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’.

The Mongol Empire became a chief destination for European travellers in a very specific moment of the medieval period, roughly framed by two events: Ögedei Khan’s European campaign of 1240–1241, and the formal fall of the last Yuan Mongolian emperor in 1368, which marked the takeover of the Chinese Ming dynasty and the opening of a new social and political paradigm in Asia. Between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Mongol rule brought about an unprecedented geopolitical stability across Eurasia, traditionally referred to by historians as Pax Mongolica. The general safety of the roads and the relatively smooth administrative system of the Mongol khanates allowed for a productive period of economic and cultural interconnections between Europe and the Far East, whose protagonists were traders, diplomats, missionaries, and adventurers. While merchants exploited the safety of the Silk Road to reach territories both within and beyond the Mongol area, the Mongol Empire was the express destination of several diplomatic and missionary expeditions, carried out by Franciscan and Dominican friars.

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.

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.

In 1237, having conquered much of the Central Asian steppes, a massive force of Mongols led by the third generation of Chinggis Khan’s descendants launched a campaign into eastern Europe, taking Kiev (1240) and sweeping westward into Poland and Hungary. News of this invasion quickly reached as far west as England. After more than 130 years of crusading, Latin Christians were passably familiar with the political and cultural complexities of the eastern Mediterranean; knowledge of the lands farther east, however, remained a hazy blend of ancient authors, Biblical lore, the Alexander Romance, and the legend of Prester John. Within short order, however, western European leaders took the initiative in their own hands, dispatching exploratory missions to the Mongols, like those of the Franciscans John of Plano Carpini in the mid-1240s and William of Rubruck in the early 1250s. Thanks to the detailed accounts of their travels they wrote on their return, the Mongols emerged from the fog of apocalyptic terror that had first surrounded them and, like a gradually-developing Polaroid, took on the contours of people with their own history, customs, and institutions

Chapter 4 deals with the encounter of Buddhism and the West during the period of the Mongol Empire. It locates any mention of the Buddha and his religion within a general view of the mediaeval East as a place of wonders – of unicorns, of dog-headed men, and of the mythical kingdom of Prester John. It demonstrates how the West came to see the Buddha as chief among idols. This chapter explores the encounter between Mongols and Franciscan missionaries sent by the West to explore the intentions of the Mongols: of John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck and of other travellers – Marco Polo, Andrew of Perugia, and King Hethum of Cilicia. It focuses not only on their often inchoate awareness of Buddhism, but also on Marco Polo’s first account in the West of the life of the Buddha, of the relics of the Buddha in Sri Lanka, and of various hints of Buddhist doctrines.