lingua franca 339
nineteenth century, when the evidentiary trail peters out. The evidence is vexingly
contradictory, referring to an unfixed Romance-based language which may go by a
variety of names. We have enough historical evidence to be confident that the lan-
guage existed and that early modern travelers relied upon it as a necessary linguistic
strategy. However, we know little—beyond the details I have summarized here—
about the nature and structure of the language.^10
Negative evidenceIndeed, the category of what we do not know and cannot know about the lingua
franca is in some ways more compelling and provocative than the evidence I have
amassed here. It seems evident that the language must have emerged from the circu-
lation of Italian ships during the Middle Ages. Yet, with the exception of the two
equivocal literary texts discussed above (Fazio degli Uberti and the “Contrasto della
Zerbitana”), we have no medieval documentation of the language whatsoever. No
Arabic-language sources discuss the language in any detail. They occasionally men-
tion a “Frankish” language, but because they make no effort to describe the lan-
guage, we cannot know whether they refer to the lingua franca or in an entirely
imprecise way to “whatever language it is that those Franks speak.” Furthermore, I
can point to an extensive body of negative evidence: travelers in territory where the
lingua franca is attested by others who say nothing about the language themselves.
An anonymous English-language guide for pilgrims published in 1500 includes glos-
saries of useful words in Greek and Arabic and makes no mention of the lingua
franca (Informacon for pylgrymes, 27–28). During the 1580s, Giovanni Francesco
Alcarotti traveled overland from Constantinople to the Holy Land. He compiled a
highly-detailed, bracingly pragmatic guide for the pilgrim, including a list of words
that one would need on the road—most of them Turkish—and he advised the traveler
going by land from Tripoli to Jerusalem to learn a bit of Greek.^11 He said nothing
about the lingua franca. A 1583 report written for the Venetian Republic laments
the loss of souls on ships at sea: extra-communitarians who do not know the lingua
franca must die without confession or absolution.^12 Lanfreducci and Bosio, Knights
of Malta, wrote a detailed work of reconnaissance about the coast of the Maghreb in
- They ought to have noted the presence of the language; as we have seen,
Bartolomeo Ruffino reported hearing it in Tunis just 10 years earlier. Rather, they
tell us that Christian sailors off the Tunisian coast use what Turkish they know to
communicate with the local population (Lanfreducci and Bosio, 1925: 440). In
1612, four years before Pietro della Valle’s lingua franca conversation in Damascus,
Giovanni Paolo Pesenti passed through nearby Aleppo with a company of Italian
merchants on his way to the Holy Land, and left a lively description of Ramadan
nights spent drinking coffee and smoking tobacco in the cafes of Aleppo (before
either coffee or tobacco were familiar to western Europeans). He says nothing about
the lingua franca; he tells us that the traveler must rely upon dragomans in order to
communicate with the locals. Santo Brasca in the Holy Land in 1481; Henry de
Beauvau in the Holy Land in 1619; Domenico Magri in Mount Lebanon in 1664:
this is but a partial list of the mountain of negative evidence, travelers who wrote
books about their journeys through the Mediterranean which tell us nothing about
the lingua franca.