Month: December 2025

Benjamin’s account of Alexandria begins with the famed lighthouse, the Manar al-Iskandriyyah, which Alexander the Great had built on a pier extending into the sea. The lighthouse features a large tower with a glass mirror that could reportedly allow inhabitants to see ships from a distance of twenty days’ journey. Benjamin recounts a story in which a Greek captain named Theodoros breaks the mirror, after which Christians gain greater access to the surrounding seas, eventually capturing Crete and Cyprus. This anecdote emphasizes the strategic importance of Alexandria’s location for maritime control, as well as the city’s role in the interaction between Christian, Greek, and Egyptian spheres of power. For Benjamin, the lighthouse symbolizes both technological sophistication and the vulnerabilities inherent in controlling trade and naval passage.

Beyond its military significance, Alexandria functions as a commercial crossroads for merchants from across Europe, the Mediterranean, and as far as India and Africa. Benjamin enumerates a remarkable range of trading partners: Venetia, Lombardy, Tuscany, Apulia, Amalfi, Sicily, Calabria, Hungary, France, Aragon, Andalusia, Africa, Arabia, India, and Javan. Goods such as spices, silver, gold, silk, and linen flow through Alexandria, demonstrating its centrality in medieval trade networks. Each nation reportedly maintains its own inn, suggesting a cosmopolitan city accustomed to accommodating diverse travelers. Through this lens, Benjamin emphasizes the city as a point of contact between multiple religious, ethnic, and economic communities.

Religious and demographic observations are also central to Benjamin’s description. He notes around 3,000 Jews in Alexandria and provides detailed counts for Jewish populations in surrounding towns, such as Damietta, Simasim, Sunbat, and Tanis. His attention to these populations reflects both practical concerns for Jewish travelers and a broader interest in the status and distribution of Jewish communities in the Mediterranean. The presence of Christian and Mohammedan communities alongside Jews illustrates the plurality of religious life, while Benjamin’s careful record-keeping indicates the ways in which Jews navigated this diversity for commerce, pilgrimage, and communal support.

Benjamin also records the physical and logistical aspects of travel in and around Alexandria. He gives distances between towns, the relative fertility of lands, and economic activities such as flax cultivation, linen weaving, and local trade. Travelers where Jewish communities reside as well as which regions provide resources, sustenance, or trade opportunities. Alexandria, with its fertile surroundings, maritime access, and extensive markets, provides both material support and safe passage for long-distance travelers, particularly pilgrims heading toward Jerusalem.

Interpreting Benjamin’s account, it is clear that Alexandria embodies the intersection of wealth, religious diversity, and strategic importance. The city’s maritime prominence, extensive commercial connections, and abundant local resources make it a model of medieval urban significance. Benjamin’s attention to both Jewish communities and foreign merchants highlights the ways in which trade and religion were intertwined, and how Jewish travelers relied on knowledge of these networks for safety and sustenance. Furthermore, the story of the broken lighthouse mirror suggests a Jewish awareness of geopolitical shifts and the subtle relations of power among Christians, Greeks, and Egyptians.

Overall, Alexandria emerges as a city of remarkable complexity: a strategic maritime center, a hub of international trade, a locus for diverse religious communities, and a waypoint for pilgrims. Benjamin’s narrative blends practical travel information—distances, populations, products, and ports—with a reflection on cultural, political, and religious networks, demonstrating how medieval travelers understood and navigated the Mediterranean world. His account provides insight into both the material realities of travel and the broader cultural interactions that shaped the experiences of Jewish and non-Jewish communities in the medieval period.

Benjamin portrays Palermo as a prosperous and well-governed city on the island of Sicily, rich in natural resources and architectural marvels. He emphasizes the king’s domain, including a garden called Al Harbina, which contains every type of fruit tree, a large fountain, and an enclosed reservoir called Al Buheira with fish. The king owns ships overlaid with gold and silver, illustrating both wealth and leisure. Benjamin describes palaces with walls painted and overlaid with precious metals, and marble floors designed with intricate gold and silver patterns. For a medieval traveler, these details signal Palermo’s opulence and sophistication, setting it apart from other Mediterranean cities.

The city also functions as a hub for pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem, suggesting its significance within broader religious and commercial networks. Benjamin notes the Jewish population of around 1,500, alongside numerous Christians and Mohammedans, reflecting the city’s religious diversity. He highlights the fertility of the surrounding land, including abundant springs, gardens, wheat, and barley, which support both local sustenance and trade. Palermo is thus a city where commerce, agriculture, and political power converge, offering travelers both material resources and social insight.

From a practical perspective, Benjamin provides travel information: Palermo is roughly two days’ journey from Messina, and from there pilgrims cross to Jerusalem. Distances, populations, and local economic products are carefully noted, demonstrating the interconnectedness of Mediterranean trade and pilgrimage networks. Travelers would find Palermo not only a place of beauty and wealth but also a logistical waypoint for longer journeys.

Interpreting Benjamin’s description, one can see that his attention to material wealth, gardens, and palaces underscores medieval values regarding power and status. His continued interest in Jewish populations suggests a concern with both communal welfare and potential assistance for Jewish travelers. The combination of leisure, commerce, and strategic location would have made Palermo a model city in Benjamin’s eyes: a place where political authority, economic activity, and cultural diversity were all very evident.

Overall, Palermo emerges as a site of wealth, religious and cultural diversity, and strategic importance, offering insights into the networks that shaped medieval life. Benjamin’s account blends factual travel information with his own religious/cultural concerns, making it both a practical guide and a reflection of Jewish experience.

In addition, Benjamin provides information on Messina, which lies about two days’ journey from Palermo along the northeastern coast of Sicily. Messina serves as the initial port of arrival for travelers coming from the eastern Mediterranean and functions as a critical waypoint for pilgrims heading to Jerusalem. He notes the fertility of the area, with gardens and plantations that supply both the local population and visitors, highlighting the city’s role in provisioning travelers. Though smaller than Palermo, Messina’s position on the sea makes it an important logistical hub, connecting Sicily with broader Mediterranean trade and pilgrimage routes. By including Messina, Benjamin emphasizes the practical side of travel: while Palermo showcases wealth and cultural prominence, Messina ensures access, sustenance, and maritime connectivity for those on extended journeys.

Plotting Benjamin of Tudela’s route onto the Tabula Rogeriana made the differences between medieval and modern maps feel much more obvious than they did in theory. Once the points were actually sitting on al-Idrīsī’s map, I could see how each map carries its own ideas about what matters in the world. The modern map treats distance and navigation as the main concern, while the medieval map treats relationships, routes, and cultural density as the things that make geography meaningful.

Working first with the modern map pushed me into a very standardized way of thinking. I had to turn Benjamin’s “a day’s journey,” “five parasangs,” or “the road is dangerous because of serpents and scorpions” into something a contemporary viewer could recognize. That meant looking for distances, estimating travel time, and describing terrain as if those details were meant to be objective. The modern map doesn’t care that Babylon has biblical ruins or that Hillah has four synagogues and 10,000 Jews. It only cares where those cities sit on a coordinate grid. It has no way of portraying anything more complex than that.

The Tabula Rogeriana, on the other hand, treats space as something lived, which is what makes it perfect for this narrative. The south-up orientation shifts gravity toward Africa and the Mediterranean instead of Europe. That orientation lines up seamlessly with Benjamin’s own priorities. He spends more time in the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Egypt than in Western Europe, and those regions sit at the top of al-Idrīsī’s map. The map reinforces the idea that this part of the world is central. It does not flatten it or minimize it in the way a modern map would.

The climate zones create another layer of meaning and intrigue. Al-Idrīsī divides the world into seven horizontal bands that each carry environmental and social implications. When I placed Benjamin’s journey points into those bands, his descriptions made more sense. His comments on prosperity, strong water systems, and thriving trade fall in the temperate zones. His mentions of instability or sparse settlement fall in harsher ones. The modern map ignores this logic. It gives terrain but doesn’t try to explain why different climate regions feel different to the traveler. The Tabula offers that context immediately, making Benjamin’s descriptions feel rooted rather than vague.

Medieval travelers also thought about distance differently than we do now, and plotting Benjamin’s route onto the Tabula brought that into focus. His sense of movement is tied to people, customs, and the reputations of regions rather than to mileage. A “day’s journey” only makes sense inside a world where travel time depends on terrain, safety, hospitality, and political stability. The Tabula supports that mindset because it organizes space around lived experience. Its climate bands, regional clusters, and emphasis on navigable water routes give a traveler information that a modern map treats as irrelevant.

The density of coastal cities and river routes on the Tabula Rogeriana stood out as soon as I began placing points. The map shows the Mediterranean as a complex, connected system rather than just a boundary. Once I plotted Benjamin’s stops, that network lined up naturally. His itinerary mirrors the patterns the map highlights: ports, commercial cities, political centers, and river crossings. A modern map hides this structure because it treats every coordinate as equal. Without additional notes, it makes Hillah, Babylon, and Kufa look isolated instead of part of a dense, interdependent region. The Tabula makes the social logic of his route visible.

Part of what enables this clarity is the way the map makes its priorities explicit. Medieval maps were not trying to depict the world “accurately” in the modern sense. They were arguing for the importance of certain regions and routes. The south-up orientation, the expanded Mediterranean basin, and the dense labeling of port cities all show where al-Idrīsī believed the world’s energy was concentrated. A modern map distributes space evenly, which washes out these differences. The Tabula shows that some regions mattered more than others, and that acknowledgment helps Benjamin’s journey fall into place rather than float between isolated points.

Scale shifts are part of this worldview. Modern maps stretch space evenly, so long stretches look empty. The Tabula compresses and expands regions depending on cultural significance. When I placed Benjamin’s points, the areas he focuses on felt larger or more central because the map expects those places to matter. It isn’t a distortion; it’s a perspective. Seeing the two visualizations side by side made it clear that Benjamin’s itinerary fits more naturally inside al-Idrīsī’s system than inside a modern one.

Actually plotting the points exposed how much interpretation the assignment required. Some sites, like Babylon or Kufa, aligned easily with the river systems the Tabula emphasizes. Others—especially smaller villages or religious landmarks—had to be placed by reading the logic of the surrounding map rather than looking for a one-to-one match. That felt truer to how medieval maps functioned: as guides blending geography, memory, and narrative. My choices—where to put Kotsonath, how far to place Hillah from Babylon, how to position Ain Siptha—mirrored the judgment a traveler like Benjamin would have relied on. Working this way made the medieval world feel less abstract and showed how geography, storytelling, and lived experience were linked.

While the modern map argues for objectivity and measurement, the medieval one argues for networks, climates, and centers of life. Putting Benjamin’s journey onto both made the assumptions behind each style visible in a way they weren’t before. It changed how I see his travels and how I think about the act of mapping in a broader sense.