Petrarch's 1336 Ventoux climb helped invent mountain sport
On 26 April 1336 the poet Petrarch climbed Mount Ventoux, 1,912 metres high, and wrote about it in one of his letters, saying Philip V of Macedon's ascent of Mount Haemo had inspired him. It is an early account of going up a mountain for the experience rather than for trade or worship.
People have lived among mountains since prehistory; Ötzi, who died in the fourth millennium BC, was found in an Ötztal Alps glacier. For most of antiquity, though, climbing served economic, political or religious ends, and the highest peaks were linked with the supernatural. In 1492 French officer Antoine de Ville scaled Mont Aiguille, 2,085 metres, with ropes, ladders and iron hooks, the first officially verified technical climb and often called the birth of the sport. Around the same era Incas reached 6,739 metres on Llullaillaco, and in the mid-1500s Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner became known as the first to hike and climb purely for pleasure.
Horace-Bénédict de Saussure failed on Mont Blanc from 1757 and offered a reward, won in 1786 by Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard. Marie Paradis became the first woman on its summit in 1808, followed by Henriette d'Angeville in 1838, as peaks such as the Grossglockner, Jungfrau and Breithorn fell in the early 1800s.
Alfred Wills's 1854 Wetterhorn ascent made climbing fashionable in Britain and opened the Golden Age of Alpinism; the Alpine Club, the first mountaineering club, followed in 1857. Edward Whymper's party first topped the Matterhorn in 1865, and four of them died falling on the way down. Scientists such as John Tyndall climbed early on, but pure sportsmen came to dominate, and the edelweiss became the climbers' emblem. British pioneers such as William Cecil Slingsby then opened Norway's Jotunheimen, and Norwegians later founded Norsk Tindeklub, the world's third oldest climbing association.
The sport still has no widely applied formal rulebook, relying instead on grades, guidebooks and club traditions. The UIAA, a federation of alpine clubs, is the Olympic-recognised world body.
Source: Mountaineering
