Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Autograph I, c. 1480

The Coburg manuscript provides an early text version of Hans Tucher's travel report, which comprised three stages up to the final text form, before it went into print at the beginning of 1482. The gradual development towards the final printed version can be easily traced.
In the first stage the report was handed down in three manuscripts in which the outward journey and the stay in the Holy City, the onward journey to Saint Catherine's Monastery on the Sinai and the return journey to Venice as well as the travel expenses with detailed lists of travel provisions and costs were described in each case. They were based on extensive material that Tucher had collected on the trip, including a diary that he arranged and copied as a fair copy.

Only the Coburg report part is preserved in the original. It is to be supplemented by the Nuremberg fragment's eight separate sheets. Some of the other chapters have been preserved as copies, e.g. with an autograph by Sebald Rieter (1426-1488), which names the pro rata travel expenses of the two pilgrims Tucher and Rieter (Ansbach, Gymnasium Carolinum).

In the next stage, personal references in the text were erased or reshaped so that the description of an individual pilgrimage takes on general features that prospective pilgrims could use as a manual in planning and carrying out their journey. The three-part layout was then united in one manuscript (London, British Library).

Randall Herz

To the digitised copy