A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages – The World Through Medieval Eyes
Reviewed by Nancy Wigston
Pack your bags, saddle your horses, load your stores of wine, food and cash—not forgetting your final will and testament—for we’re off to the Middle Ages with the most excellent guide, Anthony Bale, a professor of medieval studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. This deeply intriguing piece of historical detective work enlightens us about our traveling forebears while inevitably unearthing our own travel memories. But first, what did the world look like in, for example, 1491?
We need to go no further than the mercantile city of Nuremberg for the answer, where the city council has commissioned merchant and navigator Martin Behaim to create a most astonishing globe: about two feet in diameter, made of linen and paper, its geographical features painted by a local illustrator, this “status symbol” writes Bale, showed contemporary knowledge of a world that totaled three continents, a world that had been explored by the most sophisticated travelers of Nuremberg. With two thousand place names, Behaim’s globe is busy with detail, the work of a native son whose father was a “Merchant of Venice, then the most cosmopolitan city in Europe.”
Spices, fabrics and other luxury items came to Nuremberg, and Behaim conducted the family business in remote corners of the world. Rich in both fact and folklore, the globe informed those who gazed upon it with exotic details: in Ceylon, people go about naked, in the islands east of India, people have canine heads, and in Iceland they eat no bread, abandon their children to foreign merchants to control the population, and catch the cod that appears on European tables.
Fantasies aside, travelers of today can relate to 15th-century habits. We overpack, taking the “best versions of ourselves” or fall prey to homesickness, “the traveler’s curse.”
Setting off to follow medieval travel routes, Bale reminds us that Behaim—like Chaucer and Columbus—was influenced by an immensely popular 14th-century travel guide, in which Sir John Mandeville shared knowledge of trips from Europe to Jerusalem and on to Asia. Mandeville was a colorful read, if not a thoroughly dependable guide.
By the late 1400s, mass tourism (for those with means) had attracted travelers very like us to foreign, especially religious, sites. Travel offered many benefits—escaping troubles at home, receiving saints’ blessings, and earning indulgences—reprieves for one’s allotted time in Purgatory. A very holy site like Jerusalem granted Christians plenary indulgences, wiping clean their upcoming years in Purgatory. In 1300, a Jubilee Year, a million people came to Rome to be absolved of sins.
Travel was worth the cost, the risk of shipwreck, the cheating guides, miserable lodgings, thievery, or trying encounters with strangers. Travel today can also be onerous, annoying and costly, as we endure long check-in line-ups, trace lost luggage, or are thrown off kilter by crashed computer systems, so we must sleep on airport floors or scramble to book expensive hotels. Still, our difficulties may not compare to traveling on horseback or in filthy Venetian galleys. Yet we continue to go, enticed by Royal Jubilees, the Olympic Games, or the sheer thrill of escape.
Most memorable are the people we meet on the way. Medieval holy sites drew an especially quirky cast of characters. Take Margery Kempe, an Englishwoman subject to visions, conversations with God, and frequent episodes of “boisterous sobbing” as she begged for Christ’s forgiveness. After forty, having borne fourteen children, the tireless Kempe traveled to Venice, Rome, Jerusalem and Russia. And her wailing could drive her fellow travelers nuts. She may sound familiar to anyone who’s traveled in a group with a travel bore or a drunk, although Kempe seems to have been exceptionally trying—some bullying companions cut short her gown and made her sit at a table below the lowliest servants. We know all this because she dictated her travel stories (being illiterate herself).
Medieval trips were often booked and paid for in advance, like an English package holiday. So what if some didn’t make it home safely, or at all? Others claimed to have found paradise. The legendary St. Brendan, in 565 AD, arrived at “the Blessed Isles,” returning to Ireland after seven years describing a utopia, filled with food and sunshine. Though speculation about the isles buzzed—the Azores or Newfoundland perhaps?—they were never seen again: a once-in-a-lifetime vacation.
Both Edens and monster-filled destinations where men were part horse, part fish, and entirely mythical, feature in travelers’ tales from the Greek Pliny the Elder to 13th century Marco Polo and 14th century Sir John Mandeville. Most people stayed home, content to read about dream-like lands and fantastic creatures they would never see. Setting off for paradise sometimes ends in disaster—a gripping example is Alex Garland’s The Beach where a backpacker in Bangkok finds and follows a secret map to an Edenic island. Big mistake.
Musing about the nature of travel never tires Bale. “The world cannot be fully known.” Hmm. “Each journey is unique.” Maybe. But he reaches the heart of things, with “Travel is the tales we tell when we come home.” And the further we go, the wilder the tale.
When his English travelers have packed as much (the Earl of Derby took six horses, many servants and a new feather bed) or as little (Brother Thomas, an Augustan friar, carried only a bag, a staff, and a wide pilgrim’s hat) as their station in life allowed, they are sentimentally pictured at sunset on a quay in the East Sussex port of Rye, the harbor bustling with ships and excitement. “Here begins the game,” declares our guide.
Since the 10th century, one of the most popular pilgrimages in Europe has been the series of routes through France and Spain to the Church of Santiago de Compostela containing the remains of St. James the Elder. The first guidebook to the Camino Santiago, the Codex Calixtinus, appeared in 1140, with helpful advice on where to rest, pray and what routes to follow.
In recent years, walking the Camino has seen a huge resurgence in popularity and as many as 300,000 pilgrims now walk all or part of it each year. Actor Andrew McCarthy walked the Camino with his son, and in 2023 published a best-selling book, Walking with Sam, about the bonds forged as a result.
Simply put, travel can and does change lives. In 1118, the Augustinian friar Rahere, a canon in St. Paul’s, fell ill with a malarial fever in Rome and was cared for by monks in a small hospital for the sick and poor. Visited by a divine vision of St Bartholemew, he returned to Smithfield, within the City of London, to build a hospital, chapel and church, to honor the saint.
The new hospital and church, St. Batholemew’s, became “places of miracles” that welcomed unwed mothers, foundlings and orphans—often from the notorious Newgate Prison at the corner of Newgate Street and Old Bailey. The “hospitality” offered was rest, a good diet, and spiritual comfort, rather than actual medical treatment. Even when Henry VIII cracked down on Catholic institutions, St. Bart’s refused to close its doors. The adjacent Hospital Museum includes wax-sealed parchment documents from the 12th and 13th centuries and a comprehensive account of medieval medicine. Born from a vision, St Bart’s remains an active hospital to this day.
Few travelers honor promises made on sickbeds in foreign lands. Instead, many fall prey to human frailties, boasting about the places they’ve been—like today’s tourists with their souvenir T-shirts and fridge magnets. Medieval pilgrims may be thanked (or cursed) for inventing the travel souvenir when they began wearing metal badges purchased abroad.
These proved they’d endured crowded ships and taxing journeys by horse. Travel writer Felix Fabri complained that his horse sunk to its knees in slushy Alpine snow, while others traveled by horse-drawn carts, asses, or simply their feet.
Pewter or metal alloy badges often depicted St. Peter in Rome, while others showed the legendry 4th-century British virgin, St. Ursula, murdered with her 11,000 (likely an ancient typo) companions in Cologne by the Huns. Medieval Cologne became the center of a roaring trade in souvenir badge production, some as shockingly profane as the most lewd screen saver today: “ambulant or enthroned genitals, winged penises, boatloads of pricks sailing the seas, walking vulvas dressed as pilgrims.” Satirists quickly mocked boasts about holiness and piety, marking the inflection point when “holy day becomes holiday.” Badges have been found in Sweden, Norway and Scotland, such is the velocity of the tacky souvenir.
Sea voyages (25-60 days from Venice to Jaffa) could challenge the most determined. Many travelers stayed for months in Venice, dazzled by this city on the water and the theatrics of St. Mark’s Square—lively with jugglers, dwarves, preachers, and folks singing the daily news –while others impatiently waited for their ships to the Holy Land, in this “damp, fetid, expensive” metropolis, a global marketplace place in constant movement. Then, as now, tourist Venice is Venice, a city of low-lying islands where gondoliers interrupt travelers’ sleep with lusty renditions of “O Sole Mio.”
On board at last, fees paid, passports in hand, travelers and traders sailed on galleys through the Venetian Republic, ruler of the Eastern Mediterranean, Dalmatia, Crete and several Greek Isles—stretching to Beirut, Alexandria and the Crimea.
After the Knights of St. John Hospitaller were expelled from the Holy Land, they built a Grand Master’s Palace and a Pilgrims’ Hospital in Rhodes. When the knights weren’t hideously torturing captured Turks, they tended to sick pilgrims. Today’s Rhodes, popular with British holidaymakers, celebrates its history, its Palace intact. A 16th-century synagogue has been beautifully restored, thanks to overseas donations.
Some Venetian ports, like Famagusta in Cyprus, were less famous for hospitals than for taverns and sex workers, where pleasure and vice reigned. One pope blamed this behavior on the enduring worship of Aphrodite. What we now call sex tourism has deep roots in our collective past. The farther we travel from home, it seems, the looser our morals, so Bangkok’s Patpong Entertainment District, for example, has become a well-known fleshpot, a modern rival to medieval Famagusta.
As travelers proceeded to Jaffa along the coast, many kept travel diaries. Their quarters were lively with rats, wrote pilgrim Hans Von Mergental. Few could swim, and Nicola de Martoni’s fear of capsizing turned his hair and beard white. The German cleric and writer Felix Fabri described dead calm as worse than violent storms. At each way station, travelers were greeted by locals selling local merchandise and extolling holy relics. Zadar—a miniature eastern Venice (now in Croatia)—was proud home to St. Simeon’s uncorrupted body. Eventually, veiled ladies were glimpsed walking along the shore.
An enduring highlight of travel—then and now—has to be one’s first glorious sight of Constantinople (Istanbul) a wonder of the medieval world. Named by the Christian convert, Byzantine Emperor Constantine, modern Istanbul looks as spectacular from the water today as it did 500 years ago—more so perhaps, since its cityscape was enhanced with palaces and mosques by Sultan Mehmed II whose Ottoman forces conquered the former Byzantine capitol in 1453.
Today’s Istanbul remains a very cosmopolitan city, famous for the same buildings pilgrims saw—the Hagia Sofia (537 AD), the Grand Bazaar (begun in 1455), Galata Tower (1348), St. Benoit Catholic Church (1427), Topkapi Palace and Museum (begun by Mehmet II in the 1450s) and mosques and palaces built by other Ottoman Sultans.
Its 21st-century popularity partly stems from TV series— Dizis in Turkish — that are watched by millions around the world. While series with as many as a hundred episodes can be historic (the Crusaders, understandably, are portrayed as brutal invaders), others resemble modern crime or mystery tales, featuring fashionista ladies and gun-toting men in Armani suits. Theatrical Istanbul makes a backdrop pleasing to both eye and intellect.
Writer Agatha Christie loved the city and stayed at the Peri Palace Hotel, where she wrote Murder on the Orient Express. No word on whether she bought a Turkish carpet during her visits, but no one can avoid the city’s friendly carpet dealers. In the Sultan Ahmet district, there are a couple on every block it seems, each offering tea and a colorful array of handwoven carpets that reflect a tradition dating back millennia.
Medieval travelers saw a city, crowded with churches, Roman-like spectacles, cooled by breezes, lush with fig trees and waterfront parks: a former jewel of Christendom. But the day’s catch is still grilled by the Sea of Marmara, dried fruits, nuts, and fresh pomegranate juice are sold by street vendors and the Sufi Muslims known as Whirling Dervishes still perform their silent prayers to God. It’s very medieval, very modern.
Jerusalem was the cherished destination for Medieval Christian pilgrims. Boats docked at Jaffa, a city John Mandeville called the oldest in the world. Stepping foot onto the Holy Land was not always easy. The ruling Islamic Mameluks (former soldier-slaves) listed every arrival’s name and the management of pilgrims was then handed to the Franciscans, who took some to hostels. But ships could be held offshore until payment was made, and the unlucky could be lodged in dismal caves. Everything, including the use of latrines, cost money and everyone was prey to “brigands and robbers and thieves.”
Once inland, pilgrims were more than happy to be in Jerusalem, a holy city that evoked familiar Bible stories, a place they almost remembered, rather like encountering the real Paris after seeing it in the movies. Tourism was still in its infancy, so there was no one to prevent visitors from chipping away pieces of the Tomb of the Holy Sepulchre and taking them home.
In response to the pilgrims’ arrival, holy sites were invented or expanded for tourist consumption. The path that Christ took to Golgotha on Via Dolorosa featured many add-ons, like the spot where Saint Veronica used a cloth to wipe the blood and sweat from the suffering Christ’s brow. Some endure—and today’s faithful retrace this path today, some carrying wooden crosses. Others were short-lived, like the imprint of Christ’s footprint marking the spot where he stood before ascending to heaven, or the “holy fire” that appeared at Easter.
The Franciscan Order acted as a holy travel agency for the Mamelukes, selling guidebooks, telling visitors where to pray, and transforming, in the author’s blunt words, “the grimy piss of real urban Jerusalem into its Biblical stage set.”
Most medieval travelers ventured no further than Rome, Venice, the Camino, Constantinople, Jerusalem, or Egypt (where the pyramids were thought to have been used by Pharaohs to store grain). Like us, they often wrote journals, and would surely have taken photos if they could.
Are we so different? How many of us have posed for the camera outside landmarks like the Eifel Tower or the Leaning Tower of Pisa before rushing to catch our Ryanair flight? Travel discoveries require proof that we were there, like the child who wrote “Paris erat hic” on the walls of Pompei.
A few bold medieval traders went as far as the Silk Road—Samarkand, Tashkent—even China and India. And if they said that in Ethiopia there lived one-footed humanoids who used a foot to shade them from the sun, very few could contradict them.
Nancy Wigston is a Toronto-based writer whose last book review was on Dickensland: The Curious Case of Dickens’s London. Be sure to read her travel stories for East-West News which include a cruise down the Aquitaine’s River Lot and an exploration of London’s spy trail.