Anthony Bale offers eight sage pieces of advice for those planning to pack their bags and embark on a journey to a foreign land in the Middle Ages
1Seek salvation overseas
In the mid-14th century, an English knight called John Mandeville boarded a boat and headed east. He was intending to follow the well-trodden path of pilgrimage to the holy city of Jerusalem. But as his c1356 travelogue, Book of Marvels and Travels, tells us, Mandeville’s journey soon morphed into a voyage of curiosity to the edges of the world. On one island near India, he apparently encountered a breed of headless people with faces on their chests. On another, he was confronted by natives with one huge lip that they employed as a sunshade. The inhabitants of a third island had, he tells us, tiny mouths through which they fed themselves with a feather straw.
Mandeville’s account of his travels is as extraordinary as it is fanciful. Yet it is not quite as unusual as you might think. People in the Middle Ages travelled in surprisingly large numbers – and, as Mandeville’s example attests, by far the most widespread form of travel was pilgrimage.
People went on pilgrimages for all kinds of reasons. Often they were entirely voluntary – with the express purpose of seeking salvation or imploring a particular saint’s medical aid. For example, images and relics of the virgin martyr St Apollonia, who had her teeth violently ripped out, were popular with sufferers of toothache. But pilgrimage could sometimes be mandated, too – as a punishment for a crime, or to cure the souls of an entire community.
Pilgrimage wasn’t, of course, the only reason that people hit the road. Business travel also flourished across the late Middle Ages, often configured around fairs and markets. From around 1300, we see the advent of the travel guide for corporate travellers, such as Francesco Balducci Pegolotti’s Pratica Della Mercatura (The Practice of Commerce, c1339). Written by a Florentine banker who had worked in Antwerp, London and Famagusta, the Pratica t
