Medieval Road Trips

Travel tales were a map of their times.

IN THE MIDDLE AGES, Sir John Mandeville was called the greatest traveler of his time. Roughly retracing the route of Marco Polo, he painted vivid portraits of Constantinople, Egypt, and the Holy Land. He wrote about the ten lost tribes of Israel and described the red panther skins he'd seen hanging in a Chinese palace. He detailed the superstitions of the Tartars, who knelt before the moon in worship and considered throwing a knife into the fire to be a sin.

In more recent times, however, scholars have called Mandeville by another name: liar. Mandeville, nothing more than an armchair traveler, apparently visited none of the places he described in such intimate detail. Instead, he scrutinized the accounts of genuine adventurers—and pilfered freely. "All the farther he traveled was his library, where he got down most of these other accounts and—depending on what verb you want to use—plagiarized them or wove them together into a completely imaginary work," says Alan Gaylord, an English professor who unpacks Manddville in "Travels Sacred and Profane," a course on travel writing in the Middle Ages.

Although Mandeville was a fake, his Travels of Sir John Mandeville has become a classic. Like other travel books of its time, Gaylord asserts, it is as much a guide to the medieval mindset as to the physical landscape. For Europeans, the Middle Ages were a time of great curiosity—and terror—about the people who lived beyond their Christian world. The Crusades had made them acutely aware that large groups of people, like the Mongols and the Moslems, were hostile to their way of life.

Travel writers, says Gaylord, confronted questions of difference: "When you're in new lands, do you make them fit your vision of the world? Or do you break down your consciousness and reassemble it?"

Gaylord designed "Travels Sacred and Profane" after he noticed that his surveyclass on medieval classics was jammed with tales of journeys, pilgrimages, and quests. The fascination with travel writing reaches into Gaylord's personal itinerary. Before a trip, he admits, he obsessively studies guide books and modern-day travel literature- so much so that friends suggest he's a travel agent manque.

Gaylord's course, which includes The Divine Comedy and TheQuest of the Holy Grail, is named after Debussy's piece "Dances Sacred and Profane." But as one student noted politely in the course evaluation, Gaylord's syllabus lingers much longer on the sacred than the profane. For good reason: in the Middle Ages religion was often the motivation for travel.

As shrines became increasingly important in Christianity, pilgrimages, too, became popular, especially after the twelfth century. With the Moors driven south, the route to the Cathedral of Saint James in Santiago de Compostela became safe. That became the most visited shrine in medieval Christendom, attracting a half-million people a year and spawning a handbook, The Pilgrim's Guide to Santiago. In a culture that treasured religious relics, pilgrims believed their trips brought them blessings and increased their chances of getting to heaven. These pilgrimages, combining travel and self-improvement, were the medieval equivalent of a modern-day package tour, according to novelist David Lodge, who has videotaped his own journeygg to the cathedral.

For common folks, making a pilgrimage was one of the few permissible ways to sate their wanderlust and leave their own parishes—in real life and in fiction. "Certainly that's true of Chaucer's characters," Gaylord notes. "They're out on some kind of pleasure trip beside having to stop at Canterbury Cathedral when they get there."

Margery Kempe, a real fourteenth-century Englishwoman and the mother of 14 children, wrote about how she followed the same route as Chaucer's fictional Wife of Bath. But unlike the bawdy matron of The Canterbury Tales, Kempe was deeply moved by the shrines she visited—much to the dismay of her traveling companions. "She cries and roars, falls down, thinks of the pain or the passion of the martyr or the crucifixion and weeps and weeps," Gaylord says. "Other pilgrims apparently felt that was a bit much and often wanted to get rid of her."

The discovery of new civilizations in the Far East offered new reasons for religious travel: converting non-Christians and forging diplomatic relations. As the Crusades progressed through the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteen tit centuries and Christians lost more and more battles to the Muslims in the Holy Land, European rulers were eager to form new alliances. After the discovery of the Mongol Empire, religious leaders were dispatched there on diplomatic trips, delivering letters from the pope or the king. Like the Christians, the Mongols were enemies of the Muslims. The Europeans hoped the enemy of their enemy would be their friend. (History proved otherwise, although relations between the two empires were relatively peaceful in the early days.)

Friars who came into contact with these foreigners and their unfamiliar customs displayed a range of reactions. "Some friars are so appalled by the barbarism and paganism of the countries they're looking at they can hardly stand it," Gaylord says. "Others are much more open-eyed and intrigued and sympathetic to the ethnic differences they see."

Friar William of Rubrack, a thirteenth century French Franciscan, was one of the more clear-sighted observers. Dispatched to the Mongol Empire by King Louis IX, William and his party set out from Constantinople, crossed the Ukraine and Russia, and reached Mongolia in 1254 When his guide offered him a taste of comos, fermented mare's milk, William was terrified. "Swallowing it, I broke out in a sweat all over from alarm and surprise," he reported to the king. Soon, though, he was raving about the concoction. Although the first sip stung his tongue like raspberry wine, William wrote, comos left behind an aftertaste of milk and almonds. He hinted at the drink's source of pleasure: "It produces a very agreeable sensation inside and even intoxicates those with no strong head." William also reported on the habits of the people he met. The Mongols never washed their clothes, claiming that it would make God angry. In fact, William wrote, they thrashed anyone they spotted doing laundry. Hanging their clothes out to dry, they believed, would bring thunder, which they dreaded.

These medieval accounts, Gaylord notes, planted the seeds for contemporary travel writers like Paul Theroux. "They're prototypes for what we're accustomed to as modern travel narratives: 'I went out to this strange place and I saw these strange people,"' Gaylord says. "Sort of a NationalGeographic without the photographs."

KATHLEEN BURGE wrote about gender andShakespeare in this magazine's October issue.