Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), the great Arab philosopher and historian, regarded the Franks as barbarians who lived without benefit of the sunlight of the Islamic world, the people dull of understanding and their tongues heavy. Born in Tunisia, Ibn Khaldun went to Cairo in 1382 and...

Even if Europeans felt some hostility towards the Muslims, this did not deter them from risking their lives on dangerous sea voyages, intent as they were on making pilgrimage to the Christian holy places and increasing the lucrative trade with the infidels. This mercantile outlook was typified by men such as Francesco di Marco Datini of Prato, a wealthy Florentine merchant who headed his account books ‘In the name of God and of profit’. Foreign travel too had a certain cachet: the traveller became a focus of attention, a person of importance on his return. It was considered that a...

At first sight, to those approaching the coast of northern Egypt, the low-lying country with its peculiar light suddenly seemed to rise out of the sea. In the greenish-yellow currents of the debouching Nile hippopotami could be seen swimming out to sea from the delta swamps. When passengers crowded the decks on arrival at Alexandria, the city appeared to be a shining noble place, surrounded by stout double walls protected by ‘towers, moats, warlike machines and having fair palaces within’. On closer inspection, however, the streets were narrow, ugly, tortuous and dark, full of dust and dirt.

Founded in 331...

Once travellers left the bustling decaying port of Alexandria they were absorbed into the atmosphere of the countryside, where the fellahin had followed the daily round according to the rhythm of the Nile since the time of the pharaohs. No matter which conqueror had invaded the land, later to recede as the tide, the life of the native Egyptians kept to its inexorable pattern, varied by the levels of harsh taxation levied to enrich the rulers.

On 5 October 1382, after a week of rest and sightseeing, Lionardo Frescobaldi and his companions prepared to set off for Cairo. Presumably the...

While Syria had suffered from the onslaughts of the Mongols and the wars of the Crusades, Cairo had escaped almost unmolested. Peace had enabled her to become the fabled cultural city of the Arab world. Foreign visitors were uniformly astonished by the opulence that unfolded before them. Ibn Battuta (b. Tangiers 1304) surpassed himself with his mellifluous prose when he dictated his memoirs on his return to Fez to Muhammad Ibn Juzayy, the current secretary of the sultan:

I arrived at length at Cairo, mother of cities and seat of Pharaoh the tyrant, mistress of broad regions and fruitful lands,...

After a 250-year rule over Egypt and Syria, the Mamluk sultanate was on the wane. By the time the elderly sultan al-Ghawri reluctantly agreed to ascend the throne in 1501 at sixty years of age, the taxes that had customarily flowed into Mamluk coffers, culled from the lucrative spice trade, were seriously depleted, leaving a gaping hole in the treasury. To the north the power of the Ottoman Empire was steadily rising. These and other factors were the cause of friction, apprehension and increasing paranoia.

Because of threats to the frontiers of Egypt, the disparate Europeans in Cairo found themselves...

Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79), whose works were universally read by the educated, wrote in withering terms that the pyramids were but vain and frivolous pieces of ostentation on the part of Egyptian monarchs (Natural History36.16). But before the tide of works from classical authors permeated the libraries of European scholars, it was commonly thought that the pyramids were the granaries of the most holy Joseph, used for storing corn during the years of famine. As such, they were regarded as objects of reverence, and indulgences were awarded by the church to visiting pilgrims on a kind of...

After they had prayed in the old churches of Babylon, tasted the delights of Cairo and clambered round the pyramids, Christian pilgrims prepared for the journey through the Sinai desert to St Catherine’s monastery, the supreme point of their Egyptian itinerary. It was an arduous and dangerous enterprise, taking on average about 22 days for the round trip through extremes of heat and cold. Almost everyone who wrote of his experiences made an effort to capture in words the loneliness and desolation of the peninsula. Felix Fabri, a Dominican friar from Ulm who went on pilgrimage with a group of...

Despite the recognised dangers, a few intrepid Europeans risked the desert journey to accompany the great company of Muslims on the yearlyhajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1586 or thereabouts, 20 days after Ramadan, an anonymous Englishman joined the caravan from Cairo for the 40-day journey on the well-trodden route to ‘Aqaba across the northern Sinai desert. It was a brave venture, since if any Christian had been discovered in the Muslim holy places, he would undoubtedly have been summarily executed:

The Captain of the caravan and all his retinue and officers resort unto the castle (that is the...

A year after the Spanish Armada had suffered defeat and shipwreck on the shores of Britain, an anonymous Venetian fulfilled his desire to explore the southern provinces of Egypt. On 7 August 1589 he departed from Cairo with a crew of Nubian boatmen. For some years he had wanted to make that journey ‘for no profit whatsoever, but only to see the many splendid buildings, churches, statues, colossi, obelisks and columns and also to see the place where the above mentioned columns were dug out. In order to look at these excavations I had to journey further than I thought.’...