Conclusion

Abstract

The travel works discussed here were products of a european literary culture grounded in a late-medieval society and economy for which travel was a common if not universal activity. However, even for those who could not afford it, travel was a known thing, a fact of life. It is perhaps for this reason that the journeys and voyages referred to in our travel works describe real or imaginary trajectories that take the reader far beyond the familiar western European world. Until the age of transatlantic discovery, the really exotic directions were only two: southward into Africa or eastward into Asia. The former was problematic: a relatively narrow habitable zone along the Mediterranean coast, a vast and frightening desert to the South, hostile infidels to East, and a formidable and largely unknown West Coast. More options were available in the direction of the rising sun. In that vast world, the thirteenth century had witnessed the establishment and systematic maintenance of trade and travel routes connecting Asia with europe and the Middle East. Always the theater of rising and falling empires, Eurasia witnessed, before and during the centuries encompassed by the present study, a constant if fitful competition among “contentious hegemonic political and military systems,” observes Eric Wolf (25). The hegemonic accumulation of wealth and resources synergetically interacted, both in the Eurasian heartland and on its periphery, with expanding long-distance trade, creating extensive and complex “grids of communication” that linked numerous regions and distinct populations (25).