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.

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.