Many late medieval travellers left us extensive accounts about their experiences, but they often do not differ from each other in significant ways, commonly because they copied from previous sources and followed the same routes, such as coming from Germany, crossing the Alps down to Venice, from there taking the ship traveling along the coast of the Adriatic Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean, to reach the Holy Land. German merchants who travelled south to reach the Italian markets were all required to stay in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice. Those who travelled north, often members of the Hanseatic League, found necessary trading centres in the various harbour cities along the coastlines of the Scandinavian cities, the British Isles, and Russia. In a way, we have thus to perceive German medieval travellers as being part of a mass European movement. The motifs for travels were commonly shared: religious desires, economic interests, diplomatic purposes, intellectual curiosity (learning), and professional needs.

The late twelfth century witnessed the emergence of the Middle High German courtly romance, first introduced by Hartmann von Aue, who translated primarily Erec and Iwein from his French sources by Chrétien de Troyes. Other poets soon followed suit, especially Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strassburg, and The Stricker. These romances competed with the traditional bridal-quest verse narratives, and also with contemporary heroic epics, but soon established themselves independently. The thirteenth century witnessed a considerable expansion of the genre, though many romances either turned into more sentimental narratives or imitated much of the ‘classical’ poets from around 1200. In the late Middle Ages, the verse romance was substituted by prose novels, often simply technical adaptations of the traditional courtly narratives (then also printed). However, in the fifteenth century some of those early novels were predicated on innovative themes and reflected the changes of time.