These men changed their minds as a result of their personal encounters with foreigners, but the stereotypes they first brought with them were nurtured in an intellectual climate where ideas about the other were formed without benefit of personal experience or reliable information. Marianne O’Doherty writes of the plural (East) “Indies” in order to emphasize the “multiplicity of meanings” that medieval readers and writers from different cultural and social groups brought to their variable perceptions of the “not us.” “The Indies,” she finds, “are a plural entity throughout the later medieval period because travelers, geographers, cartographers, and audiences engage in an endless process of reinventing them in accordance with their own or their culture’s changing knowledge, needs, fears, and desires.” 6 Kim Phillips makes much the same point in her convincing argument that western writers on Mongolia, China, India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries were neither imperialist nor orientalist: “Their observations offered a far more diverse range of perspectives than can be covered by concepts of a European Self standing in contrast to an oriental Other, or of a superior European civilization justified in criticism or domination of less advanced cultures.” 7 They too may begin very well and end very badly. It is not surprising then-since it was a personal experience-that we find great variety in medieval attitudes toward travel, that reveries about the pleasures of the road appear side-by-side with grumblings about bad ships, bad food and bad weather, that some went with open eyes and others with closed minds, that feelings toward foreigners ranged from the benign to the benighted, or that, like travel itself, attempts to summarize medieval opinion can neither be recommended nor discouraged. They were one-way trips, experiences that changed people, irrevocably: those that lived to tell the tale were never the same as once they were. When asked about his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the late fifteenth century, Count Eberhard of Würtemberg replied that there were three things in life that could neither be recommended nor discouraged: marriage, war, and a voyage to the Holy Land-“They may begin very well and end very badly.” 1 Why? Because marriage and war-like faraway places-were terrae incognitae, unknown worlds with undreamed-of rewards and unimaginable risks. Included are observations about the ways in which people at all levels of medieval society, including the illiterate and untraveled, perceived the “other.” Medieval people were neither simplistic nor one-sided, and they often changed their minds, not only as the result of real-life interactions with foreign peoples, but also sometimes as the result of hearing or reading about them. In addition to presenting an overview of who travelled and why, where they went, and how they conveyed themselves, the principle aim of this essay is to demonstrate the wide variety of medieval responses to cross-cultural encounters. An especial emphasis is placed upon the ways in which these sources-including material objects-were disseminated, “read,” and interpreted. It is interdisciplinary and multivalent, and it considers a variety of sources, both historical and literary, from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. The following is a broad reflection on medieval travel and the ways in which western Christians encountered and imagined non-Christians and non-Europeans.
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