By period

Medieval Travel Narratives

This collection gathers medieval travel narratives in the broadest sense: everything written before the sixteenth century, from the end of Antiquity onward, from the Norse seafarers of the tenth century to the Portuguese sailors who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. People in the Middle Ages traveled far more than we tend to imagine, but slowly: on foot, on horseback, by camel or aboard ships that hugged the coast, and every departure meant months, sometimes years, away from home.

Few of them set out from pure curiosity. They traveled to pray: Christians to Jerusalem, Rome or Santiago de Compostela, Muslims to Mecca, whose annual pilgrimage drew crowds from the Atlantic to India. They traveled to trade, along the caravan routes of silk and incense, to the Venetian and Genoese outposts on the Black Sea, with the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean. They traveled to negotiate: in 921, Ibn Fadlan joined the Baghdad caliph's embassy to the Volga Bulgars; in the thirteenth century, the Franciscans John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck crossed Asia to the court of the Mongol Great Khan. And they traveled to settle: around the year 1000, Norsemen from Iceland and Greenland reached the shores of North America, five centuries before Columbus.

These travelers did not belong to a single world. Benjamin of Tudela, a Jew from Navarre, visited the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean and the Near East around 1170; Ibn Jubayr of al-Andalus described his pilgrimage of 1183; Ibn Battuta of Tangier spent nearly thirty years crossing the Islamic world, from West Africa to China. At the far end of Eurasia, the Chinese fleets of Admiral Zheng He reached Arabia and the coast of East Africa between 1405 and 1433. The Castilian envoy Ruy González de Clavijo was received by Tamerlane in Samarkand in 1404, and the Russian merchant Afanasy Nikitin reached India by way of Persia in the 1470s.

The narrative was often written after the fact, and by more than one hand. Marco Polo dictated his memories in 1298 to Rustichello da Pisa, his fellow prisoner in a Genoese jail; Ibn Battuta entrusted his to the scholar Ibn Juzayy at the command of the sultan of Fez. Authors wrote for a prince, a religious order or a community of believers, and their texts circulated in manuscripts that were copied, translated, abridged and illuminated. A travel account could serve as a diplomatic report, a pilgrim's guide or an inventory of goods and tolls.

Truth obeyed rules other than ours. Travelers reported what they had seen, but also what they had been told and what ancient authorities, the Bible, Pliny or Solinus, had already asserted. The maps of the time, from the Hereford mappa mundi to the Catalan Atlas of 1375, set Jerusalem at the center and filled the margins with monstrous races. Europeans searched for the kingdom of Prester John and placed the earthly paradise somewhere in the East. The Travels attributed to John Mandeville, a skillful compilation about lands its author probably never saw, were more widely read than Marco Polo. Reading these texts means learning to separate exact observation, often remarkable, from the marvels that frame it.

This collection brings together our editions of texts written before the sixteenth century and a directory of related accounts, witnesses to a known world that ocean voyages were about to redraw.

Our titles on this subject

10th century

The Discoverers of the North Atlantic

Norse sagas (Landnámabók, Íslendingabók, Vinland sagas), c. 860-1000

Around 860, storm-driven Norse sailors discover Iceland. Erik the Red invents Greenland; his sons reach America five centuries before Columbus. A Viking odyssey carried by the figure of Gudrid.

The Norse discoveries in the North Atlantic, between the ninth and eleventh centuries, survive only through Icelandic memory, written down two or three centuries later. The Book of Settlements, Ari the Learned's Book of the Icelanders and the two Vinland sagas are the founding witnesses. Read side by side, they show how a settler society told the story of its own origins, and why the excavations at L'Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland, bore out their historical core.

11th century

Safarnama

Nasir Khusraw, 1045-1052

In 1045, a Persian official leaves everything behind to seek what elevates the mind. Over seven years, Nasir Khusraw crosses Fatimid Cairo, Jerusalem, and Mecca: the first great travel journal of the medieval Muslim world.

In the mid-eleventh century the Near East was divided between Seljuks and Fatimids, on the eve of the Crusades. Nasir Khusraw, a Persian official turned pilgrim, crossed it with no aim of conquest or trade, recording what he could measure: ramparts, markets, prices, mosques, taxes. His picture of Cairo and of Jerusalem before 1099 has few equals, and it offers a Muslim's view of the Muslim world, the reverse of the European accounts that followed.

The Description of the Northern Islands

Adam of Bremen, c. 1075-1080

Around 1075, a canon of Bremen drafts the first written portrait of Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, and the mysterious Vinland, without ever leaving his cell.

Around 1075, Latin Europe knew the Scandinavian North only by hearsay. Adam, a canon of the Church of Hamburg-Bremen, which was charged with converting those lands, gathered what missionaries, merchants and above all the Danish king Sweyn Estridsson could tell him. The result is the first reasoned geography of the Baltic and the North Atlantic islands, written as the northern kingdoms turned Christian, and the only mention of Vinland older than the Icelandic sagas.

15th century

Captivity and Travels Through Three Empires

Johann Schiltberger, 1394-1427

Held captive by Tamerlane for thirty years, the Bavarian squire Johannes Schiltberger crossed the Ottoman, Timurid and Tatar empires. His account, dictated around 1430, is the first Western view from within.

Between the defeat at Nicopolis in 1396 and the 1420s, the East changed masters several times: Ottomans, Timurids, khans of the Golden Horde. Johannes Schiltberger lived through these upheavals not as a traveller but as a captive, handed from one master to the next. That position opened worlds no ambassador could reach, from army camps to the northern steppes, and his account, dictated on his return, told Christian Europe about a world it knew only through rumours of war.

The Star Raft

Fei Xin, 1409-1433

Half a century before Vasco da Gama, a soldier of Zheng He's fleet describes forty-four countries across Asia, the Indian Ocean, Arabia, and East Africa. A Chinese view of the fifteenth-century world.

In the early fifteenth century, Ming China sent the largest fleets of the age into the Indian Ocean. Fei Xin sailed with them as an ordinary soldier, neither envoy nor admiral, and he writes as a literate member of the crew. His forty-four entries, each closed by a poem, describe Malacca, Calicut and Hormuz as the Chinese empire saw them, before the Portuguese arrived to redraw the trade routes of the whole region.

Letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha

Pero Vaz de Caminha, c. 1450–1500

In ten days of writing to his king, a Portuguese scribe gives birth to Brazil.

On 1 May 1500, the scribe of Cabral's fleet sent King Manuel I the first description of a land that would become Brazil. Written on the spot, over ten days of observation, Pero Vaz de Caminha's letter captures the fragile moment of the meeting with the inhabitants of the coast, before any colonisation. It remained unpublished until 1817 and is now regarded as the literary birth certificate of Brazil.

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

Ahmad ibn Fadlan, Voyage chez les Bulgares de la Volga (921)

In 921, a scholar from Baghdad travels north to carry the caliph's word to the king of the Volga Bulgars. Along the way, he encounters the same Scandinavians who appear in our sagas, but seen from the far end of their world: traders in slaves and furs camped on the river, whose funeral rites aboard a burning ship he describes with the precision of an astonished ethnographer. Where the Icelanders tell of their ancestors from within, ibn Fadlan looks at them as an outsider. His account, exactly contemporary with the Viking Age, illuminates from without the men this book follows westward.
Leon Diaconus, Histoire (959-989)

This Byzantine chronicler recounts the wars that shook the Eastern Empire in the second half of the tenth century, at the very time Erik the Red reaches Greenland. In its pages the Rus appear, those Scandinavians who came down the rivers of Russia to the walls of Constantinople, allies one day and enemies the next. The same people who drove their ships toward the ice of the north were thus opening, in the south, a route to the Empire's gold. To read Leon Diaconus is to measure the reach of a Norse world that touched both the shores of America and the gates of Byzantium.
Sei Shonagon, Notes de chevet (c. 1000)

At the other end of the known world, in the Japan of the year one thousand, a lady of the imperial court keeps the liveliest journal of her age. Sei Shonagon does not sail, she observes: the seasons, the rites, the pettiness and the grace of a society refined to the extreme. Nothing could seem further, on the surface, from Norse sailors shivering in their small craft. And yet the two worlds are contemporary, day for day. To read her is to remember that the Viking Age was also the century when, in Kyoto, a man was judged by the fold of his sleeve.
Ibn Boutlan, Lettre sur le voyage du Caire vers la Syrie (c. 1050)

The Christian physician from Baghdad, almost a contemporary of Nasir, described, around 1050, his own travels from Iraq to Fatimid Egypt and Syria, through Aleppo and Cairo, in the very years when Nasir was staying there. Comparing the two views of al-Mustansir's Cairo is invaluable: Nasir sees the splendor of Shia power and the honesty of the merchants; Ibn Boutlan notes the theological quarrels and the condition of minorities. Two portraits of the same city, a few months apart, by two observers from different worlds.
Adam de Brême, Histoire des archevêques de Hambourg (c. 1075)

A few years after Nasir's return, the canon of Hamburg Cathedral wrote, around 1075, his description of northern Europe and the Scandinavian lands, where he even mentions the existence of a Vinland discovered by the Norsemen. It is the northern and inverse counterpart to the Persian's journey toward the southwest. The climate is harsh where Nasir seeks the sun. The travelers are Vikings where he encounters pilgrims, camel drivers, and qadis. Two extremes of the same century, two halves of the known world, written in almost the same years.
Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla (c. 1230)

A century after Adam, the Icelander Snorri recounts from within the kings the canon knew only by hearsay. Harald Bluetooth, the two Olafs, and Cnut the Great reappear here, but seen by the Norsemen themselves, with their sagas, their skalds, and their own memory. To read Snorri after Adam is to hear the other version of the same history, that of the conquered finally given voice.
Abou Hamid al-Gharnati, Tuhfat al-Albab (1115-1160)

This Andalusian from Granada, born shortly after Nasir's death, traveled between 1115 and 1160 through the Muslim and Christian world from west to east, passing through the Volga region and the Hungarian steppes, describing peoples no one had yet recorded in Arabic. Like Nasir, he narrates with a calm ethnographic curiosity; like him, he is a traveler who returns and who writes. Where the Persian dwells on stones and markets, Gharnati lingers over the customs, clothing, weapons, and beliefs of the men of the North.
Ibn Joubayr, Relation des voyages (1183-1185)

The Andalusian pilgrim from Valencia made the pilgrimage to Mecca between 1183 and 1185 and wrote the notebook that would found the classical Arabic genre of the rihla. He passed through the same Egyptian ports, sailed down the Red Sea, and saw Mecca one hundred forty years after Nasir, under the Ayyubids of Saladin. More literary, more brilliant, and also more laudatory toward the restored Sunni power, he completes his predecessor on every point where Nasir remained silent. The two notebooks read almost like a two-voice score on the same Levant.
Anna Comnène, Alexiade (c. 1148)

The daughter of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I recounts, around 1148, in learned Greek, the reign of her father. She writes about exactly the generation following Nasir's own, and evokes the Seljuk Turks, the First Crusade, and the eastern Mediterranean on the eve of its great upheaval. A book to read to understand the other side, the Christian one, of the world Nasir crossed: the voice of a learned princess answers that of a fleeing secretary, both born of the same world, but half a century apart, after the crusade had passed through it.
Benjamin of Tudela, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (c. 1170)

Around 1170, this rabbi from Navarre travelled through the Mediterranean and the Near East to visit Jewish communities. Like Adam, he blends precise observation with hearsay, and his text wavers between reportage and legend. The same mixture of accuracy and wonder is found here, the same insatiable curiosity for distant peoples and their customs.
Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum (c. 1200)

Around 1200, this Danish clerk composed in Latin the great chronicle of his people. He knew Adam's work and carried it forward, giving the Danish kings their national epic. Here one meets the heroes and legends that Bremen had barely glimpsed, in an ample language that seeks to rival the Ancients.
William of Rubruck, The Journey of William of Rubruck (1253)

In 1253, this Franciscan set out on a diplomatic and religious mission to the court of the Mongols at Karakorum. Like Adam's legates to the kings of the North, he carried the faith to peoples reputed to be savage. His account, lucid and disenchanted, shows the reverse side of the missionary dream that Bremen had nurtured two centuries earlier.
Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo (1298)

Two centuries after Adam, the Venetian sets out in the opposite direction, toward the far East. Where the canon stops short at the gulf of darkness, having never seen those regions with his own eyes, Polo crosses deserts, serves the Great Khan, and brings back the wonders of China. The comparison illuminates Adam's method: one man travels and recounts what he sees, the other compiles and recounts what he is told. Two ways of stretching the boundaries of the known world.
Ibn Battuta, Voyages (1325-1354)

The great traveler from Tangier crisscrossed, over thirty years between 1325 and 1354, the entire Muslim world, from sub-Saharan Africa to China. When he passes through Jerusalem, Cairo, or Mecca, it is three centuries after Nasir, and the world has been transformed: the Crusades over, the Mongols established, the Mamluks in Cairo. The contrast with the Persian's notebook gives the measure of what has changed. Where Nasir describes in a few pages, Ibn Battuta expands into personal adventures, marriages, learned disputes, and princely banquets.
Ibn Battuta, Rihla (Voyages) (1355)

A century before Zheng He, the Moroccan Ibn Battuta likewise crossed the Indian Ocean, from the Maldives to Bengal and on to the ports of southern China. His vast account traces exactly the routes of the treasure fleet, but in the opposite direction and as much by land as by sea. Here one finds the atolls, the Indian courts, and the pepper trading posts that Fei Xin would later describe, seen through the eyes of a traveling qadi searching everywhere for his fellow believers. A striking counterpoint from the Muslim world.
Ibn Khaldoun, Voyage d'Occident et d'Orient (1380-1400)

The great Tunisian historian, already famous for his Muqaddima, travels between Tunis, Cairo, Mecca, and Damascus in the years 1380-1400. Above all, he meets Tamerlane in person beneath the walls of Damascus in January 1401, in a conversation that remains famous, in which the conqueror questions him about the Maghreb. The account, in Arabic, is contained in Ibn Khaldoun's autobiography, of which Abdesselam Cheddadi produced a French edition at Actes Sud in 1995. Schiltberger and Ibn Khaldoun speak of the same Tamerlane, seen on one hand by an Arab scholar, on the other by a Bavarian page.
Jean de Mandeville, Livre des merveilles du monde (c. 1357)

Compiled around 1357 from earlier sources, the English knight's fictitious travel journal is one of the bestsellers of the fifteenth century. Schiltberger no doubt had occasion to hear it read aloud in Bavaria, and the European culture of Asia that forms the Bavarian's horizon owes it much. Worth reading to understand what Europe believed about the world when a young squire from Munich set out to fight the Turks.
Ruy González de Clavijo, Embajada a Tamorlán (1403-1406)

The ambassador of King Henry III of Castile sets out in 1403 from Cadiz for Samarkand, where he is received by Tamerlane himself. He returns by way of Georgia and Trebizond in 1406. His account is the exact diplomatic counterpart of Schiltberger's testimony: while the Bavarian serves on foot in the Timurid camp, the Castilian is received there in silk robes amid the elephants. The two narratives cross almost physically at Samarkand. Where Schiltberger sees the court from within, as a captive, Clavijo describes it from without, as a guest. Reading the two side by side gives the most complete stereoscopic portrait Europe ever had of the Timurid empire.
Ruy González de Clavijo, Récit de l'ambassade à la cour de Tamerlan (1403-1406)

While the Ming fleet was opening up the Southern Seas, a Castilian ambassador journeyed to Samarkand, to the court of Tamerlane, between 1403 and 1406. His journal, precise and vivid, describes another superpower of this early fifteenth century and the splendor of a Central Asian capital. Where Fei Xin traveled by sea in the name of a Chinese emperor, Clavijo traveled across the steppes in the name of a king of Spain: two diplomacies of the same age, worlds apart from one another.
Le Bourgeois de Paris, Journal (1405-1449)

The anonymous Parisian keeps his journal between 1405 and 1449, in a France ravaged by the Hundred Years' War, the English invasion, and the quarrels of the Armagnacs and Burgundians. Schiltberger is a captive at Tamerlane's court when Charles VI sinks into madness; he returns to Bavaria just as Joan of Arc has Charles VII crowned at Reims. Two contemporary Europeans, one in Asia, the other in Paris, live through the same quarter century of disasters at the same time.
Bertrandon de la Broquière, Voyage d'Outremer (1432-1433)

The chamberlain of Philip the Good sets out in 1432 to spy on the Ottomans, traveling from Jerusalem to Constantinople and on to Burgundy, just after Schiltberger's return. His account, published by Charles Schefer in 1892, is the first Western testimony to the Ottoman empire restored after the disaster of Ankara. Where Schiltberger recounts Bayezid in the present tense of the captive, La Broquière describes Murad II as a diplomatic agent aware of the Ottoman threat. Together, the two accounts form the European chronicle of the late pre-Byzantine Orient.
Bertrandon de la Broquière, Le Voyage d'outre-mer (1432-1433)

Shortly after Zheng He's final voyage, a Burgundian squire crossed the eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia to scout the routes of a possible passage to Jerusalem. His account, restrained and curious, offers a European's view of the East at the very moment when, at the other end of Asia, China was withdrawing into itself. Two worlds still unaware of one another, held together, for a moment, by these contemporary notebooks.
Ma Huan, Ying-yai Sheng-lan (瀛涯勝覽, Le Panorama général des rivages de l'océan) (1433)

A shipmate of Fei Xin, the Muslim interpreter Ma Huan left behind the natural counterpart to The Star Raft. Embarked, like Fei Xin, on Zheng He's treasure ships, he visited many of the same countries, from Champa to Calicut and Mecca, but his gaze lingers more on languages, religions, and rituals. Where Fei Xin notes a scene and closes it with a poem, Ma Huan narrates and marvels. Reading the two together is to see the same fleet through two different pairs of eyes, and to measure what each man chose to remember of the same shores.
Álvaro Velho (attribué), Roteiro da primeira viagem de Vasco da Gama (1497-1499)

Three years before Caminha, a member of Vasco da Gama's crew, often identified as Álvaro Velho, kept the log of the first sea route to India. He tells of the rounding of Africa, the calls along the Swahili coast, the arrival at Calicut and the wariness of the local ruler. It is on this brand-new road that Cabral's fleet set out in 1500, and several of its men had already sailed it: Nicolau Coelho, the first to approach the Brazilian beach, had commanded one of Gama's ships. Both texts share the same Portuguese seafarers' gaze, attentive to gestures, exchanges and bartered objects.

Medieval Travel Narratives