TERRA INCOGNITA: HOW CRUSADERS VIEWED NATURE IN THE BALKANS

The Crusaders who followed Via militaris or Via Egnatia to the Holy Land crossed the huge and absolutely unknown region of the Balkans where they found themselves in an unfamiliar natural environment. The article studies physical and psychological effects from the environment in the Crusader chronicles and pilgrimage accounts. The purpose of the study is to investigate how the nature affected the Crusaders and what they thought about it. In order to reconstruct the Crusaders’ perceptions of the Balkan’s nature, the author analyzes a certain rhetoric used by the chroniclers and pilgrims in their accounts. They constantly inform that on their way the Crusaders came across abandoned places (loca deserta), dense forests (silvae condensae) and steep mountains (abrupta montium). On the one hand, the use of these topoi by the Crusader chroniclers was an important way to domesticate an unfamiliar space. On the other hand, we can recognize their awareness of nature behind these stereotypical descriptions. Writing about the nature in the Balkans, chroniclers stress the desertedness, inaccessibility and remoteness of the region from any society and civilization. The representations of the wild and dangerous nature match with the stories about the Balkan people and their brutish customs, barbarous language and mode of living. On the whole, all these descriptions are based on the contrapositions of the notions of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilization’, ‘chaos’ and ‘order’ etc.

medieval Balkans, perception of nature, human-environmental interactions in the Middle Ages, therhetoric of nature description in medieval texts