Gone Medieval - Travel Guide to the Middle Ages

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

If you are planning - or dreaming of - your next holiday, have you stopped to wonder whether our medieval counterparts did exactly the same thing? Why did people travel in the Middle Ages, and what was the experience like for them? Were there any similarities with travelling today?In this edition of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Anthony Bale.  His book A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages invites the reader to journey alongside scholars, spies and saints, from western Europe to the Far East and the Antipodes, giving an insight into how medieval people understood their world.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here >You can take part in our listener survey here > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. It's the time of year when we're all dreaming of our next holiday. And if you're wondering whether our medieval counterparts were doing the same thing and what travel was like hundreds of years ago too, then we've got the perfect guest for you today. Anthony Bales, a travel guide to the Middle Ages, the world through medieval eyes, sets out on a quest to answer all of your questions. And Anthony joins me today to explore medieval travel in more detail. So welcome to gone medieval, Anthony. Thank you very much. It's great to be here, Matt. It's fabulous to have you here. What drew you to the

idea of writing about medieval travel? I suppose there's both the personal and the academic sides of things which got me interested in this. The academic side, about 10 years ago, I had translated one of the most popular travel guides of the Middle Ages, John Mandeville's Book of marvels and travels, and that had led to a lot of academic work on the manuscripts and the readers of Mandeville. And Mandeville describes the entire medieval world as was seen from Western Europe, starting with England, then to Jerusalem, and then all the way to the Far East. So doing that work got me involved in medieval ideas of travel, medieval ideas of the shape of the world, geography, natural history, and also the rationale that Mandeville gives.

for travel, which includes what's good for your soul through pilgrimage, but also around curiosity, he says men like to hear and read about new things, which is why people should go travelling in order to write about these things. So really for the last 10 years or so, I've been doing a lot of work on Mandeville and thinking about who was reading him, what his book was used for, and that kind of thing. And then also personally, I'm very keen traveller myself, and I developed when I was working on Mandeville a way of doing fieldwork through his text of medieval sites of the places he describes and trying to work out how some of these places themselves were constructed through medieval writing and medieval memories of places. And I started this book, The Travel Guide to the Middle

Ages, during the pandemic, during lockdown, when of course we couldn't often travel even to the next street or the next town. We couldn't see people look at. We couldn't see people who we knew well, we couldn't go to places that we knew well, but also our rhythms of the year, our rhythms of sense of like being able to go to somewhere quite familiar, either business travel or a favourite holiday, suddenly were interrupted. I think I was starting to think about travel in new ways as a set of obstacles, travel as a set of difficulties, travel as something dangerous, which then also connected a lot to medieval ideas of what travel was. How does exploring things like Manderville's manuscript, how does that give us a

to the voices of individuals, because I guess from a medieval point of view, we're used to hearing from chroniclers who are probably sitting in their monasteries, passing comment on what's happening in the world around them. But this is very personal experience that we're hearing about in this kind of manuscript. Yes, lots of medieval travel writers are also sitting in monasteries and thinking about the world from a monastery as an experiment in thought. But yes, what we get from travel writing, confessional writing or spiritual writing of personal writing of personal transformation, we get the first-person narrative. So we get sometimes texts which are eyewitness texts of travel and sometimes texts which pretend to be eyewitness texts. But either way,

they are one of the places where we find something like subjectivity, a fairly modern sense of, I saw this and this is what I'm telling you about a place. And in the 15th century in particular, we really start to see much more of a personal travel diary where, the traveller writes about their experiences as a set of advice for future travellers or to warn future travellers where we get a very strong sense of the narratorial eye. I went to this place, I experienced this and that's why you should believe my text. And that's a very different kind of understanding of the medieval voice from earlier texts which are all about repeating reliable information. in travel writing you actually see much more of an emphasis on individual experience and the kind of inquisitive, curious traveller.

So I think there is something quite distinctive about travel writing as a way of cautiously accessing that kind of first person voice. I do want to go back though to the kind of warning I gave at the beginning of that answer about some of these writers sitting in their monasteries, including Mandeville himself. He's often derided as an unreliable traveller, and it's clear that Mandeville's book, which was written in the 1350s, is itself playing with the idea that eyewitness experience might be more reliable than what you can learn in books. A lot of my travellers, even if they did travel, they then put their accounts of their travels into other more established narratives when they came home, because there wasn't the same emphasis on originality. and on individuality that we have in modern writing, actually, if your text was too original, it would look ridiculous and outlandish. It needed to look like an established journey.

So there is a lot of tension in the medieval sources for travellers between the individual witness and the established cultural frame of what a journey looks like. And I think we would still have some of that today if you went to Victoria Falls or Niagara Falls and didn't look at the waterfalls but looked the other way, you'd have done travel wrong, you'd have got it wrong. You actually have to say, this is what I saw at that place, and that's why it was worth visiting. That's a kind of silly example in a way, but lots of my travellers, they have to explain why they were on the road, what the purpose of their

travel was, purposeless travel, was seen as being very dangerous, morally dangerous, but also they need to write in a way which makes their travels useful for their readers in one way or another. Who do we see during the Middle Ages travelling? I guess there's a view that it would still just be an elite enjoyment, so what we're hearing are probably elite voices. Is that the case? It's surprisingly less elite than we might think, though lots of the voices we have tend to be on the elite side because they see other people with access to write it down or to have their journey written down. But actually, people travelled from all social classes and for a very wide variety of reasons in the Middle Ages. And almost everybody would have travelled at some point in their

life because the most popular and most frequent reason for travel or rationale for travel was pilgrimage. And a pilgrimage could be a journey to the next village. It could be a journey to your local cathedral or your local shrine. It didn't need to be an international journey. But almost everybody would have made a pilgrimage either for devotional reasons or often for medical reasons. One of the most popular reasons to undertake a pilgrimage was to cure toothache or to pray for a child who was ill or to pray for the safe delivery of a baby if the mother was pregnant and things like that. So this was a very popular and very homely medicine which also involved travel. At the same time, as my book shows, we have people travelling.

from Western Europe very frequently to the Holy Land to Ethiopia, sometimes much further afield to India, to Sumatra and Java. We have people travelling for lots of different reasons, sometimes to missionise, to spread the Gospels, sometimes as soldiers and mercenaries, sometimes as diplomats, often still as pilgrims, but with other reasons perhaps for curiosity or perhaps as businessmen who would include

that kind of 40% pilgrimage, 60% business as the reason for travelling. And you get a strong sense from the medieval accounts of the established routes being very busy with different kinds of travellers. And interestingly, travel is one of the places where women travel alongside men, women sometimes travel in groups maybe with their daughters or their sisters or as groups of widows or with their husbands. But female travellers are also reasonably common in our sources. And there's an established infrastructure for people who can't pay. In England,

the cost of inns is regulated to be cheap, usually a penny a night. And on the continent, in any Christian country, there's an injunction of taking in the traveller for one to three nights, usually for free and giving them food. That's one of the kind of works of mercy that good Christians are enjoined to do. But it seems to be actually very established that on routes like the Brenna Pass, which goes through the Alps, connecting Venice with Northern Europe, that there are inns and accommodations for people of all different classes from the poorest to the wealthiest. What we find in the accounts is that travel is actually a place of very unpredictable social mixing, that you might have someone very poor, put alongside somebody who might be a prince,

or an aristocrat. And in some of the sources that we have, like the book of Marjorie Kemp, Marjorie Kemp, who was travelling to the Holy Land in the 1410s, and then later to Prussia in the 1430s, she often writes about meeting great, venerable people on the route, maybe somebody who's heading to the papal court, or a very wealthy lady who she meets in Assisi. So there's a kind of unpredictability about the social classes that travel forces. together and people meet the kinds of people they might not have met at home. So that's a very long answer to your question, but basically the people who tend to write about their travels, yes, they tend to be on the wealthier side, certainly on the literate side, but their accounts

often show us all kinds of unpredictable social classes mingling. And that makes just quite interesting because it shows, I guess, someone like Chaucer, you know, Chaucer isn't writing something completely wild. He's writing about, a bunch of people who meet together on the road from all sorts of diverse backgrounds. And that would almost have been an everyday occurrence for people. They wouldn't have thought this was a strange mixture of people. Absolutely. The Canterbury Tales, it's set up around this pilgrimage to Canterbury, one of the main shrines

in medieval England. But Chaucer has people from different social classes, a cook, a miller, people who would have been thought of as being relatively lowly, as well as women, a nun, the wife of Bath. There's various women on the pilgrimage. and yes, that sense of their social mixing is absolutely inherent to what Chaucer is doing in the Canterbury Tales, often to comic effect, but would have been quite historically accurate. And don't forget that as well as the actual travellers themselves, the experience of travel would have brought travellers into contact with people along the way. People, say, providing food or providing shelter or all the kind of different industries which existed to support or to get money from the travellers, would have themselves been unproductive. local, would have had all kinds of different local colour involves in it. Travel is always unpredictable,

but it's often unpredictable in ways that people really don't expect about the kind of chance encounters that occur along the way. There's so many interesting things in the book that we would utterly recognise today, the kind of personal challenges that people face. Stuff like, you know, sea sickness crops up in the book, trouble with the food in foreign places and things like that. How did people explain their experiences of stuff like that? You know, we see quite a lot of those common features that we might recognise today cropping up through travel? I think lots of the texts we have about medieval travel are themselves effectively warning texts about how to prepare yourself for the ordeal of a journey. And so even though there's a sense that

some of the travel guides are advertisements for the pleasures of reaching one's destination, say Rome or Jerusalem, very many of them become much more admonitory in their tone, particularly about this idea you mentioned about sea sickness. So a lot of the text will talk in great detail about sea sickness. By sea sickness, they don't seem to mean something like queasiness or maybe not having your sea legs. They seem to mean something much more like dysentery, which can be fatal and very dangerous. And don't forget, almost nobody at this point could swim. And so there's a sense that getting in the water would be fatal. So a lot of the texts will talk about, ways to combat sea sickness and will offer experiences of sea sickness and the dangers of it.

People will also talk about the difficulties, particularly on board a boat of getting good food and clean water or clean wine. There's a very strong sense in lots of the text that at Venice, you should treat Venice like a kind of great big supermarket and stock up for the journey ahead because that's going to be your last outpost of Western food. And also to get a lot of medicinal herbs and spices, which would, you know, calm your stomach or ease diarrhea or flatulants, which are things that people commonly write about. Sea sickness, food, they're two of the really key themes, expense. People write a lot about being ripped off, about how money just seemed to fall away from their supplies very quickly. And you get the strong sense that

medieval travellers, because they were travelling on existing routes and established routes, they were being ripped off everywhere they went. There was a charge for entering a town, for leaving a town, for carrying wine through a town, for entering a shrine, for leaving a shrine. You see quite a lot of detailed accounts of the actual experience on the ground of travelling of the kinds of things where you would arrive in a place and immediately be asked for money for something. And I think we probably all had that experience as travellers.

And the thing which is perhaps surprising to a modern audience is the danger of death on the road, that people set off on their travels and would put their affairs in order, they would usually make a will and they might settle any debts, and they would not expect necessarily to come back. Because of the sense of what was dangerous on the boat or on the road, and also duration of travel, people were expecting to go for many months. and they might not have been expecting to come home, particularly if they were going overseas.

And I think travel was not necessarily a kind of, I will go and recharge my batteries and then I'll come back refreshed. Often there are a sense of I will go and I will have an experience, which will be a once in a lifetime experience, but it will also be itself remarkable on account of its danger and its difficulty

and the stakes of the travel itself are very high. A few other things people talk about are animals, nature, prodigies and miracles and stories they're here on the way, exciting new relics. A few travellers will talk about sex tourism and about brothels and about the cost of prostitution. Often this information will be smuggled in a kind of disapproving way, but it's clear that people were encountering sex tourism. Certainly in Cyprus, that was a very common kind of complaint about the town of Famagusta, which was a common port for people to go to

was that the sex tourism was just absolutely blatant and it was famous for that. And then also in India, they tend to be the main themes. And obviously they are somewhat similar to the things that we would talk about today. What is also very common is that people will talk about ways of ensuring a better bed in a hostelry

or on the board of boat. But unlike today, there's very limited choice. And so there's some tips about how to ensure that you'll be less unquestory. comfortable. I was going to say how you'd be comfortable, but that seems to be not be very important. The tips are really about how to avoid, say, staying in the bilge of the boat, which is the very worst thing, but it's where most people would stay, or in Jerusalem going to the standard, hostel, the Muristan, next to the Church of Holy Sepulka, which seems to have been particularly

disgusting. So people have tips about asking locals or staying in a monastery or paying to stay at the front of the boat, there's a kind of raised area, and staying with the captain of the galley there, and that would ensure that you were removed from the lower class of passengers, but also removed from the kind of discomfort. So accommodation, there isn't quite the kind of sophisticated information we might have now about star ratings and that kind of thing, although Venice did start to introduce that in the 15th century, start to introduce a kind of quite sophisticated infrastructure around accommodation. But these tend to be the practicalities that people talk about. Is there anything that sticks out as particularly an oddly medieval that we probably wouldn't

experience today? Yeah, I think the main thing is pilgrimage. Often people are travelling for spiritual and at least the idea behind their pilgrimage is that they will do something good for their soul, not their body, and that if they get to Jerusalem or to Rome or to Santiago de Compostela, that will reduce the time that they will spend in purgatory after they die through the system known as pardons or indulgences. And so theoretically speaking, at least, people are often travelling with the rationale of doing something which would be good for their soul in what we would think of as the afterlife, rather than actually doing something which helps them in their everyday, worldly embodied life as they were experiencing it. That said,

very quickly pilgrimage shades into tourism and a kind of holiday. And what we see in many of the sources, particularly those connected with the journey from Venice to Jaffa, which was the main route to get to Jerusalem, are elements of kind of package tourism and holidays where concerns about accommodation, food, local customs, local difficulties, ways of paying your way. into something more comfortable, people telling each other's stories, people singing, people getting drunk, people looking for new husbands or wives, all these distractions very quickly come into the picture. And so in the kind of medieval theological writing about pilgrimage, there's this idea of the Peregrinatio, which is a very straight line where you set off

from your home to your destination, you don't look left, you don't look right, you are focused rigidly on your destination, you get there and then you come back spiritually transformed and you come back a slightly different person who has got the benefits and the blessings of their pilgrimage. In reality, a lot of my travellers, they're very distracted and they have this curiosity, this wandering eye about the world they're travelling through. And they also have these kind of physical experiences where they sometimes try to think about the spiritual benefit which they're going to get so they can forget the physical ordeal, but often the physical trumps, the spiritual, and they're talking about their kind of practical discomfort. So I think the idea that you

would go all the way to Rome, say, for an indulgence is very unfamiliar to modern people, but then lots of the later travel around business travel or around keeping a journey of one's travels as a journey of self-improvement does shade into modern. ways of thinking about travel. So we have very voluble writers in the 14th and 15th centuries. I think he's someone here like Felix Fabry, who was a friar from Germany, who wrote incredibly wonderful but very detailed and very gossipy in places, accounts of his journeys. Even though he's writing in terms of spiritual improvement, but actually his accounts, we've got these very gossipy asides about the people he's traveling with or about the local

customs he sees and a lot of practical information about what not to do. And a wonderful passage, a very honest passage, he was from the city of Ulm in southern Germany. And when he leaves Ulm, he talks about his homesickness and how the idea of getting to Jerusalem seemed incredibly bitter to him and all he wanted to do was go back and only the embarrassment and the shame of doing that stopped him. So you get this very strong sense of the tension between the pilgrimage was what he was. he should be doing, but actually the practical journey itself was quite off-putting and quite unpleasant for him. It's interesting that I guess we wouldn't consider travel as in some way an investment for something that we're not going to realise on this earth. It was almost like travel was an

investment for the afterlife and for the soul, and it wasn't meant to be enjoyed, even if people managed to find ways to enjoy it along the route. That wasn't the idea or the reason behind it. What elements of travelling in the medieval world might be recognised today? How did medieval passports work? So medieval borders and the kind of medieval technology of passports tended to be pretty porous, but there were incipient technologies around this. There were two main, important places to think about passports. One was in the letter of safe conduct, and this was linked to the modern passport. If you look in the front of a British passport today, there's effectively a request from His Majesty's government that you are allowed to

travel and that was basically similar to a letter of safe conduct. It was a letter from either a bishop or a ruler, a prince, a king, certifying that you were who you said you were asking that you were able to travel without letter or hindrance. It testified to your good intentions and to your identity. And sometimes if it was from a bishop, it would also free you from some of the tolls and taxes on the route. So most cities had walls and gates which were locked at night and had a very strong sense of citizens and aliens, outsiders. And outsiders would often be charged a fee to pass through the city. As cities are often located on rivers or on main routes, then you needed to go through the city to do that. So these were often non-optional tolls and charges and your letter of safe conduct might

be required there and it might get you off, say if the bishop was in good standing, with the next bishop, that kind of thing. The other place where the passport or the forerunner of the passport was really important was in Venice, where there were various technologies of a thing called a bulletta, which was a kind of little certification. And this sometimes was used as a bill of lading to show what you had in your baggage, particularly if you were a trader. But sometimes it was used as an individual certification that you had paid your fare to get to Alexandria or Jaffer. And so, Sometimes it was used as a health certification in times of plague. And as time goes on, it becomes more and more important that you can show that you've come from somewhere that's plague-free.

And so these bills will be used to show that you've spent time, say, at the Lazaretto being cleansed or that you've come from somewhere that was plague-free. So these technologies of individual certification, they're halting, and they're not continuous. Not every medieval traveler has them, but they do become more and more sophisticated. and more widespread, most travellers would carry a letter of safe conduct, and if they didn't have something which proved their identity, they could be mistaken for a vagabond or a beggar and not a sincere traveller, and then they could be refused entry, they could be charged, they could be imprisoned, and so the stakes are quite high to have individual certification that proved that you were legitimate. And when travellers lose this, we only have a few examples of this, and we have an

example of an Italian traveller having his letter of safe conduct stolen off him somewhere on the Silk Route. We have an example of a Russian traveller who loses his identity when he's in India. I write about him in quite a lot of detail in the book. And then you're really in a very kind of grey area as you're no longer a visiting traveller passing through. You become something much more unpredictable and perhaps dangerous to the local authorities. You could be a spy, you could be there to convert the local population, and that I think becomes much more dangerous for the individual traveller. It sounds like the plot of a fairly modern Hollywood movie, though, that you lose your passport somewhere in the wild, and you can't prove who you are and you're stuck and

can't find your way back home. Yeah, the Russian guy, I mentioned, Athanasius Nikitin, but his life really is like an amazing film because he set off as a merchant to Persia from Western Russia and he ended up spending a long time in India and going native. And actually it's from him we get a lot of accounts of Indian sex work, Indian alcohol, Indian food, Indian religion at the time accounts that we really wouldn't have from a Western perspective otherwise. And also he seems to have become a kind of Muslim. At one point he's forced to convert, but at other points it appears that he then had accepted that. And he wrote in a mixture of Slavic languages and Turkish and Persian and Arabic, his entire life seems to be transformed through travel in a very

interesting and filmic way, because you get this incredibly detailed but quite convoluted and quite messy account of his journey near the end of his life at his homecoming. Yeah. Here on God Medieval, I'm always trying to claim everything as a medieval. invention and medieval creation. Could we say that the travel industry and the idea of tourism is a medieval invention? I think lots of the technologies of travel and tourism are medieval inventions, things that we still have with us today. You've mentioned the passport, which by the way, there are eastern antecedents and parallels to the passport, Mongol passports and other kinds of individual certification, which exist at the same time.

and the idea of the plague quarantine, this is something that first appears in Ragusa, in Dubrovnik, and then in Venice, and lots of the technologies about holding sick travellers in a Lazareto in the plague quarantine island. These are developments. But also, I think in English, we have lots of the words holiday and holy day, which are directly coming from the Middle Ages and that ambiguity between going to a saint's shrine or taking a day off work and travelling. And we have a lot of those kind of parallels in English, which are bequeathed to us from Middle English, the verb to Rome itself, R-O-A-M, it's said to come from, to go to Rome, R-O-M-E, and to wander. It's not important to me as a medievalist to say everything is a medieval invention,

but I think we can see in lots of ways as here in Western Europe, how medieval culture chimes with or rhymes with things in the modern period. They're not exactly the same, but there's a very similar resonance to. it. And obviously there are classical and early medieval accounts of journeys and accounts of travelling. What we get in the Middle Ages is a sense of the infrastructure and the cultures of travel, not being about individual odysseys, but being about a kind of touristic and quite capitalistic experience with the things like the hotel, the tavern and the inn, and these kinds of technologies starting to exist in ways which are recognisable now.

When you were writing, did you recognise what your sources were talking about from your own experiences of medieval travel? When you go to the same place, did you recognise any of the things that they were talking about, or did it feel like quite a detached experience? No, I absolutely didn't want it to be a detached experience, and I did travel to most of the places I write about, partly to get a sense of the embodied sense of writing about, a certain place which may be saved, we might not get a sense from the medieval text, whether it's mountainous or flat, whether it's accessible or inaccessible. But also, when you're in a place, you realise the perspective on the physically embodied way of going around it, the distances between

churches, say, in Rome might give you a really different sense of why a travel writer made so much of that leg of their journey. But also, I wanted to get a sense of why there's, some of the misunderstandings and some of the local details come into the texts. Unexpectedly, I ended up actually having a much more medieval sense of travel, partly because of the difficulties of travelling during the pandemic. I got quite ill during my trip to Germany with tick bite and Lyme disease. I ended up in Venice during a general strike where it was very hard to get to Venice itself. In the Maldives, my speedboat off of the atoll, I was.

was on was cancelled and I ended up being stranded there which is very similar to one of the travellers I write about from 15th century Genoa who went to the Maldives in India. The national lockdown was imposed while I was there and so there were a lot of kind of these medieval style privations and unpredictabilities which put me unexpectedly into the position of the travellers I was writing about and made me feel I think at times very much at the mercy of strangers and of my own resourcefulness and also thinking about this kind of ultra-embodded experience you have as a traveller where things go wrong where it's really just you having to find a way that said I also have written about places which didn't exist or aren't accessible now and so one of the

places I write about towards the end of the book is an island called pantin which may or may not be somewhere in Sumatra or Indonesia, but this is somewhere which appears a lot on medieval maps and in medieval accounts of the world as a kind of end of the world. And I use that then to lead on to medieval places called the end of the world. Most cultures have a place that they think of as the end of the world. So these were places that I would then explore through maps and through representations of them. And I found that I was moving when I was writing the book between the experience of place as a thing that you encounter physically and the experience of place as a thing that you encounter mentally or intellectually. And the book kind of dances between

those two things, places that we know in the mind's eye and places that we know through the buildings and through the food and through the practicalities. And I think that's very much a mandivian and medieval way of thinking about the world, this movement between the internal place that's constructed through the intellect and the place that one's footsteps, one's body encounters. Yeah, so when you're writing the book, did you find your way of writing about these places influenced by the medieval sources that you'd read as well as your own experiences of it? Or is it that more that you were experiencing it still in a very similar way to a medieval person might have experienced it?

It's a really hard question to answer, but if you think about a city like Rome, the modern traveller can go through Rome as a modern city, as a 21st century capital city with all the technology and particularly things like urban transport, if you use a medieval text like the Mirabilia, which was the standard handbook to Rome or the stations of Rome, which was a very popular poem about Rome, and actually walk that route that medieval pilgrims would have walked, it gives you a totally different sense of the topography of the city. It connects places which aren't now connected and it moves the sense of where the centre is, much more towards, say, things like the Lateran Palace away from the Vatican. The Lateran was then one of the highlights of Rome, as well as the Vatican, which wasn't yet

the kind of focal point that it is now. And so I think you can get a different topography. You can also see how medieval pilgrims were confused by certain things if you travel in their footsteps, say in Cyprus or in parts of Greece. There are multiple shrines to the same saint that pilgrims may have seen elsewhere in the Holy Land or in London or whatever. And these are often now quite forgotten shrines, but they would have been quite important in the Middle Ages. And seeing how people misunderstood or re-understood certain places, it's quite important to get a sense of the local locality of those traditions.

But I think you can read the medieval sources without travelling yourself. I did that on behalf of my readers. I endured these journeys. But I think in a way you can read lots of medieval sources. travel writing, it's designed to be read from home. It's designed to be read in the mind's eye. And the point of it is to imagine and to build a picture for the reader of places. The phrase that medieval travel writers use in Latin is inoculus Mentis in the mind's eye. There's a strong sense of actually being a receptive reader of this material. You don't have to be a

diligent traveller. Yeah. You can enjoy someone's holiday slideshow at home instead of having to go there yourself. Exactly. Just to end on, if we were to book a gone medieval package holiday to the 14th century, what do you think a modern traveller would find most difficult to navigate about travel in the medieval world? The most difficult thing for a modern traveller would be unpredictability. That might be about health and welfare, but it might also be about expense. But I think we now feel that money and the cost of travel is something that is very closely detailed and circumscribed today that we can actually know what something's going to cost. We know what our budget is for a journey and we know what to put aside for a certain kind of hotel or a certain kind of meal or a

certain kind of experience. In the Middle Ages, I think they really didn't know what it was going to cost. They knew they were going to at some point going to have to make some money or beg or rely on strangers. So I think the sense that travel was unpredictable would have been the thing that was most alien to people. Yeah, definitely. And I think alongside that, as you may mention the idea that it wasn't for pleasure. You weren't supposed to enjoy this. Yeah, I think that's right. I think lots of the pilgrims, they will get to Jerusalem after this terrible journey where they've described how awful it is, but they will still say the sweetness, the joy of seeing Jerusalem, that made it all worthwhile. And I guess that's a question of belief and a question of,

was it really? But lots of the travellers will find ways of translating the ordeal into a really wonderful experience. Thank you very much for joining us, Anthony. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Anthony's book, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, The World Through Medieval Eyes, is out now. So whether you're looking for a holiday read or some preparation to compare your experience, you can grab a copy and enjoy tales of medieval travel right now. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment,

please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help new audiences to find us. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.