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Benjamin of Tudela went on to Constantinople by way of Gardiki, a small township on the Gulf of Volo, Armyros, a port much frequented by the Venetians and Genoese, Bissina, a town of which no traces are left, Salonica, the ancient Thessalonica, and Abydos.
Alexandria was practically the centre of all this trade, and most of the nations of Europe found it necessary to establish factories in that city, to safeguard the interests of their merchants, who all sought for Eastern luxuries in its port Benjamin of Tudela, a Jew, who visited it about 1172, gives the following description of it:
Benjamin of Tudela visited that part of Turkey in Asia which is watered by the Euphrates and Tigris, and saw the ruined city of Babylon, passing by what is said to be the furnace into which Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were thrown, and the tower of Babel, which he describes as follows.
The only writer that casts any doubt upon Benjamin's record as to independent Jewish tribes in Arabia is R. Jacob Safir, who visited Yemen and other Arabian ports in the Red Sea in the year 1864. See chaps. xv and xliii of Iben Safir, Lyck, 1866. Dr. L. Grünhut, in his introduction, Die Reisebeschreibungen des R. Benjamin von Tudela, Jerusalem, 1903, p. 16, refutes Safir's statements.
Bay, one of his generals, gathered together eighteen thousand men, with whom he retired to Tudela, without any impediment on the part of the enemy. M. de Vendome learnt the news of this defeat while on his way to Spain. Like a prudent man as he was, for his own interests, he stopped at once so as to see what turn affairs were taking, and to know how to act.
The vacations were passed by the young men either at the count's house at Madrid, or at a country residence near Tudela, north of which, in the central valleys of his native province of Navarre, the Conde de Villabuena owned extensive estates.
The tower of Lebanon is described as looking towards Damascus. The ruins of this house and tower, in the forest of Lebanon, are probably those seen by Benjamin of Tudela, who describes the stones of which it was built as twenty palms long, and twelve wide. Gabriel Sionits describes the tower as an hundred cubits high, and fifty broad.
A Jewish traveller, who visited the East in the twelfth century, is lost in his admiration of the Byzantine riches. "It is here," says Benjamin of Tudela, "in the queen of cities, that the tributes of the Greek empire are annually deposited and the lofty towers are filled with precious magazines of silk, purple, and gold.
It chanced, that on the fourth day after the arrival of Luis and the Villabuenas from Salamanca, the two latter rode over to the Ebro, below Tudela, for the purpose of bathing. They were not good swimmers, and were moreover unaccustomed to bathe in so rapid and powerful a stream.
"From near and far they came," says the contemporary poet-chronicler, William of Tudela; "there be men from Auvergne and Burgundy, France and Limousin; there be men from all the world; there be Germans, Poitevines, Gascons, Rouergats, and Saintongese. Never did God make scribe who, whatsoever his pains, could set them all down in writing, in two months or in three."
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