Marino Sanuto the Elder

Marino Sanuto or Sanudo the Elder of Torcello (1260 – 1338) was a Venetian statesman and geographer.

He is best known for his lifelong attempts to revive the crusading spirit and movement; with this object he wrote his great work, the Secreta (or Liber Secretorum) Fidelium Crucis, otherwise called Historia Hierosolymitana, Liber de expeditione Terrae Sanctae, and Opus Terrae Sanctae, the last being perhaps the proper title of the whole treatise as completed in three parts or "books". This work has much to say of trade and trade-routes as well as of political and other history; and through its accompanying maps and plans it occupies an important place in the development of cartography. It was begun in March 1306, and finished (in its earliest form) in January 1307, when it was offered to Pope Clement V as a manual for true Crusaders who desired the reconquest of the Holy Land. To this original Liber Secretorum Sanuto added largely; two other "books" were composed between December 1312 and September 1321, when the entire work was presented by the author to Pope John XXII, together with a map of the world, a map of Palestine, a chart of the Mediterranean, Black Sea and west European coasts, and plans of Jerusalem, Antioch and Acre. A copy was also offered to the king of France, to whom Sanuto desired to commit the military and political leadership of the new crusade.

Marino himself tells us that he had spent the best part of his life in "Romania", the lands of the Eastern empire; of the Morea he had especially intimate knowledge; he had also visited Cyprus, Rhodes, parts of the Syrian, Cilician and Egyptian coasts, France, Flanders and north Germany, both west and east of Denmark. He had been in Acre, Alexandria, Constantinople, Avignon, Bruges and Sluys, as well as (apparently) in Hamburg, Lübeck, Wismar, , Stralsund, Greifswald and Stettin. Among his friends and correspondents were Guglielmo Bernardi de Furvo, a Venetian nobleman who had travelled extensively in Muslem and Mongol lands (to Tabriz, Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo), Bishop Jerome of Kaffa, in the Crimea, who in 1312 had been sent to reinforce the Catholic mission in China, and perhaps Peter, the English-born bishop of Sevastopolis or Sukhum Kale in western Caucasia, who makes an appeal for aid to the prelates of England in 1330. Marino Sanuto's ancestor, Marco, had founded the greatness of his family after the Fourth Crusade as duke of the Archipelago and conqueror of Naxos, Paros, etc. (from 1207); and his descendant wrote with a personal interest in the odd question of crushing the Muslim World.

...
Wikipedia