From Tripoli through Cyprus, to Mount Sinai (2)

Crossing the Deserts of Egypt to St. Catherine’s Monastery

In the previous post, we followed an anonymous group of Eastern Christian travellers from a monastery near Tripoli through Cyprus and onward to Egypt. Their journey survives only on a detached folio preserved in a Syriac manuscript in the Vatican Library.¹ Although the account records little more than place names and dates, it offers a rare glimpse into mobility across the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the fifteenth century.

The identity of the travellers remains elusive. After the publication of the first post, a colleague suggested an intriguing possibility: perhaps these travellers were monks of St. Catherine’s Monastery returning home rather than pilgrims travelling to Sinai. For a while, I found this idea quite appealing. Yet the surviving evidence makes it difficult to confirm. The account is essentially an itinerary, concerned almost exclusively with recording places crossed and periods of residence. Additionally, the fragmentary nature of our source prevents us from reconstructing the wider context of this particular journey.

It is also worth remembering that the account survives on a detached manuscript leaf. Other folios describing earlier or later stages of the journey may have been lost, separated from the manuscript, or may still await discovery in another collection. Until further evidence emerges, the most plausible interpretation remains that of a long journey to Mount Sinai.

The first stage of the journey carried the travellers from Tripoli across Cyprus and onward to Egypt. In this post, we follow them through the second stage of their route: from the Egyptian coast, across the Nile Valley, and into the Sinai desert.

Like the first account, the second is remarkably concise. It offers no descriptions of landscapes, cities, or people. We hear nothing about the travellers’ emotions, motivations, or experiences. Names are absent, purposes are unstated, and only the principal stopping points and a handful of dates are recorded.

The second account is written on folio 119r in a different hand from the first account on folio 119v. Despite the change of scribe, both texts clearly describe the same journey. Not only are they written on opposite sides of the same folio, but both conclude with the travellers reaching St. Catherine’s Monastery on the same date: the first day of February (corresponding to 10 February using Gregorian calendar).

In what follows, I present an edition of the second itinerary and then attempt to trace the route recorded by its anonymous author.

Edition (f. 119r)

المجد لله دايما
من القاهرة يوم الاحد يوم عيد القديس ماقاريوس
في شهر كانون المبارك وانزلنا العرب في جبل الذهب
ومنه عالبركة ومن البركة الى الخانكة وايضا يوم
الخميس وهو يوم الثالث والعشرين منه سرنا الى
الدير المقدس راسا الى جفراه وثاني مرحله مقمعر
وثاني عيون موسى والثالثه وروان؟ وخامس
غرندون وسادس عكره و7الجلده و8
ام حلق ومنه الى الدير المقدس
المجد (؟)
بسم الله بسم الله
اول شهر شباط وصلنا الى الدير
المقدس طور سينا احفظه الله تعالى

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Glory be to God always.
From Cairo, on Sunday, the feast day of Saint Mercurius, in the blessed month of Kānūn, the Arabs brought us down at Jabal al-Dhahab (the Mountain of Gold). From there to al-Birka (the Pond), and from al-Birka to al-Khānkah.
Also, on Thursday, the twenty-third day of the same month, we set out directly for the Holy Monastery: first to Jafrāh; the second stage to Muqamʿar; the third to ʿUyūn Mūsā; the fourth to Wirwān; the fifth to Gharandūn; the sixth to ʿAkraa; the seventh to al-Jalda; the eighth to Umm Ḥalaq; and from there to the Holy Monastery.
Glory (?)
In the name of God, in the name of God.
On the first day of the month of Shubāṭ (February), we arrived at the Holy Monastery of Mount Sinai. May God Most High preserve it.

From Damietta to Cairo

The first itinerary ended with the travellers arriving in Damietta, where they remained for two and a half months. At first glance, this lengthy stay may seem surprising, given the relatively short distance between Damietta and Cairo. Yet Damietta was far more than a provincial port. Since the Middle Ages, it had hosted a flourishing Melkite (Greek Orthodox) community, and St. Catherine’s Monastery maintained a dependency (metochion) there. Several monks and visitors associated with Sinai are known to have come from the city.

From Damietta the group travelled to Cairo, where they stayed for another two months. Cairo was an essential stop for travellers heading to St. Catherine’s. The archbishop of Sinai usually resided in the monastery’s Cairene dependency rather than at Sinai itself, and visitors often required a letter of recommendation from him before being admitted to the monastery.

The archbishop’s prolonged residence in Cairo was partly connected to the monastery’s relations with the Bedouin tribes of Sinai. According to local custom, whenever the archbishop visited the monastery, gates of the monastery had to be opened and food distributions were made to the surrounding Bedouin communities. Combined with long-standing tensions between monks and Bedouin groups, this custom encouraged the archbishop to remain in Cairo for much of the year.

The travellers left Cairo on the Feast of St. Mercurius, which fell on Sunday, 19 January. They reached St. Catherine’s Monastery on 10 February. Although the second account does not specify the year, the chronology can be reconstructed by joining the two itinerary. The travellers departed from the Monastery of St. James in October 1498, spent ten months in al-Kūrah, two and a half months in Damietta, and two months in Cairo. The duration of their stay in Cyprus is not given apart from the eight days spent in Paphos. Assuming approximately one month on the island and no major delays, the journey would have culminated at Sinai on 10 February 1500 CE, almost sixteen months after its beginning. If they had stayed longer in Cyprus, this would indicate at least a year since they arrived in February, and it would have been the year 1501 when they arrived at the monastery.

MS Sinai, Ar. 315, fol. 1r: Commission note by the steward of the monastery in 1485 CE. Image by permission from St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai

From Cairo to the monastery: stops on the road

Some of the place names recorded in the itinerary can be identified with relative confidence, either because they still survive today or because they appear in other travel accounts. Before setting out into the Sinai desert, travellers customarily gathered on the eastern outskirts of Cairo, where they waited for caravans heading either to Mecca for the pilgrimage or to the port of al-Ṭūr for commercial transport. The account mentions three stops in this area. The first is Jabal al-Dhahab “the Mountain of Gold”. To the best of my knowledge, no place bearing this exact name is known today. One possible clue may be al-Jabal al-Aṣfar “the Yellow Mountain”, an area east of Cairo. Although the modern site developed only in the twentieth century, the similarity between the names raises the possibility that an older toponym may lie behind both designations.²

The second stop is al-Birka “the Pond,” a well-known location frequently mentioned in Arabic sources. Medieval authors refer to it as Birkat al-Ḥājj “the Pilgrims’ Pond” or Birkat al-Jubb, describing it as a low-lying area on the pilgrimage route east of Cairo.³ The third stop is al-Khānka, more specifically Khānqāt Siryāqūs, a place that appears regularly in medieval travel accounts.⁴ According to the itinerary, the travellers spent almost five days moving through these staging points before finally setting out into the desert on Thursday, 23 January.

Once they entered Sinai, the author recorded a sequence of stops along the route. He divides the journey into marāḥil (stages), treating each halt as a separate stage of travel. At first, these stages are numbered in Arabic words—second, third, and so on up to the sixth stage. Thereafter, for no obvious reason, the author switches to Coptic epact numerals.

The first place mentioned is Jafrāh, which may correspond to the plain known in medieval Arabic sources as al-Jafār in northern Sinai.⁵ The travellers appear to have reached it on the same day they left Cairo. The next stop, written as Muqamʿar in the itinerary, may be identical with the deserted campsite that the fifteenth-century traveller Felix Fabri (1441-1502) called Meschmar or Megmar.⁶

Several of the subsequent locations are easier to identify. ʿUyūn Mūsā “the Springs of Moses” remains a well-known site until today. The place called Wirwān in the itinerary is most likely Wādī Warfān, mentioned by Carsten Niebuhr as a place inhabited by local Arabs.⁷ Likewise, Gharandūn probably corresponds to modern Gharandal near Abū Zenima, where a similar place name survives today.⁸ Also Um Ḥalaq the last place mentioned before arriving in the monastery is mentioned in some sources.⁹ However, some places such as al-Jalda and ʿAkra remain in need of more research to be located.

Why This Journey Matters?

These two short itineraries are intriguing precisely because of their brevity. Written by two different hands, they nevertheless follow the same strategy. The first account focused on the route from Tripoli to Egypt and largely passed over travel within Egypt itself. The second seems intended to fill that gap, providing a more detailed record of the route from Cairo to Sinai.

Neither author was interested in describing landscapes, recording conversations, or reflecting on personal experiences. Instead, both concentrated on the practical framework of travel: routes, stopping places, dates, durations of stay, and occasionally means of transport. Yet the close relationship between the two texts suggests that the authors either wrote together or composed their accounts in close succession. Whether Mount Sinai was their final destination remains uncertain, and we do not know how long they remained there.

The timing of the journey is particularly significant. Around 1500, St. Catherine’s Monastery appears to have been experiencing a period of decline. When Arnold von Harff (1471-1502) visited in 1497, he reported finding only eight monks in residence, and claimed that no Latin Christian had reached Sinai during the previous decade—a statement that is demonstrably inaccurate, yet revealing of contemporary perceptions.

At the same time, the historical record is unusually thin. We are not even sure who was the archbishop of Sinai at the time. The only identifiable official is the monastery’s steward, Bāysiyūs, who commissioned manuscript Sinai Arabic 315 in 1485.

Against this background, the journey recorded on this modest manuscript folio becomes all the more remarkable. At a moment when evidence for Sinai is scarce, an otherwise anonymous group of Arabic-speaking Eastern Christians left behind one of the few surviving testimonies to movement between the Levant, Cyprus, Cairo, and Mount Sinai at the dawn of the sixteenth century.

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1. MS Vatican, BAV, Syr. 647 is available for viewing in the Vatican Library reading room (https://digi.vatlib.it/, account needed). ↩︎
2. Geographical Dictionary of Egypt, vol. 2, 41. ↩︎
3. Geographical Dictionary of Egypt, vol. 2, 31. ↩︎
4. Ibn Iyās, Badāʼiʻ al-Zuhūr, vol. 3, 372. Fabri crossed on his way from Cairo crossed the same place. See Felix Fabri’s Pilgrimage from Gaza To Mount Sinai, 115. ↩︎
5. From Ḥimdān, Sinai, 122, 204-205. It is called Route du Jifar in Richards, St. Catherine Monastery and the Bedouins, 148. ↩︎
6. Felix Fabri’s Pilgrimage from Gaza To Mount Sinai, 68. ↩︎
7. See the Trip of Nibur to the Arab Peninsula, 158. ↩︎
8. Felix Fabri’s Pilgrimage from Gaza To Mount Sinai, 108-109. ↩︎
9. Moatamed and Zayni 2023, 62. ↩︎

keywords: Archbishop of Sinai, Bedouins, Damietta, Eastern Christian travellers, Sinai Peninsula, St. Catherine’s Monastery

Arabic Translation of this post is here الترجمة العربية لهذا النص هنا

Suggested Citation: Vevian Zaki (10 July 2026). ” From Tripoli through Cyprus to Sinai (2): Crossing the Deserts of Egypt to St. Catherine’s Monastery” Margins Speak Blog (https://vevianzaki.com/2026/07/10/from-tripoli-through-cyprus-to-mount-sinai-2/)