Six Egyptians – possibly attendants of the Victorian photographer Francis Bedford and his companions – are arranged in a receding zigzag across the rough, uneven floor, dwarfed by walls, pillars and doorjambs in an austere, finely detailed 1862 image of the Ptolemaic Temple of Horus. Bedford must have insisted on between 10 and 12 seconds of complete stillness from the human figures in this majestic work, fully consonant with the 19th-century vogue for the timeless, immovable east – except for one deliberate anachronism. Between two of the pillars stands a white canvas hut. Here is Bedford’s portable darkroom, scene of minute struggles with the collodion process for making glass negatives. Thus an art form barely 20 years old breaks the repose of Ozymandias.  The photograph is one of around 190 that Bedford took when he accompanied the 20-year-old Prince of Wales, Albert Edward (“Bertie”), on a four-month tour of the Middle East in 1862, and which entered the Royal Collection after his return. They are currently on display at the Queen’s Gallery in London, in a handsome exhibition that does not, however, fully explore all the possibilities of its subject.  The Prince of Wales, as we are not told in the Queen’s Gallery, was under a cloud. The previous summer he had been initiated into the pleasures of the flesh by an Irish girl named Nellie, and it was from such beginnings that his scandalised father, Prince Albert, hit on the idea of an improving tour of the Ottoman dominions, focusing on the Holy Lands. But Albert had since died, his decline accelerated by his son’s “fall”, and this made Bertie doubly odious to the grief-stricken Queen, who insisted that the trip go ahead while she plotted to marry him off. The prince, enjoying a gentle degree at Cambridge, and evincing no wanderlust, was powerless to resist.  Setting off from Venice in February 1862, the smallish royal party (the principals consisted of Bertie, his governor, General Robert Bruce, and a handful of other, carefully selected, male companions) steamed down the Dalmatian coast and crossed the Mediterranean to Alexandria. From Egypt they went on to explore Palestine and Syria, living in tents and escorted by Ottoman cavalrymen, before sailing back to Europe via Constantinople. The trip took four and a half months, with Bedford as official photographer. His task was to immortalise scenes that were, as the Photographic News put it, “fraught with historic and sacred associations”.  Bedford was an experienced architectural and topographical photographer, with royal commissions already behind him, and he fulfilled his brief brilliantly. His harmonious, granular studies of the Egyptian temples and the Roman ruins at Baalbek, in Lebanon, accentuate the neglected, yet romantic, character of these places, with locals used for scale or foreground interest but offering no serious counterweight to the ruins among which they graze their goats or (in the case of Coptic Christians, appropriating part of a Pharoanic complex) come to pray.  The biblical sites as depicted by Bedford seem virtually unchanged since the Saviour’s time. His Sea of Galilee, for instance, shimmers softly in a landscape that is empty but for the ruins of Tiberias – where the royal party took Easter communion. And there is little in his image of Jerusalem from Mount of Olives to suggest that these are not the very trees among which Jesus wept the night before his crucifixion.  It would have been helpful, in the sumptuously illustrated catalogue by Sophie Gordon, to have learned more about the religious importance of these places, which is so vividly evoked in contemporary pilgrims’ accounts. Among these accounts are the entertaining letters of the liberal churchman Arthur Stanley, who was on the tour as Bertie’s spiritual chaperone.  Artists and even photographers had trodden the same paths before (the Englishman Francis Frith as recently as 1860), but each year, as the photo-historian Badr El Hage notes in his useful catalogue essay, brought more pilgrims, scholars and diplomats to a region that had seen few westerners since the Crusades. Passenger steamships (P&O began plying the eastern Mediterranean in 1835), guidebooks and the first Thomas Cook package tour gave notice of a harder, more permanent intrusion, with western museums filling up with Mediterranean fragments, the great powers using their concern for the Holy Places and religious minorities as a pretext for elbowing into Ottoman affairs, and, already, those mellow voids inspiring thoughts of a Jewish state.  The Tsar’s brother had made his tearful pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre three years before, the Russian foreign ministry minuting that “Jerusalem is the centre of the world and our mission must be there”. The British and French felt the same.  Of the historical aspects of the itinerary, the Prince of Wales was indefatigably ignorant – as we know from Arthur Stanley, who felt affection for his boyish, good-humoured charge, but there was no denying that the young man was less moved by the scene of Elijah’s sacrifice on Mount Carmel than the prospect of shooting quail on the same slopes, and if he wasn’t complaining about all the “tumbledown” temples, he spent his time testing his travel companions on the plot of a recent potboiler.  Bertie was a keen souvenir hunter, acquiring, among other things, a mummy whose excavation he had witnessed, a papyrus funerary text and a beautiful scarab made of glazed, blue-green soapstone, which he had mounted on tiny gold python heads, as a brooch. (Except for the mummy, which has disappeared, these objects have been included in the exhibition.)  For the more thoughtful members of the party, there were considerable advantages to be gained from travelling with the heir to a quarter of the globe, not least permissions to visit the sepulchre of the Patriarchs at Hebron, hitherto inaccessible to Christians, and Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, whose dilapidated dignity (it has since been lavishly restored) Bedford was one of the earliest photographers to record. “The prince entered the mosque,” crowed the Illustrated London News, “standing where no infidel has stood since the Crusades.” In Jerusalem, Bertie was tattooed with the Crusaders’ Jerusalem Cross on his forearm.  Along with the great Umayyad Mosque at Damascus, also somewhat shabby through Bedford’s lens, the Dome of the Rock is one of the few subjects that look better now than a century and a half ago. The pyramids have been all but consumed by Cairo’s sprawl, and the then-sleepy Lebanese port of Tripoli, also photographed by Bedford, by Sunni-Shia conflict.  Religious bloodshed was indeed a theme of the later stages of the tour, from visits to Crusader castles to the aftermath of a rankling three-way enmity between Christians, Sunnis and Druze. In 1860, Druze bands had laid waste to hundreds of Christian settlements in Lebanon – including the village of Hasbiya, which Bedford photographed. Most affecting, however, are his images of Christian Damascus, annihilated in the same year, with the buildings reduced to carcasses and not a soul in sight. Also in Damascus, Bedford made a rare portrait of an exiled Algerian nationalist leader who had given Christians sanctuary in his home.  Nowadays it is tempting to see communal conflict as endemic in the Levant and Mesopotamia, but the pogroms, whose effects the royal party witnessed had been notably rare until the 1840s. Bertie waxed indignant at Ottoman misrule, but Europe’s sponsorship of local clients (for years Britain had supported the Druze, while the French backed the Maronites) had helped upset the old religious balances in the first place, foreshowing the cataclysmic communal violence of the final decades of the Ottoman empire.  Even the cheapness of English cloth had sharpened resentments between the various groups, enriching the Christian agents of the Manchester houses and impoverishing Muslim weavers – unintended consequences of the Industrial Revolution and globalisation.  In June 1862, the tourists went their separate ways – Stanley nursing a mix of pilgrim’s joy and filial sadness, for his mother had died in his absence, and Bruce a violent fever that would quickly kill him. Bedford got to work printing and exhibiting; his technique was commended by the cognoscenti and his images snapped up by the pious. As Gordon’s biographical essay tells us, he went on to become a much-respected (and wealthy) photographer, and left “an extraordinary photographic legacy, much of which remains to be discovered”.  Queen Victoria found Bertie “much improved” by his travels, and “ready to do everything as I wish”. Stanley was less sanguine, writing of “the difficulty of producing any impression on a mind with no previous knowledge or interest to be awakened”. For all that, seven years later the prince would be drawn back to the Holy Land, this time in the company of his wife, the former Princess Alexandra of Denmark – and the recipient, as it turned out, of that beautiful, blue-green, python-mounted scarab.  • Cairo to Constantinople: Early Photographs of the Middle East is at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London SW1A, until 22 February
When the Prince of Wales was sent away on a trip to the Middle East to prevent him behaving badly, Francis Bedford went with him – the pictures he took captured famous sites unchanged for thousands of years. By Christopher de Bellaigue