The Medieval Travel Narrative

Abstract

S EARLY AS the tenth century, the Arab world identified (and sometimes taught) travel narratives as an autonomous literary genre related to the novel. Probably the oldest example was authored by Abu Said, of Siraf, in 915. The tradition was to last up to the seventeenth century, giving birth along the way to the vast narrative of Ibn Battuta, who from 1325 to 1345 traveled throughout Africa and Asia. In the countries of Christendom, texts more or less comparable to these exerted an enormous influence on those who read or heard them, both for the facts they revealed and for the significance they assumed in the collective mentality. Judging from the manuscript tradition of the most renowned among them, they responded to a need of the educated public: one hundred and forty-three manuscripts of Marco Polo's book; four editions in one year of the Relation of Hans Staden (1557); collections of travel narratives, such as MS 1380 in the Bibliothq Ramusio's Navigationi e Viaggi, published in Venice in 1547, and the thirteen volumes of Theodore de Bry's Grands Voyages, published simultaneously in Latin and German from 1590 to 1640. Beginning with the thirteenth century, the Crusades and the Mongol campaigns sparked curiosity about the Orient; in the fourteenth century, the Turkish threat reawakened this inquisitiveness-a defensive reaction on the part of the West, anxious to know its obscure adversary-and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with new commercial needs, the political views of some rulers maintained and nourished interest in the Orient.