Almost entirely surrounded by the sea, the Iberian Peninsula witnessed voyages that would change the face of the known world forever. Travellers crossed the Mediterranean and Atlantic, undertook journeys to Mecca and the Holy Land, to the Near and Far East, to Europe and Africa. In 1492, the New World was discovered when Christopher Columbus reached the Americas, and in 1500 Brazil was claimed for the Portuguese by a fleet heading for India commanded by the diplomat Pedro Álvares Cabral. Travel writers from Iberia departed from a place with a fluid geographical and cultural identity in its own right. Playing host over the course of its history to people of different ethnicities, religions, and languages, Iberia has always been a place of cultural interchange and political flux. Travel writing is also a key part of medieval Iberia’s rich narrative tradition in which it presents universal and particular experiences which are contingent on the delicate relationship between fact and fiction.

Unlike rabbinic literature or medieval Jewish philosophy, travel writing has rarely been considered part of the Jewish canon and, as a result, has merited little discussion and analysis by modern scholars until fairly recently. Hebrew travel writing as a literary genre, broadly defined, first emerged in the context of the crusades, when the increase in maritime traffic between Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean also facilitated a renewed Jewish pilgrimage to Jerusalem and other holy places in the Levant. The fact that the social context of this genre was the medieval European pilgrimage movement is the reason that most of its authors turned to Hebrew instead of Judeo-Arabic, which was the preferred written language of Jews in the Islamicate world. It also explains the closeness in form and some of the content between these Hebrew travel accounts and contemporaneous Christian-authored texts, such as the itinerarium or peregrinatio. At the same time, medieval Hebrew travel writings include place-specific information and lore similarly known from Arabic (Muslim-authored) literature of travel and geography.

Rome continued to attract deep interest for its classical vestiges. The most cultivated among pilgrims and travellers also came to Rome to see what remained of the old monuments scattered within and without the 20 km of its city walls that enclosed a territory of 1,400 hectares and a population between 30,000 and 50,000 inhabitants. The variety of geographical origins, perspectives and approaches to Rome as a destination of travel, whether real pilgrimages and journeys or imaginary and intellectual journeys, produced a rich array of texts of different genres: itineraries amidst churches and ancient monuments of Rome, catalogues that described the city, its features, marvels (mirabilia), sites, buildings and history, pilgrims’ and travellers’ accounts in the form of journals of their trips to Rome, including routes and impressions of the city; simple itineraries; letters addressed to friends; various kinds of literary (poetic or narrative) representations of the pilgrimage or journey to Rome.

Despite increasing dilapidation, many of Rome’s ancient buildings survived in a form to impress visitors. During the Middle Ages a number of them – Hildebert of Lavardin, Master Gregorius, Benjamin of Tudela – left a brief record of the favourable impression the ruins made upon them. More widespread, however, were the legendary accounts, as found most extensively in the Mirabilia Urbis Romae, of the history and function of a number of the ruins of the pagan past. Such fables can be seen as forerunners of later ruin-mindedness in their attempt to explain the original role in the urban fabric of what was now ruinous and puzzling.