Author(s): Margaret Wade Labarge

Non-Fiction

Adventure, religion, politics, amusement - the story of how and why the upper-class travelled in the medieval world

Margaret Wade Labarge takes a medley of upper-class men and women of the thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries and illustrates how they travelled throughout their known world. She presents such unforgettable and indefatigable travellers as Eudes of Rouen, who averaged 2,500 miles a year during his term as archbishop of Rouen; Mary, daughter of Edward I and a most restless nun; Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, Castilian ambassador to the court of Timur at Samarkand; and Bertrandon de la Broquiere, the Burgundian squire who disguised himself as a Turk in order to join a caravan returning from Mecca. Their stories, and those of their fellow travellers, underlie the mobility and the accompanying splendour which kings and queens, lords, ladies and leading ecclesiastics took for granted as the normal pattern of life in the later Middle Ages.