The medieval Low Countries are an awkward geographical ensemble, unified only by the fact that at the end of the period the various principalities were all ruled by the same prince. Only in 1540s was the region formally detached from the Holy Roman Empire and from France. Moreover a linguistic frontier ran across many principalities, making in fact Flanders, Brabant, and Liège (French and Dutch) and Luxemburg (French and German) bilingual. The Low Countries constituted one of the most densely urbanised regions of medieval Europe: In the fifteenth century, one third of the population in Flanders and Brabant, and in Holland even half of the population-, lived in towns. This was in essence an urban world, where the urban way-of-life dominated the economy, politics, and religious and cultural life. Literacy rates as a consequence were high, mobility as well. If the authors of the Low Countries travelogues were in great majority townsmen, it is striking that also foreigners who reported on their visits to the Low Countries could not stop wondering about how urban this region in northwestern Europe really was.