Marino Sanuto the Elder

Marino Sanuto or Sanudo the Elder of Torcello (1260 – 1338) was a Venetian statesman and geographer. He is best known for his lifelong attempts to revive the crusading spirit and movement; with this object he wrote his great work, the Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis.

The map of the Holy Land by Marino Sanudo, drawn in 1320 CE.

Life and travels

Marino himself tells us that he had spent the best part of his life in "Romania", the lands of the Eastern empire; of the Morea he had especially intimate knowledge; he had also visited Cyprus, Rhodes, parts of the Syrian, Cilician and Egyptian coasts, France, Flanders and north Germany, both west and east of Denmark. He had been in Acre, Alexandria, Constantinople, Avignon, Bruges and Sluys, as well as (apparently) in Hamburg, Lübeck, Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund, Greifswald and Stettin.

Among his friends and correspondents were Guglielmo Bernardi de Furvo, a Venetian nobleman who had travelled extensively in Muslim and Mongol lands (to Tabriz, Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo), Bishop Jerome of Kaffa, in the Crimea, who in 1312 had been sent to reinforce the Catholic mission in China, and perhaps Peter, the English-born bishop of Sevastopolis or Sukhum Kale in western Caucasia, who makes an appeal for aid to the prelates of England in 1330.

Marino Sanuto's ancestor, Marco, had founded the greatness of his family after the Fourth Crusade as duke of the Archipelago and conqueror of Naxos, Paros, etc. (from 1207); and his descendant wrote with a personal interest in the odd question of crushing the Muslim World.

References

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Sanuto, Marino, the elder". Encyclopædia Britannica. 24 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 196–197.

Marino Sanuto the Elder

Life and travels

See also

References