Medieval Hungary lay on the cross-roads for medieval travellers, along one of the main communication routes of medieval Europe. Its position in the Carpathian basin determined many aspects of its connections with regions near and far. All travellers, diplomats, pilgrims, and armies who wanted to take the overland route from Western Europe to Byzantium or further, to the Holy Land, followed the valley of the Danube from Southern Germany through Austria, Hungary, and on to the southeast. Travel literature for Hungary should be appreciated as complex. Hungary was visited by foreigners coming from many different directions, Christians and non-Christians, monarchs, armies, and simple travellers. Pilgrims travelling to holy places, students studying in foreign universities, rulers on military campaigns or diplomatic missions, mercenaries fighting in various military conflicts, and prisoners of war, were among the many reasons for travel. are. Distinctive travel literature for medieval Hungary is only a small part of the textual sources relating to travellers who arrived in or departed from this country.

This chapter examines French travel writing from the latter end of the Middle Ages with a special focus on understudied accounts. As we will see, this period sees travel conducted by French-speaking military officers, court figures, and spies deeply embroiled in the local, regional, and international politics stretching across Francophone Europe and gazing outward over the Near and Middle East. Thus, although entitled ‘France’, this chapter necessarily encompasses far more than that geographic territory. It follows a peripatetic clerkly class ferrying counsel and culture between various Francophone royal and ducal courts. These authors’ disparate geopolitical backgrounds are subsumed under their choice to write in French, and their attachments to home are problematized by their itinerant lives and cultural aspirations. Their multifaceted accounts, often vexed and internally inconsistent, reflect the rapidly changing world through which they travelled.