05 Travel and Trade

Europeans and knowledge of wider world: 1300; 1500; 1600

Knowledge, degree of contact not evenly distributed evenly across population

Who traveled, who did not, and why?

Focus today: 1300-1500

Non-travelers:

  • none: Modern-style mass tourists
  • Peasants and the urban poor (though potential for displacement due to war, plague, famine)

Travelers:

  • traders, international businesspeople and their crews
  1. Destinations: mainly other trade centers
  2. Residence: private or fondaco

Venice, Fondaco dei Tedeschi (currrent building 1506; first constructed 1228)

Venice, Fondaco dei Turchi (c1200s constructed as palazzo; Ottoman fondaco early 17th c)

  • Diplomats: may be nobles or commoners
  • Nobles
  • Travel among estates less frequent than earlier; chateau building
  • Diplomatic visits
  • Crusades: in decline by 15th c but still conceptually important (see below)

 

Other Travelers:

  1. academics
  2. Mercenaries and other soldiers
  3. Fishermen: they travel but within standard regions
  4. Pilgrims

 

11th and 12th centuries: Map

Within Europe ex: Via Francigena

Later Middle Ages:

Pilgrimage routs ca 1150

Crusades

  • 1095 First Crusade
  • 1291 Fall of Acre
  • Albigensian Crusade
  • Reconquista (ends 1492)
  • Normans in Sicily
  • Teutonic Knights: first phase 1229-1290s; continues against Lithuania until 1410

Pilgrimage

Rome, Compostela, Jerusalem

"Saint James as a Pilgrim with a Purse and a Staff" (Paris, 1440), courtesy of Getty Images

“Saint James as a Pilgrim with a Purse and a Staff” (Paris, 1440), courtesy of Getty Images

And innumerable others

 

mapping and surveying

 

Ptolemy (ca 100-170)

Geography Translation into Latin ca 1406

Navigation

Astrolabe from 11th c

Compass from ca 1200

14th-century copy of Epistola de magnete of Peter Peregrinus. MS. Ashmole 1522, fol. 186r, Bodleian Library.

Portolan charts   

Travel writing