The Marquis of Tarifa’s Journey to the Holy Land (1518–1520): Mediterranean Impressions and Sevillian Reflections

The article analyzes the piligrimage diary of the Sevillian aristocrat Fadrique Enriquez de Ribera, Marquis of Tarifa (1476-1539), who travelled to Jerusalem between 1518 and 1520. The different stages of the journey – Spain, France, Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean – are described unevenly and with varying degrees of detail. The study focuses on those parts of the journey that were of greatest interest to Don Fadrique and that allowed him to determine the route and duration of his stays independently. From this perspective, particular attention is given to Italy, where the breadth of the Marquis’s interests becomes evident. An analysis of the diary highlights the importance the author attached to descriptions of city fortifications, hospitals, the political organization of urban republics, the Order of the Hospitallers on Rhodes, Carthusian monasteries and funerary monuments. All these interests are explained either by the author’s social status as an aristocrat and knight or by the specific aims he set for his journey. At the same time, the diary shows that in his aesthetic preferences the Marquis of Tarifa remained more a man of the Middle Ages than of the Renaissance.

He rarely refers to classical antiquities, seldom mentions Renaissance buildings and never notes their novelty in comparison with medieval ones. Nevertheless, the reconstruction of his palace (the Casa de Pilatos) and the creation of a funerary chapel for his ancestors, which he undertook in Seville after returning from his travel, demonstrate a clear influence of Renaissance architecture and sculpture in its northern Italian version. The palace and the chapel became the first Renaissance buildings in Seville and played an important role in the development of the Spanish Renaissance.

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