Medieval European travel writing reveals the particular ways that race-making and world-making are bound together. This literature combines ethnography and historiography, usually providing details about the culture and history of the peoples encountered by the traveler, as well as descriptions of the geography and landscapes traversed. Travelers consistently blurred the lines between fantasy and reality, but their writings nonetheless became common source material for encyclopedic texts and romance literature, thereby fueling European knowledge production and popular culture. As this literature developed a fantastical perspective about the world and its diverse inhabitants, it forged a crucible for making up people. It was a mode of writing particularly suited for race-making. This chapter examines race in medieval European travel literature that looked beyond the Levant and into Asia in order to demonstrate how histories of contact in the global Middle Ages shaped the development of racial ideologies in the period. It takes the ‘global’ not as an empirical concept, but as, to use Sanjay Krishnan’s argument, ‘a mode of thematization or a way of bringing the world into view’.

One of the earliest descriptions of Bohemia comes from the tenth-century Hispano-Arab Jewish traveller Ibrahim Ibn Yaqub. Cosmas’s Bohemian Chronicle serves as a basis for John Marignolli’s Cronica Boemorum, which laces its contents with reflections of his oriental voyages. The Chronicon pontificum et imperatorum of Martinus Polonus was translated into Greek, Persian, and Armenian. The Czech Alexandreida offers a modified account of Alexander the Great’s exploits, while the Liber Wenceslai militis contains a late-medieval knight’s account of a visit to England. On the level of new textual production, however, travel writing that might be characterized as literary or historiographical, or which extensively reports the wonders of the East, proceeds little beyond the turn of the fourteenth century in the Czech lands.

Travel manuscripts and printed books tell us how scribes and printers had to think carefully about representing foreign lands. Sometimes this meant turning the ordinary into the marvellous to capture the imagination of their readers; at other times this meant turning the strange into the recognisable. The manuscripts and printed books they produced translated tales of the unfamiliar into material palatable for domestic readers, which often required a careful balance of accuracy in relating travellers’ accounts and imagination to satisfy readers’ appetites for novelties. This essay looks at how travel literature circulated in manuscripts, how printers took advantage of the appetite for travel narratives, and what hybrid forms of manuscript and print tell us about who was reading them and the way travel literature was being read. As travel literature is a broad category that encompasses marvellous accounts, diaries, itineraries, letters, guidebooks, devotional aids, maps, and other narratives, my aim is not to offer a comprehensive overview but a few examples that demonstrate how the material context of travel literature can reveal much about their reception, use, and development.

In this chapter, I will use the Great Khan’s dreams of the white knight as the starting point to examine the problematic figurations of idolatry, fetishism, orality and whiteness within late medieval travel writing, especially Mandeville’s Travels and Marco Polo’s Le Devisement dou monde. Seemingly unrelated among themselves or to whiteness, these material and performative manifestations of faith nonetheless intersect in important ways in medieval perceptions and representations of the Tartars. The kind of cultural and textual ‘whitening’ of Genghis Khan’s dreams that Hetoum and the Mandeville-author engage in points to the power of artistic manipulations. Geoffrey of Vinsauf, in his Poetria nova, argues that art ‘plays about almost like a magician, and brings it about that the last becomes first … black white, and vile precious’. Jacqueline de Weever argues that such a belief in art’s capacity to transform black into white (nigra candida) is also a belief in the possibility of erasing alterity through whitening. Whitening, in its attempt to mask anxieties and assimilate differences, ignores the origin of alterity. The act of whitening, in fact, posits a new origin.

Jerusalem is at once a place in the world, a historic city in the Holy Land, and an image, an idea, a symbol. Jerusalem’s multiple facets are present in the biblical accounts of the city. Perhaps more than any other place or space on the planet, Jerusalem has been represented in writing and culture, at least since the biblical period. Encounters with the earthly Jerusalem and attempts to apprehend the heavenly Jerusalem are a mainstay of the western Christian tradition of travel writing, as well as of Jewish and Muslim literary and devotional traditions. In this essay I alight on some of key representations of Jerusalem but make no claim to completeness. Rather, in this essay I focus on Jerusalem’s status within the medieval Christian tradition of place pilgrimage, especially with regard to the dominant role Jerusalem has played in global geography, popular pilgrimage, and mnemonic retention.

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.