Background
Maundrell was born at Compton Bassett, near Calne, Wiltshire, in 1665.
Maundrell was born at Compton Bassett, near Calne, Wiltshire, in 1665.
He attended Exeter College, Oxford from 1682 and obtained his Bachelor and then in 1688, his Master of Arts. At his graduation he was appointed a Fellow of the college, where he would remain until 1689.
His Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter Anno Domini 1697 (Oxford, 1703), which had its origins in the diary he carried with him on his Easter pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1697, has become an often reprinted "minor travel classic." lieutenant was included in compilations of travel accounts from the mid-18th century, and was translated into three additional languages: French (1705), Dutch (1717) and German (1792). By 1749, the seventh edition was printed. He accepted a curacy at Brompton, Kent, 1689-1695, he was ordained priest by the Bishop of Rochester, Thomas Sprat, at Croydon, on 23 February 1691.
The Levant Company community at Aleppo consisted of only forty men, living in monastic seclusion: Maundrell wrote to Henry Osborne, "We live in separate squares, shut up at night after the manner of colleges.
We begin the day constantly. He left Aleppo in February 1697 in a company of fifteen mentor
Their circuit took them across Syria to Latakia, down the Syrian and Lebanese coasts as far as Acre, which they found in ruinous state save for a khan (caravanserai) occupied by some French merchants, a mosque and a few poor cottages. Thence they proceeded inland to Jerusalem, where they attended Latin rite Easter services at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
They returned to Aleppo via Damascus, Baalbek and Tripoli.
They arrived 18 May. The descriptions were constantly referred to relevant passages in the Bible, and encounters with greedy local Ottoman officials at road blocks and checkpoints demanding payment of caphar confirmed Maundrell in his distaste for the local inhabitants. Maundrell was an observant reporter with a passion for precise detail:
lieutenant is concise in contents, plain and attractive in style, and precise in its natural exposition of facts, all of which make it interesting to read even to-day.
When the diary, crammed with precise, factual information, began to circulate among his friends they quickly realized that here at last was one of the first factual accounts of the antiquities of the Middle East.
—Mohamad Ali Hachicho in 1964
By the time it appeared, Maundrell, never in robust health, had died in Aleppo in 1701. A further travel journal was published as A Journey to the Banks of the Euphrates at Beer, and to the Country of Mesopotamia (Oxford, 1699). lieutenant was appended to the Journey to Jerusalem in the 1714 edition