Travel Was More Common Than Often Assumed
Most medieval people lived and died within a short distance of where they were born, but many others traveled, some of them very far. Pilgrims, traders, soldiers, scholars, clergy, envoys and sailors moved along roads, rivers and sea lanes. Their journeys carried goods and stories, and slowly changed what people in Europe knew about the wider world.
This article concentrates on peaceful or semi-peaceful travel and what it taught. Armed expansion and settlement are a different subject.
Pilgrims
Pilgrimage was probably the most widespread reason for long journeys. Medieval pilgrims headed for local shrines, for Rome, and for Jerusalem and other sites in the Holy Land, as well as to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. Along the Camino de Santiago and other pilgrim routes, hospices, churches and inns grew up to serve travelers, and guidebooks and lists of stops were compiled.
Pilgrims returned with relics, souvenirs and information. Accounts of the Holy Land described cities, distances and local customs, and pilgrim narratives helped shape how Europeans pictured the eastern Mediterranean. Many authors repeated earlier accounts rather than describing only what they had seen, so these texts need to be read with care.
Merchants and the Routes of Trade
Merchants traveled to buy and sell, and their knowledge was practical. Italian traders from Venice and Genoa operated in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, while northern merchants worked the Baltic and North Sea. Goods such as silk, spices, furs, wax and cloth moved over long distances, often passing through several sets of hands, so that few traders saw the whole route.
The spice trade shows this well. Pepper and other spices reached Europe through Muslim and Byzantine intermediaries from South and Southeast Asia, and Europeans knew relatively little about where they actually grew. Over time, merchants’ handbooks recorded distances, tolls, weights and measures for different markets, which was useful knowledge even if it was not “scientific.”
Envoys and Travelers to Asia
In the thirteenth century, the Mongol conquests opened overland routes across Asia. The Pax Mongolica, a period when large parts of the continent were under Mongol authority, made some of those routes safer than before, though travel remained long and difficult. Papal and royal envoys, including Franciscan friars such as John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck, were sent to the Mongol court and wrote reports about the peoples and customs they met.
The best-known European traveler is Marco Polo, a Venetian whose account of years in Asia became a widely read book. Historians debate how much of it he saw first hand and how much he gathered from others, but it influenced later ideas about China and the East. Travelers from other regions also left records. Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish traveler of the twelfth century, wrote about Jewish communities across the Mediterranean and the Near East, and Ibn Battuta, from Morocco, journeyed across Africa and Asia in the fourteenth century and later dictated an account of his travels.
What Travelers Brought Back
Travel brought news, but also ideas and objects. Merchants and scholars encountered numbers, medical texts, new crops and technologies. Information was not always reliable, and some popular travel books mixed real observations with legends, such as stories of monstrous peoples. The famous Travels of Mandeville, written in the fourteenth century, is a notorious example of a book that borrowed heavily from other works.
How Knowledge Reached Maps
Medieval maps served many purposes. Large world maps known as mappa mundi often placed Jerusalem near the center and combined geography with biblical history and legend. They were meant to teach and inspire as much as to guide a journey. The Hereford map, made in England around 1300, is one of the best-known surviving examples.
Sailors needed something more practical. By the thirteenth century, Mediterranean mariners were using portolan charts, which showed coastlines, harbors and compass directions with striking accuracy for the regions they covered. The compass itself seems to have reached Europe by around the twelfth or thirteenth century, but its origin and early use are difficult to trace. These tools helped captains steer between known ports and, in later centuries, supported voyages along the Atlantic coast of Africa.
Limits and Legacy
Medieval geography was uneven. Europeans knew the Mediterranean world quite well, parts of Asia and Africa through merchants and rumor, and much of the rest hardly at all. Still, the habit of recording distances, routes and customs grew over the period, and travel accounts supplied a stock of information that later explorers read and used.
It also helps to remember that medieval Europe was one participant in a wider network of travel. Muslim, Jewish, Byzantine and Asian merchants and scholars were often better traveled than Europeans, and Europeans learned much from them.