In March 1923, when British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory was touring the United States to raise money for an expedition to Mount Everest planned for the following year, a journalist asked why he wanted to climb Everest. He famously replied, “Because it’s there.”
The question, which seemed odd to an adventurer like Mallory, was perfectly reasonable to ordinary people. Why would anybody want to risk their life to climb a piece of rock? Mallory explained: “Everest is the highest mountain in the world, and no man has reached its summit. Its existence is a challenge. The answer is instinctive—a part, I suppose, of man’s desire to conquer the universe.”
Mallory’s desire to conquer Everest cost the lives of seven Tibetan Sherpa porters, who were killed in an avalanche. Two years later, it cost Mallory his own life.
Mount Everest’s peak rises in the backdrop of Rongbuk monastery in Tibet. Credit: Göran Höglund
Mallory wasn’t the first person in history to find the call of the world’s highest peak irresistible. Humans have climbed mountains since prehistory. The remains of Ötzi, who lived in the 4th millennium BC, were found in a glacier in the Ötztal Alps. However, the highest mountains were rarely visited in earlier times and were often associated with supernatural or religious beliefs. Although there are many documented examples of people climbing mountains throughout history, mountaineering as a sport did not develop until the 19th century.
A rare medieval example of mountaineering can be found in a letter by the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch to his former confessor, Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro. In this letter, Petrarch described climbing Mont Ventoux, a mountain in southern France, simply “to see what so great an elevation had to offer.” Some historians regard this as the first recorded example of someone climbing a mountain just for the view.
Francis Petrarch was born on July 20, 1304, in Arezzo, Italy, and raised mainly in Avignon and Carpentras, where his family had moved during the papal exile. He studied law in Montpellier and Bologna but soon turned to his true passion, which was literature and classical learning.
Petrarch devoted his life to the study and recovery of ancient Roman manuscripts, helping to lay the foundation for Renaissance humanism. His writings celebrated both human intellect and emotion, bridging the medieval world’s religious focus and the Renaissance’s rediscovery of the individual.
Francis Petrarch
He is best known for his collection of Italian lyric poems, the Canzoniere, written largely to his beloved Laura, an idealized figure who inspired his poetry for decades. Written in refined vernacular Italian rather than Latin, these poems profoundly influenced later poets, including Dante and Shakespeare.
Petrarch spent much of his life traveling across Italy and Europe, serving noble patrons and the Church, while maintaining a vast network of correspondents among scholars. He was also a prolific letter writer and regularly corresponded with his friends, among which he counted Boccaccio the most notable.
In one of these letters, dated April 26, 1336, and addressed to his spiritual mentor Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, Petrarch describes his journey up and down Mont Ventoux. “To-day I made the ascent of the highest mountain in this region, which is not improperly called Ventosum,” the letter begins. “My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer,” he adds.
This trip up the 6,200-feet peak is often viewed as a symbolic turning point between the medieval and Renaissance worlds—combining personal experience, curiosity about nature, and spiritual reflection in a distinctly modern tone.
Mont Ventoux. Credit: Véronique PAGNIER
Petrarch said that he had wanted to climb the mountain for a long time, having “lived in this region from infancy.” The mountain, which is visible from a great distance, “was ever before my eyes,” he wrote.
Petrarch wrote that he was inspired to climb the mountain by Philip of Macedon, who “ascended Mount Haemus
in Thessaly, from whose summit he was able, it is said, to see two seas, the Adriatic and the Euxine”.
Petrarch left the house with his brother the day before and by evening reached Malaucene, which lies at the foot of the mountain. There they rested for a day, and began the ascent the next morning, accompanied by two servants.
Petrarch found the mountain very steep and “almost inaccessible mass of stony soil,” but they pressed on driven by “vigour of mind and strength and agility of body”.
The letter continued:
We found an old shepherd in one of the mountain dales, who tried, at great length, to dissuade us from the ascent, saying that some fifty years before he had, in the same ardour of youth, reached the summit, but had gotten for his pains nothing except fatigue and regret, and clothes and body torn by the rocks and briars. No one, so far as he or his companions knew, had ever tried the ascent before or after him.
After an arduous climb, Petrarch and his brother summited the peak and rested on the little level place on the top. As he gazed over the vast landscape stretching to the Alps and the Mediterranean, Petrarch felt a surge of awe at nature’s grandeur. Yet the moment also stirred a deep self-examination. He opened his pocket copy of Augustine’s Confessions to a random page and happened upon a passage that read:
“And men go about to wonder at the heights of mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the broad tides of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolutions of the stars, but themselves they consider not.”
The words struck him like a revelation. He realized that while he had sought an external height, the true ascent lay inward, in the contemplation of the self and the soul’s journey toward God.
A 19th century weather station at the summit of Mont Ventoux. Credit: NicolasAix
Petrarch’s climb of Mont Ventoux is often seen as a symbolic prelude to the Renaissance, because it embodies a profound shift in how people viewed the world and themselves.
In the Middle Ages, mountains were typically regarded with fear or indifference—wild, dangerous places with little religious or practical value. Human life and thought were directed toward heaven, not toward the natural world. Petrarch’s decision to climb Mont Ventoux simply “to see the view” was therefore unusual. It reflected a new curiosity, a desire to experience nature for its own sake, to observe and to feel wonder. This attitude foreshadowed the Renaissance rediscovery of the natural world and humanity’s place within it.
At the same time, Petrarch’s reflection at the summit, prompted by the passage from St. Augustine, revealed an equally Renaissance concern with the self. He realized that while he had looked outward toward the beauty of the world, he had neglected to look inward, to understand his own soul. This balance between outer experience and inner reflection, between the material and the spiritual, is a hallmark of Renaissance humanism.
Thus, the ascent of Mont Ventoux can be read as an allegory for humanity’s rising consciousness: the climb representing the pursuit of knowledge and self-awareness, and the summit standing for the union of earthly beauty and divine truth. Petrarch’s mountain, in other words, became the first peak of the Renaissance mind.
A climber reaching the summit of Mount Manaslu (8163 metres), Nepal. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
While Petrarch’s climb of Mont Ventoux in 1336 was a solitary and contemplative act, it would be several centuries before others began to climb mountains for pleasure rather than pilgrimage, science, or necessity. That attitude began to change during the Age of Enlightenment, when scientists and naturalists such as Horace-Bénédict de Saussure scaled Alpine peaks to study geology, botany, and meteorology. Saussure’s ascent of Mont Blanc in 1787, one year after it was first climbed, helped transform mountains from symbols of terror into objects of fascination and beauty.
By the early 19th century, this new appreciation for nature combined with advances in travel and equipment to create the sport of mountaineering. Wealthy European travellers, especially from Britain, began exploring the Alps for recreation and challenge. The period between 1854 and 1865 became known as the “Golden Age of Alpinism,” marked by first ascents of many major Alpine summits, including the Matterhorn in 1865.
What had begun with Petrarch’s desire “to see what so great an elevation had to offer” evolved into a pursuit that blended adventure, physical endurance, and scientific curiosity—a true expression of the Renaissance spirit carried forward into the modern age.
References:
# Petrarch: The Ascent of Mount Ventoux. MIT
# How a Renaissance Poet's 1336 Climb Inspired Generations of Hikers. History.com
# Petrarch's Augustinian View from Mont Ventoux. Genealogies of Modernity
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