Benjamin of Tudela · 1173 · overland

The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, made in the 1160s and written down about 1173 - a rabbi from Navarre who travelled from Spain to Baghdad counting the Jewish population of every town he passed, and produced the most detailed picture of the twelfth-century Mediterranean that exists.

1. 1
   Tudela

   Navarre, around 1165, and a rabbi sets out east - counting the Jewish community of every town he passes through, which is what makes the Itinerary a document nobody else produced.

2. 2
   Barcelona

   Down through Aragon to the Catalan coast, and a city he calls small and beautiful - then along the Mediterranean shore into Provence and the ports of the Rhone.

3. 3
   Marseille

   Two congregations and a school, and the ship to Italy - Benjamin travelling as a merchant, or as a pilgrim, or as an agent of somebody, since he never says why he went.

4. 4
   Rome

   Two hundred Jews, and a description of the ruins with a precision that historians still quote - including the Colosseum, the Lateran, and vessels he was told had come from the Temple in Jerusalem.

5. 5
   Constantinople

   The greatest city in the world, its wealth catalogued street by street - and the Jews confined to Pera across the Golden Horn, forbidden to ride, and treated, he writes, very badly indeed.

6. 6
   Antioch

   Through the Aegean and along the Levantine coast into the Crusader states - a Jewish traveller moving through Latin territory in the decades before Saladin, and noting who lives where.

7. 7
   Jerusalem

   The city under the Crusader kingdom, with two hundred Jews living by the Tower of David - and the Western Wall, described here in what may be the earliest surviving account of Jews praying at it.

8. 8
   Damascus

   Three thousand Jews, and the great mosque, and the Nur al-Din hospital - the point where the Itinerary moves out of Christendom and starts describing the Islamic world from the inside.

9. 9
   Baghdad

   The Abbasid capital and the Exilarch, head of all the Jews of the east, whom Benjamin describes riding out with a mounted escort and being greeted by Muslims as a descendant of David.

10. 10
    Basra

    Down the Tigris to the head of the Gulf, and the furthest point that can be checked - beyond it his account of Persia, India and China is second-hand and he mostly says so.

11. 11
    Cairo

    Back west by way of Egypt, and Fustat, and the Nile - the last long stretch of the Itinerary, and the point at which the record simply stops without saying how he got home.