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 joint centre of this book is Europe and the Middle East, because the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries CE marked what I would call an era of global contact. It was during this time that a series of interlocking conflicts enmeshing the Christian and Islamic civilisations that started with the conquest of Iberia in the eighth century and continued through the Crusades to the Ottoman wars of the early modern period shaped and expanded both Europe and the Middle East. At the same time, Europe and the Middle East explored and expanded into Asia, Africa, and eventually North America. I combine Europe and the Middle East into one cultural entity because for all their differences, the longue durée stresses the shared logocentric tradition of the Abrahamic faiths, the common heritage in science and philosophy, and the centuries of interwoven experiences, often painful and violent, but just as often culturally enriching and mutually beneficial. And while the political entities of medieval Europe play a more significant role in structuring this book than other areas, there are attempts to balance this by foregrounding the role of literatures and writers from other parts of the world.

Women of the middle millennium were more mobile than we imagine, moving from one location to another for marriage, work, trade, worship, to visit family members, to take part in warfare, to settle in new lands, and – against their will – to be trafficked as slaves and sex workers. This picture of women on the move might contradict pervasive stereotypes of premodern women confined to the domestic sphere, or living out their whole lives within the context of one village or neighbourhood. Certainly, diverse religious and secular edicts ordered women to remain confined to domestic spaces and denigrated ‘wandering’ women as harlots of loose character. Many women of elite status were constrained to obey such orders and found themselves subject to strict control over movement. The majority of women who did travel probably did so less often and over shorter distances than their male peers. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to imagine half of humanity was absent from the roads, paths and ship-routes of the premodern world. It is not that women did not make journeys, but rather that travel was highly gendered in ideology and practice.

Mecca is the religious heart of Islam. Islam began here when the Prophet Muhammad received the first words of the Qur’an just outside Mecca and it is toward the Ka‘ba that every Muslim in the world is required to pray five times a day and complete at least one Hajj pilgrimage in a lifetime. In the vein of medieval travel this article will focus on three aspects in the context of Mecca: Finding the Qibla (direction of prayer towards the Ka‘ba in Mecca), pilgrimage (hajj) journeys to Mecca as recounted in a specialized travelogue genre known as ‘rihla’, and images of Mecca in hajj certificates and prayer manuals.Like Jerusalem, Mecca has been a religious nexus since time immemorial or so the story goes that the Ka‘ba, built by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham and Isma‘il [Qur’an 2:125-7], was a site of pilgrimage from ancient days. Stressing the omphalotic nature of the Ka‘ba, pre-Islamic Jahiliyya stories tell us that pagan pilgrims would rub their navels on a nail sticking out of the center of the floor of the Ka‘ba as a way of uniting with god and the cosmos.

Travel is a prominent feature of every cycle of medieval Irish literary tales with roots in the pre-Christian narrative tradition, as well as in the majority of stories that originated in the Christian era, including lives of saints and legends about historical figures that took shape in this period. Underlying early Irish society and culture was a tension between competing movements, one attracted by the conceit of centripetal stability and the other fuelled by a centrifugal dynamic. A reassuring ideology of cultural and linguistic unity, cultivated by tradition-bearers such as poets and clerics, sought to balance out the instabilities of a volatile social order that frequently experienced realignment, fission, and reconfiguration. Related to this underlying tension was the paradox that, even though the typical person’s status, sphere of activity, and safety were circumscribed within the same social space from birth to death, medieval Irish storytelling and even Christian Ireland’s religious culture glorified travel – that is, the heroic going-forth well beyond the realm of the familiar, and the leaving behind of one’s safety zone.

This chapter will demonstrate the breadth of travellers and travel-writing both from ‘Arabia’ and to ‘Arabia’ across the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. It begins with a definition of ‘Arabia’ and a short, succinct overview of medieval Arabic travel and travel-writing with a view to showcase the vitality of movement including but not limited to pilgrimage. The chapter will hone in on two forms of travel-writing in particular: the earliest genre of geographic literature often titled Kitab al-masalik wa’l – mamalik (‘Book of Routes and Realms’) composed in the early Islamic period and associated with the Balkhi school of geographers and the rihla, a genre developed from the twelfth century onwards by Muslim travellers from the Islamic West (Al-Andalus and North Africa) as a record of their pilgrim travels ‘to Arabia’. From here, we turn to the rihla, focusing on the Valencian ‘father’ of the genre, Ibn Jubayr who journeyed east between 1183-85. Across these examples, we will encounter different types of and reasons for travel, but all expressed in literary form. It concludes by bringing into the fold the voices of Muslim women pilgrims.

Given the privileged position of anglophone literature, medieval travel writing from England has been covered more extensively than that originating in other literatures and traditions. This chapter will try to balance English and Scottish travel writing, while omitting three writers in particular that feature elsewhere in this volume: Sir John Mandeville, Margery Kempe, and William Wey. There is no shortage of travel writing situated in England and Scotland: Ohthere, The Stacions of Rome, or the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales are only some instances. English and Scottish pilgrims to the Continent and Palestine have left numerous accounts, the most striking early example of which is Saewulf’s voyage to Jerusalem in 1102. This chapter will offer an overview of several central and remarkable English and Scottish travel texts. Furthermore, I will look at texts for which travel is central yet that have not been typically considered as travel writing. In this sense, I continue the theme of this volume in embracing a capacious definition of ‘travel writing’ as not only texts that make travel their express subject, but that contain and offer accounts of multiple journeys. England

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.

Rome continued to attract deep interest for its classical vestiges. The most cultivated among pilgrims and travellers also came to Rome to see what remained of the old monuments scattered within and without the 20 km of its city walls that enclosed a territory of 1,400 hectares and a population between 30,000 and 50,000 inhabitants. The variety of geographical origins, perspectives and approaches to Rome as a destination of travel, whether real pilgrimages and journeys or imaginary and intellectual journeys, produced a rich array of texts of different genres: itineraries amidst churches and ancient monuments of Rome, catalogues that described the city, its features, marvels (mirabilia), sites, buildings and history, pilgrims’ and travellers’ accounts in the form of journals of their trips to Rome, including routes and impressions of the city; simple itineraries; letters addressed to friends; various kinds of literary (poetic or narrative) representations of the pilgrimage or journey to Rome.

Any modern survey of medieval travel literature whose destination was Compostela, or which mentioned it as a significant waystation, had little to discuss about this small town except as a goal of sacred travel. With the twelfth-century Liber Sancti Jacobi the one stunning exception, pre-Reformation primary sources are essentially preserved in archives outside the Iberian Peninsula. Of the forty-some narratives that report visits to Santiago, nearly all were written by foreigners in foreign vernaculars in manuscripts shelved and nearly forgotten near travelers’ homes. It seems that the consolidation of the Spanish state under Ferdinand and Isabel in the late fifteen century, the stiffening of that nation’s intellectual frontiers, and Spain’s adversarial incursions into European affairs in the sixteenth century coincide with a slow rise in pilgrimage narratives written by native Spaniards. Jacobean pilgrimage contracted. Many foreigners came to despise pilgrimage and largely stopped coming.

Iceland was an island discovered and populated by travellers in the early Middle Ages. Travel was thus an essential part of the Icelandic experience. The Old Icelandic sagas include numerous examples of travel writing, describing various kinds of sea voyages, such as Viking raids, military conquests, diplomatic missions, trading expeditions, as well as voyages of discovery and colonisation. Journeys on land are also described, in particular the pilgrimages which are called ‘walks to the South’ (ON. suðrgöngur). Norsemen drew geographical material from erudite works in Latin by Solinus, Orosius, Isidore of Seville, Bede, and Honorius Augustodunensis. To these they added information acquired personally, both at home and on journeys abroad as Vikings, traders, and pilgrims. What information concerning actual travel can be gathered from these sources? What was the motivation for the journeys described in the sagas? How do the sagas combine learned material from medieval Europe with native traditions from the Norse world? And above all, in what sense did the Icelanders view travel as a liminal experience?

The study of travel in Late Antiquity is complicated by a specific set of factors that will appear throughout this volume and in every period: namely, the motivations and goals of the travellers. This is especially true in Late Antiquity because the mental shape of the world was changing quickly and dramatically from what came before. The imperial reign of Constantine (306–337) ushered in for Christian writers a long-expected saeculum of imperial peace and the triumph of the Christian message. The motivations for travel in Late Antiquity very often can only be read on the background of that paradigm shift. The triumph of the Church was inextricably linked to the shape of the empire, notionally and geographically. That same empire in which Christians formerly had moved quietly and in secret was now an open space for travel and expansive thinking. Thus, travel in Late Antiquity went hand-in-hand with new geographical horizons: not primarily a physical expansion of “the known world” (the oikoumenē in Greek), though that came too, but a freedom of expression through movement within the Roman Empire they already knew.

The main portion of this essay will present representative Latin and vernacular travel narratives and related texts that postdate the Viking Age. It will be divided into sections according to the general direction of the journeys undertaken. In the material surveyed, accounts of travels to the north are typically associated with adventure and the supernatural. Travels to the west are associated with the more mundane, but equally tantalizing, mercantile and administrative activities. Travels to the south finally are associated with pilgrimages and warfare. Accounts of journeys towards the east do not, apart from a fifteenth-century translation from Latin into Danish of the account Sir John Mandeville’s travels, feature prominently in the material from mainland Scandinavia. Scholarship on medieval Scandinavian literature generally differentiates sharply and consistently between Latin and vernacular texts, and among the vernacular texts between those written in East Norse (Danish, Swedish, and Gutnish) and West Norse (Norwegian and Icelandic). In the present contribution, an effort has been made to include texts in Latin as well as East and West Norse.

This chapter examines travel and communication in Late Antiquity, analysing the complexities of movement across the Roman and Byzantine worlds from the third to the eighth century. Rather than viewing this period as one of declining mobility, the chapter argues that travel remained vital, though its dynamics shifted due to political, economic and religious transformations. A major focus is on the infrastructure that supported travel, including roads, bridges, way stations and ports. The cursus publicus, the state-run courier system, is highlighted as a crucial mechanism for imperial communication and administrative efficiency. Trade networks, both maritime and overland, played a fundamental role in sustaining long-distance movement, with Mediterranean seaports, river transport and caravan routes facilitating commercial exchanges. Religious travel, particularly pilgrimage and episcopal councils, became increasingly significant after the rise of Christianity, with the movement of monks, clergy and pilgrims contributing to the spread of religious ideas and artistic traditions. The chapter also addresses migration, discussing the movements of soldiers, officials and entire populations in response to military campaigns, economic opportunities and political upheavals. In this way, this contribution demonstrates that mobility remained central to the late antique world, shaping social, economic and cultural interactions across the empire.

Augustine’s picture of the Christian life as a voyage to the heavenly homeland is central to his thought and preaching, especially prominent in his sermons on the Psalms. For Augustine, peregrinatio is a defining image for the earthly life as such as well as of the process by which the Christian believer seeks to travel home on the path made by Christ. Augustine’s vivid imagery for this spiritual journey traverses a varied landscape, which this essay traces through a range of his sermons. Augustine’s Christology is particularly powerful in these images, for it is Christ who makes a way across the sea and over land to the homeland. Yet to be able to take this path, the believer must also be taught and inspired by the Holy Spirit to desire this homeland. Augustine’s exhortations to cultivate desire and longing are thus also dominant features of his sermons on this theme.

Station Island is a key text in coming to an understanding of the changing nature of Heaney’s engagement with Catholicism. For this reason, it is the subject of Chapter Four, alongside Heaney’s translation Sweeney Astray, published in the same year. Heavily informed by his reading of Dante, it comes at the mid-point of Heaney’s own life and is the most forthright engagement with the political and religious pieties of his childhood upbringing. I attend to a close reading of the twelve-sequence poem ‘Station Island’, the title poem of the collection, and read it in the context of its draft forms and what Heaney says elsewhere about the poem. I conclude by arguing that rather than resolving Heaney’s complex engagement with Catholicism, Station Island appears to reinforce it. However, as an act of spiritual catharsis, it clears the way for the more visionary and airy poems of subsequent collections. His translation of the Sweeney poem allows Heaney to ventriloquise, from a safe vantage point, his own poetic sense in the person of King Sweeney, who acts as a bridge between the two collections.