Five days’ journey from Abydos is Constantinople, the seat of the Greek empire. Benjamin of Tudela briefly describes the structure of the government under King Emanuel, with his twelve ministers. As is typical for this account, Benjamin does not describe the practical or physical aspects of his journey—there is no indication of where he stayed, or for how long, or how he traveled to and from the city. He does describe the terrain surrounding the city and how it is situated on a peninsula, surrounded on one side by an arm of the Sea of Russia and the other side the Sea of Sepharad. It is eighteen miles in circumference, one of the larger cities he has visited.

He spends a large part of this excerpt talking about the merchant activity, wealth, and material possessions of Constantinople and the Greeks. We know very little about Benjamin of Tudela outside of his Itinerary, but a common theory is that he was a merchant of some kind. This passage certainly supports this conclusion, since he seems especially interested in trade and goods out of everything he saw in Constantinople. In fact, the majority of his writings on this city are devoted to those subjects. He says that Constantinople enjoys lots of merchant activity from all over: Egypt, Persia, Hungary, Russia, Babylon, and more. In terms of the architecture, he describes churches and palaces with pillars of gold and silver, inlaid with precious stones. He says that the King’s palace, Blachernae, was made of so many precious metals and jewels that it shone by moonlight. He is also concerned with the tributes received from all over the kingdom, the total of which he is told amounts to 20,000 gold pieces every year. These include silks and fabrics of purple and gold, the most precious and expensive colors. The inhabitants themselves are rich in gold and jewels and wear silks and embroidery. They ride horses and eat bread, meat, and wine. He says they “look like princes,” and calls it the richest land in the world.

In contrast are the Jews of Constantinople, who are relegated to a ghetto outside the city, behind and inlet, so that they must travel by sea to get in or out. He says that they are permitted to do business in the city, and that there are silkmakers and rich merchants among them, but overall their condition is poor. There are 2,000 Rabbanite and 500 Karaite Jews, divided by a fence. Benjamin sees that the Greeks hate the Jews, defiling their homes and beating them in the streets. These are some of the worst conditions of the Jewish population seen in his travels. Yet, he says, the Jews are good, kind, charitable, and cheerful despite their oppression. Wherever the place, Benjamin of Tudela speaks highly of Jews, even in unfamiliar lands or of different ethnicities, when he otherwise dislikes or distrusts the native populations. There was great allegiance among the Jewish diaspora of Benjamin’s time, and a great desire for communication between scattered groups of Jews, as noted in part II of the introduction: “In the sacred tongue they possessed a common language, and wherever they went they could rely upon a hospitable reception from their co-religionists. Travelling was, therefore, to them comparatively easy, and the bond of common interest always supplied a motive.” Interestingly, he writes that despite the widespread hatred of Jews the King’s physician, R. Solomon Hamitsri, is a Jew who lives in the ghetto, and through him the rest of the Jews enjoy some alleviation of their condition. In this time period the status of Jews was often extremely precarious, changing from one ruler to the next even within a single dynasty, region, or city. In these climates, individuals like R. Solomon could potentially bring their community up with them to a certain degree.

Two of the most common hypotheses for Benjamin’s reasons for traveling are present in this excerpt: first, the merchant theory, as mentioned previously, based on his great interest in trade, wealth, and goods in and out of Constantinople. Second, his interest in the conditions of Jews in each place he traveled, potentially writing a guide for his community on the safest places to live and move around.