in this chapter, chapter 2 will look at how Breydenbach and his circle understood and responded to the print dilemma through the person of the author and his partner, the artist. The images of the Peregrinatio are constructed to say “I, the artist, saw” as a visual argument working in tandem with the text’s repeated declarations that they are, indeed, records of the artist’s act of viewing. These statements are amplified by their singularity; this is the first time the artist for a published book is identified or promoted in the text. Reuwich’s city ‘views’ are among the very first, and the use of the trope of the view here also amplifies themes developed by its earliest progenitors, such as Petrarch and Jan van Eyck. Later in the early modern era, the claim of printed images to be reliable copies of nature or other images will become routine.7 In the Peregrinatio, we see how this notion of authenticity was originally orchestrated.
Chapter 3 takes up the question of the Peregrinatio’s portrayal of the European encounter with Islam: how the theme of crusade pervaded the politics and financial strategies of church, empire, and press; how the Peregrinatio packaged the issues; and how its choices contrasted with the presentation of Islam in some of its source material. The Peregrinatio exemplifies the intersection of crusade rhetoric, indulgences, and print innovation that marked the culture of print in Mainz. The visual materials that show off what the team learned in Venice, some of their freshest materials and most forward-looking, serve this emphasis on crusade. The book’s text and images are not just organized to follow a pilgrimage, but to describe also a journey from a bastion of orthodoxy and resistance to Muslim aggression, Venice, to the Holy Land, a region overrun by heresy. The story of the Peregrinatio’s reception of the Levant is also the story of its relationship to Venice and vice versa. The Peregrinatio team and Venetian artists are mutually admiring and wide open to each other’s influence, but their different picturing of Islam demonstrates how its presentation can vary starkly with audience.
The View of Venice may be the Peregrinatio’s longest image, but the Map of the Holy Land with View of Jerusalem is its core construction, most essential to its message and most illustrative of the type of intellectual and artistic activity that animated the project. The creation of the map epitomizes the creation of the book. Chapter 4 parses the map to demonstrate this, while recouping its value in the context of period cartography.
Chapter 5 continues the focus on that woodcut, zooming in on the View of Jerusalem, which takes control of the center of the landscape. While Muslim patrons composed the built environment of Jerusalem itself to generate an Islamic experience of the space, Reuwich fights pictorially for a sovereign Christian view. He depicts a vantage near the place where pilgrims earned indulgences for viewing sites that Muslims forbid them to visit. This was a moment in the tour that served simultaneously to remind the pilgrims of Christian subjection and to overcome their subjection by means of a view. Reuwich offers a woodcut ‘view’ with the same double purpose of displaying both the center of Christian sacred history and an object lesson on the contemporary threat. He translates into a picture a practice shared then and now by all three Jerusalem religions, their setting up distinct, physical outlooks—contingent views dependent on vantage—that nevertheless show the city as they believe it to be absolutely. The artist’s personal experience of viewing the city endorses the ‘view’ he prints, which the reader then inhabits, encouraged by the routine of spiritual pilgrimage; and through the image of the artist-author’s authority, the contingency of the Christian point of view, physical and metaphorical, is fixed in place as a true image of Jerusalem.
Bernhard von Breydenbach and His Pilgrimage
The frontispiece introduces Breydenbach, or rather the lady on the pedestal does, with her extravagant dress amplifying the traditional conception of a shield holder—usually a fetching hostess or a playful creature such as a wild man, who presents a heraldic display (figures 2, 10).8 The person offering the shield lends the arms her good looks or his vitality, while providing an opportunity for exploring the female form or drolleries of costume and pose. On the last page of the Peregrinatio, a woman crowned with an exotic turban and sheer veil tenders a shield with Reuwich’s own printer’s mark (figure 3).9 On the frontispiece, she fulfills her role by gesturing to the shield, helm, crest, and title of Breydenbach, which are given pride of place on her right. Across her body, they face the achievement of Count Johann von Solms-Lich (Johannes Comes in Solms et dominus in Mintzenberg), an eighteen-year-old nobleman who also made the pilgrimage. He was escorted by a knight in the service of his family, Philipp von Bicken (Philippus de bicken miles), whose somewhat smaller and more wilted armorial bearings assume a lower position on the pedestal, commensurate with his station.10 Beyond Breydenbach’s noble birth, the frontispiece also invokes his church office, through the inscription below his shield that announces him as “Bernhard von Breydenbach, Dean and Chamberlain of the Church of Mainz” (Bernhardus de breidenbach decanns et Camerarius ecclesiae Moguntine), and through the pairing of this with the arms of his superior, the archbishop of Mainz, inserted across the opening in an initial that begins the text in the Latin, Dutch, and some of exemplars of the German editions (figure 4).
With the heraldry of the archbishop, the book’s dedicatee, Breydenbach pulls a fourth, more august personage into orbit. Breydenbach’s return from pilgrimage and his publishing activities coincided with the prime of his career, which was spent entirely in the service of the Mainz archdiocese. Born around 1435 to a family in the lower ranks of the nobility with a seat at Breidenbach, about eighty miles north of Mainz, Bernhard was educated from a young age at the school attached to the cathedral in Mainz, then from 1456 to 1458 at the University of Erfurt, which lay within the extensive territories subject to the archbishop.11 In 1450, Breydenbach was named a member of the cathedral chapter, a body of twenty-four clerics (each required to trace his noble descent through all sixteen of his great-grandparents), who elected the archbishop and assisted him in the running of the diocese. The archbishop was ex officio one of the seven prince-electors who met to choose each new Holy Roman emperor. Indeed, he was the chairman (Archcancellarius) of the prince-electors, with power and clout to represent to the pope, advise the emperor, and address affairs throughout the realm. Accordingly, the responsibilities and prestige of this cathedral chapter exceeded the norm, and the canons were generously supported by income from the chapter’s own significant territories and landholdings and from additional benefices and posts they filled. Breydenbach, for example, was appointed a canon at three local churches and a fourth about forty-five miles to the east in Aschaffenburg. There is evidence that already before his pilgrimage he also played a role in supervising the printing projects of the archdiocese on his superior’s behalf: his arms appear at the bottom of a metalcut on the colophon page of the 1480 Agenda Moguntinensis (Mainz Agenda). Issued under the name of the archbishop with his arms depicted at the top of the metalcut, this publication outlined the liturgical formulas for various rites as practiced in the diocese (figure 9).12
Breydenbach’s pilgrimage took place midcareer with at least three members of the traveling party brought together some time around February 1, 1483, when Breydenbach sent letters to Mainz requesting that his painter join him at the residence of Count Johann in Lich about fifty miles northeast of Mainz. Breydenbach seems to have called the painter in order to create a portrait of the young man, and documents confirm the artist answered the summons. A portrait made in 1528 by Hans Döring, presumably a copy of the lost original, professes to show the count at that age.13 Breydenbach is documented in Lich at least once more, returning to Mainz on April 13, and in that week he received permission twice over to absent himself from his duties, with one permit authorizing a six-month absence from a diocesan law court on account of plague and a second consenting to a year’s absence from the cathedral chapter for pilgrimage.14
On April 25, 1483, the traveling party
