The A to B of medieval travel: 8 tips for travelling in the Middle Ages

In the mid-14th century, an English knight called John Mandeville boarded a boat and headed east. He was intending to follow the well-trodden path of pilgrimage to the holy city of Jerusalem.

But as his c1356 travelogue, Book of Marvels and Travels, tells us, Mandeville’s journey soon morphed into a voyage of curiosity to the edges of the world. On one island near India, he apparently encountered a breed of headless people with faces on their chests.

On another, he was confronted by natives with one huge lip that they employed as a sunshade. The inhabitants of a third island had, he tells us, tiny mouths through which they fed themselves with a feather straw.

Mandeville’s account of his travels is as extraordinary as it is fanciful. Yet it is not quite as unusual as you might think. People in the Middle Ages travelled in surprisingly large numbers – and, as Mandeville’s example attests, by far the most widespread form of travel was pilgrimage.

People went on pilgrimages for all kinds of reasons. Often they were entirely voluntary – with the express purpose of seeking salvation or imploring a particular saint’s medical aid. For example, images and relics of the virgin martyr St Apollonia, who had her teeth violently ripped out, were popular with sufferers of toothache. But pilgrimage could sometimes be mandated, too – as a punishment for a crime, or to cure the souls of an entire community.

Pilgrimage wasn’t, of course, the only reason that people hit the road. Business travel also flourished across the late Middle Ages, often configured around fairs and markets.

From around 1300, we see the advent of the travel guide for corporate travellers, such as Francesco Balducci Pegolotti’s Pratica Della Mercatura (The Practice of Commerce, c1339). Written by a Florentine banker who had worked in Antwerp, London and Famagusta, the Pratica tells us little about the delights or wonders of travel.

Rather, Pegolotti focuses on the routes across the Levant and the Silk Roads, weights and measures, currency conversion and mints, transit duties, tolls and lodgings. Unlike John Mandeville’s fantastically florid travelogue, there is no wanderlust in Pegolotti’s account… only the quest for profit.

2. Choose your route carefully (and employ a minder)

There were well-worn paths to popular destinations, but not all of them were safe.

So you’d decided to head out on a pilgrimage. Where could you have gone? Well, thousands headed to one of the holy trinity of medieval pilgrimage – Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela. Others flocked to sites that grew in popularity in the Middle Ages – places such as Aachen, Canterbury or Cologne.

Meanwhile, those who didn’t have the means to embark on international journeys could visit one of the many smaller, local shrines, often as humble as a wayside cross or a holy well.

Medieval Europe was criss-crossed with routes that served business travellers and pious pilgrims. Wealthier travellers would hire a scarceler or escarcelle, a kind of minder or guide who would fix the route, ride ahead and offer protection from kidnappers and thieves.

If you didn’t have the funds to hire professional help, you could take advantage of the amenities that dotted popular routes: markets, fairs, taverns, brothels, currency exchanges and shrines. Key routes included the Via Regia, which connected northern Spain to Muscovy; the Via Imperii, linking the Baltic region to Rome via Germany; and the Via Francigena, which connected Canterbury to Rome.

The most enduring route is surely the Camino de Santiago, which bore pilgrims to the Galician shrine of St James. Although the route changed over the years, the most popular way to Santiago conveyed pilgrims across the Pyrenees from St Jean-Pied-dePort in southern France, a journey of about 30 days.

The Codex Calixtinus, a 12th-century manual for pilgrims, describes the holy places along the way that warranted a visit. But it also included less spiritual matters. It warned readers to avoid a “salty brook” near Navarre where two men lay in wait for travellers whose horses drank the water and died, and warned against “enormous” wasps, horseflies and places where there was quicksand. The guide makes it clear that choosing a route was not about the destination, but about safety and comfort on the way.

3. Pack appropriately – and don’t antagonise the locals

Failing to carry the essentials could end in disaster.

If there’s one thing you can’t afford to forget when heading overseas in the 21st century, it’s your passport. Back in the Middle Ages passports didn’t exist, but they did have a forerunner: something called the letter of safe-conduct. These were often issued by a king, prince or bishop, with the aim of guaranteeing the holder’s identity and intentions.

If you didn’t produce this document on demand, you could be denied entry to towns. Worse still, you could find yourself getting imprisoned, fined or – as the Venetian merchant and diplomat Giosafat Barbaro discovered to his cost in 1474 – beaten up. Barbaro was near the city of Tabriz (in modern-day Iran) when a man appeared on the road and demanded to see the merchant’s letter of safe-con- duct. When Barbaro refused, he received a punch in the face, causing him severe pain for some months.

It was partly because of incidents like this that a staff and bag were also among the medieval traveller’s must-have items when embarking on a journey. The staff not only provided support over arduous terrain, it could also be employed for self-defence. The bag (a ‘scrip’ or ‘wallet’) needed to be secure enough to hold coins and valuables.

There was no travel insurance, of course, but for added spiritual protection when embarking on your journey, you could get your staff and bag blessed by a priest.

An English liturgical rite called the Sarum Missal gives this prayer to bless a departing pilgrim: “Take this staff as a support during your journey and the toils of your pilgrim- age, that you may be victorious against the bands of the enemy and safely arrive at the shrine of the saints to which you wish to go and, your journey being accomplished, may return to us in good health.”

4. Put your feet up and relax

The Middle Ages had a thriving hospitality industry, with plenty of places for travellers to eat, drink and sleep.

In the early 1430s, the English mystic Margery Kempe embarked on a pilgrimage to Aachen. On the return journey, near Calais, Kempe could find nowhere to sleep. Not an ideal scenario for someone in her sixties.

“With great fear and depression,” she approached a house by the edge of the woods, and asked the owner if she could sleep there. He declined, but she spied an outhouse with a pile of bracken. “With great insistence, she obtained permission to rest herself on the bracken that night.”

Despite Kempe’s travails, not every pilgrim had to make do with a bed of bracken. In fact, those seeking a good night’s sleep could make use of the many inns, hospices and monastic dormitories that dotted the routes to pilgrimage sites.

In England, you can still see some of this accommodation today. Examples include the humble Maison Dieu (c1235) at Ospringe in Faversham (Kent), which served Canterbury pilgrims; the King’s Head at Aylesbury (c1450), which retains its 15th-century hall and courtyard; and the grand, galleried New Inn at Gloucester, built by the Benedictine monks of Gloucester Abbey in the mid-15th century.

If you were seeking a room for a night, it was important to make the distinction between a tavern and an inn. The former provided food and drink; the latter lodging and stabling. Rooms were usually on an upper floor, arranged around a courtyard for the horses. You could even pay extra for a private bedroom.

As one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations in Europe, Rome had a famously well-developed network of hostels for visitors, including its very own English Hospice, founded in 1362.

The hospice, which was located on the Via di Monserrato, was opened by an English couple, Alice and John Shephard, who had made a living by selling rosaries to pilgrims and taking in visitors. By 1376 the complex boasted its own chapel and had become a well-known focal point for English and Welsh pilgrims.

In fact, following her pilgrimage to Rome, Margery Kempe described how her own serving maid had abandoned her in the city and ended up at the hospice, employed to look after its wine cellar.

5. Dodge the rip-off merchants

Tolls, tariffs, taxes and street hustlers abounded.

You may have had the time, the energy and the spiritual zeal to undertake a journey. But did you have the money? Travelling in the Middle Ages was seriously expensive.

Movement in medieval Europe was subject to a plethora of taxes and tolls, and many travel guides included price lists and currency conversion tables. The Viabundus project, a digital map of medieval transport, reveals that, from 1225, foreign merchants were charged a fee to trade at the port of Lübeck (in modern Germany).

Tolls were also levied on the cargo of ships leaving the port, and on carts, cattle, pigs and sheep entering through the town gates. In the mid-1490s, port authorities in Lübeck levied a “pound toll” on traders and travellers – to cover the cost, it was claimed, of protecting them from piracy.

Likewise, in the Holy Land, the Mamluk authorities extracted a myriad of fees from visiting Christian and Jewish pilgrims. On arrival at Jaffa in 1486, the German pilgrim Konrad Grünemberg was charged to stay in ancient caves full of donkey dung. During the night, Grünemberg was charged four marchetti (Venetian coins) to use an outside hole-in-the-ground latrine. When one knight from the party refused to pay the fee for the toilet, he was beaten up so badly, he died the following day.

In 1520, the celebrated artist Albrecht Dürer kept a meticulous diary of his expenses while travelling from Nuremberg to the Low Countries. These included small coins for the boys who carried his possessions and tended his horses, fees for tolls, departure taxes, payments to messengers, three pennies for a bath, and small change to men and boys who directed him to local shrines. The artist rarely commented on the landscape or the sites he saw; rather, he focused on the coins flowing out of his bag to facilitate his journey.

6. Listen to your bowels

Food poisoning, sea sickness, stomach bugs and worse stalked the medieval traveller.

You’d done the planning, you’d saved for years: now you were ready to set off on the trip of a lifetime. But if your stomach betrayed you en route, your journey could become less of a lifelong dream than a living nightmare.

Travellers in the Middle Ages lived in constant fear of succumbing to food poisoning, sea sickness, stomach bugs or worse. And so medieval travelogues were packed with musings on their authors’ bowel movements.

Londoner Geoffrey Caldwell, for instance, writing in c1500, advised his fellow travellers to buy a covered pail for defecating in and a jar for urine as soon as they arrived in Venice.

They should, he counselled, also obtain their own barrels of wine and drinking water – avoiding the water from cisterns along the route, which caused constipation, and fresh water, which could be harmfully laxative.

Caldwell also advised stocking up on enemas and suppositories. And if you were prone to bouts of flatulence? Then you should never leave home, Caldwell counselled, without a plentiful supply of fennel seed and aniseed.

7. Grab a souvenir or five

Mementos both sacred and profane were an integral aspect of the medieval travel experience.

When William Wey went on pilgrimages to Jerusalem in 1458 and 1462, he returned home to England laden with mementos of the journey. The souvenirs he collected included stones from sacred sites such as Mount Calvary, the Holy Sepulchre, Mount Tabor and Bethlehem, as well as a paper crucifix enclosed in wooden boards.

Wey set these up in a ‘Jerusalem chapel’ at Edington in Wiltshire, alongside structures made of painted planks depicting the key destinations of the Holy Land.

Not everyone constructed shrines to their travels as elaborate as Wey’s. But collecting a souvenir was, all the same, an essential part of the pilgrimage experience. People believed that going on a journey conferred a blessing on the traveller – and that this blessing followed the pilgrim home along with the keepsake.

The most common souvenir was the pilgrim badge: usually a cheap, alloy emblem showing a saint’s attribute. The city of Cologne, with its shrines to the Three Magi and to St Ursula, led the way in the pilgrim badge industry and was one of the earliest places to develop them (by the start of the 13th century).

Almost as popular were profane badges showing genitalia, sometimes dressed up as pilgrims, or sailing in a boat. Such badges are often said to have been considered magical talismans: good luck charms to protect the wearer on their perilous journey.

Other souvenirs included boxes of holy soil, a replica of Moses’s staff, rosaries worked in olive wood, and lengths of ribbon showing the measure of Christ’s footprint.

8. Look death in the eye

Some pilgrims failed to prepare for the journey home; others were dead before they got that far.

If you visit the magnificent 15th-century hospice on the Greek island of Rhodes today, you can still see the tombs of English, French and German pilgrims and knights. These burial places provide proof that many travellers never made it home in the Middle Ages.

Death was a fact of life in the medieval pilgrimage, and so it was essential that travellers set their affairs in order before departure, and that they made a will. But assuming you did survive the journey, how should you prepare for the long road home? This was a question that all too few pilgrims considered.

One of the key tenets of pilgrimage is that the traveller undergoes a transformation, internally, from their journey; reaching the destination is the apex of the trip. It was at Jerusalem in 1414, for instance, that Margery Kempe received her first bout of divinely ordained crying and screaming. She demonstrated the transformation wrought by travel through her body and through her emotions.

It was relatively unusual, therefore, for travellers to write about their return journey: the wisdom of travel was held to be in the teleological journey to a destination, not in the exhausted wandering homewards that followed.

An exception to this was the aforementioned William Wey, who left the earliest known account of Vlad the Impaler. Wey was in Rhodes, making his way home from Jerusalem to Wiltshire in 1462, when he heard about Vlad’s gruesome exploits: how the infamous ruler had waged war with the Turks, inflicted massive casualties on them, and eventually “took his brother and inserted a stake in his anus which he drove in as far as his throat”.

Travel, in the Middle Ages as now, was an important conduit of information, and led to sometimes unexpected revelations of new worlds – even if, as in Vlad’s case, those new worlds revealed humanity at its very worst.

This article was first published in the December 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine