Medieval Travel Guide Review: A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages by Anthony Bale

A Review of A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes by Anthony Bale; 368 pages; W.W. Norton (April 2024)

Hormuz was by no means plain crusing. Marco Polo, who landed on the city-island within the strait within the 1270s, referred to as the place “torrid” and “insalubrious,” though he famous the “spices, precious stones and pearls, silk and gold fabrics [and] elephants” that festooned its markets. A century later, European travellers had been nonetheless describing Hormuz as a harmful place. The Franciscan missionary Odoric of Pordenone reported that it had neither contemporary water nor bushes, and induced “men’s testicles to hang down to their legs as far as the knees.” In his new e book, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, Cambridge University historian Anthony Bale notes that, for a lot of, Hormuz’s “sweltering weather seemed to reflect a broader corruption.”

However, Hormuz figures extra positively in among the descriptions Bale cites. In the early fifteenth century, Ma Huan, a Chinese Muslim, journeyed so far as Jeddah on Arabia’s west coast. Of Hormuz, he noticed that “the people of the country are all rich,” and religiously “reverent.” Its Muslim inhabitants had been “refined and fair,” “stalwart and fine-looking” and its “physicians and diviners” had been “decidedly superior to those of other places [perhaps he was thinking of China].” Those falling into poverty, he wrote, got “clothes and food and capital” by their betters. Ma Huan, presumably guided by spiritual camaraderie, made no point out of misshapen our bodies or different ills.

The combat-devastated Gaza Strip additionally figures (briefly) in Bale’s narrative. In the eyes of the late fifteenth century Italian Jewish traveler Meshulam of Volterra, Khan Yunis, the Strip’s second largest metropolis (principally rubble and tent encampments immediately), was a “fine and renowned place” that sported “fine fruit.” But it additionally had loads of robbers, susceptible to focusing on travellers. 

The title and subtitle of Bale’s e book are each considerably deceptive. It isn’t actually in regards to the medieval European thoughts or a information to the Middle Ages. Instead, the writer relates how travellers—primarily pilgrims searching for penance or salvation, missionaries, troopers, diplomats, and businessmen from western Europe—visited websites in Europe and lands as far east as Indonesia within the late Middle Ages and early 1500s, and he describes who they had been, why they traveled, and what they noticed—or mentioned they noticed—and heard. But the e book is finely written, participating, deeply researched, and plagued by anecdotes and informative commentary.