Joint seminar with the Anglo-Turkish Society

Thursday 17 January 2019 at 6.00pm

at the Royal Anthropological Institute

Speaker: John Mole

Martoni’s Pilgrimage: the Levant before the Pax Ottomana

In 1394 a little, short-sighted middle aged provincial  lawyer from Southern Italy made a dangerous pilgrimage to Jerusalem across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, up the Nile to Cairo and across the Sinai to the Holy Land. He came home via Jaffa, Beirut, Cyprus, Rhodes, Athens and Corinth. He kept a diary that John Mole has translated from Latin.  It  is  fascinating first-hand account of peoples and lands in the turmoil of the Eastern Mediterranean as the Ottoman, Byzantine, Venetian and Latin empires struggle for supremacy. Join him on his journey!

John Mole lives in London and Greece. He graduated from Oxford University with a degree in French and German and from INSEAD with an MBA. He spent fifteen years travelling in Europe and the Middle East for an American bank. After leaving salaried employment to write full time, he published three comic novels. He wrote the best-selling ‘It’s All Greek To Me!’ about life in his village in Greece.‘The Sultan’s Organ’ is a modern English version of the wonderful diary of an Elizabethan musician, taking a self-playing organ and clock to Constantinople. His latest novel is The Hero of Negropont, a traveller’s tale set in Ottoman Greece.

Booking essential: https://john-mole-lecture.eventbrite.co.uk

Contact: contact@angloturkishsociety.org.uk

Location : Royal Anthropological Institute
50 Fitzroy Street
London
W1T 5BT
United Kingdom
http://www.therai.org.uk