Religion? Where we’re going, we don’t need Religion: Non-Religious Travel in the Middle Ages
Volume 2 | Issue 6 - Travel
Article by Jacob Harrison-Beaumont. Edited by Amy Calladine. Additional Research by Liz Goodwin.
When I finally decided to throw in my hat with New Histories and write an article, thereby doubling the output from Medieval Historians, I thought it best to use the efforts of my esteemed colleague, Mr. Simon Lax, as a starting point for the direction of this essay. As he was writing about pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, I would decide to do the opposite and focus instead on non-religious travel. However, the main problem with this (apart from the fact that I am covering hundreds of years of history in only a few hundred words) is that religion permeated all aspects of Medieval life, and for better or worse, the majority of the texts were written by those in the religious professions (monks, bishops, etc.). So, is it possible to say that there was non-religious travel in the Middle Ages?
In short the answer is yes (for the long answer, keep reading). Throughout human history there have always been reasons for people to travel: for trade, for war, and even for their own survival; reasons which do not necessitate religious motivation. Depending on where you draw its boundaries, the Medieval period may well begin with the mass movements of the ‘barbarian’ peoples which led to the downfall of the Western Roman empire. Peoples such as the Goths and Vandals entered into the Roman empire because they were being pushed west by the Huns, who may themselves have been pushed by migrations further in Asia. This ‘conveyer-belt’ of nomadic peoples driving their neighbours west through the Eurasian steppe into ‘Europe’ occurred throughout the Medieval period, including, more notably, the Bulgars and Turks, who were able to settle in the Balkans and Anatolia respectively. Movements of such large numbers of people were not without violence but violence was not their intent; many of these mass migrations began to avoid attack.
There were, however, large scale movements with violent, or at least plunderous, intent. The Hunnic empire of Attila was built on a tribute system which resulted in the Huns travelling extensively across Europe in search of pillage and tribute, rather than territory. Indeed, for many nomadic societies the raiding of both sedentary peoples as well as other nomads was an integral part of their livelihoods. The greatest examples of nomadic conquest were the Arabs and the Mongols. The Arab’s conquered North Africa, Spain, and central Asia from the Mediterranean to India and fought battles against the Franks at Tours and the Byzantines at Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) in the hundred and twenty years following the death of Muhammed. At its height, the Mongol empire stretched from China to Hungary, covering some 22 per cent of the worlds land area. The Arabs and Mongols were not, however, without religious motivation. Though not as completely formed as later writers would say, the driving force behind the Arab conquests were their shared faith. So too, the Mongols believed that they had a divine mandate to conquer the whole world. Such motivations spurred the Arabs and Mongols to keep moving. They avoided protracted siege warfare by offering good terms to cities which submitted, and had no problem with reinforcing their armies with newly conquered subjects.
Despite the accompanying rhetoric, most warfare was not primarily concerned with religious motivation, but rather the acquisition of neighbouring territory. Indeed, in Europe, the clergy were usually the most likely to try and stop warfare (not that some didn’t fight in or lead armies), most notably during the Peace and Truce of God in the eleventh century. Such military campaigns could see people travel vastly greater distances than they otherwise would in their lives. Just as Greeks could find themselves in India under Alexander the Great, so too could peasants from the north of England find themselves dying in the mud in southern France during the Hundred Years War. Mercenaries could find themselves all over Christendom. Harold Hardrada was born in Norway in 1015, travelled through Russia to Constantinople serving in the Byzantine army for several years in Sicily and the Balkans, before returning home to claim the throne of Norway. In 1066 Harold died fighting against Harold Godwinson in England at the Battle of Stanford Bridge.
As with the Arabs and Mongols, soldiers could travel extraordinary distances with only their faith to guide them. Inspired by the ideologies of pilgrimage and just war (with perhaps a hint of the mass movements of people touched upon earlier), the Crusades all shared the same intent, to conquer, or reconquer, lands for Christianity. Over a period of five hundred years, the Milites Christi (‘Soldiers of Christ’) travelled from Western Europe to destinations such as Jerusalem, Egypt, Spain, the Balkans and Baltic, and were instrumental in the expansion of ‘Europe’ in this period. Similarly, the Ottomans drew warriors from across the Muslim world to conquer the Byzantine empire; styling themselves as Gazis in reference to the battles led by Muhammed.
Such military conquests would often lead to new markets opening up. Trade was generally ignored in most Christian writings, originating with Jesus driving the moneylenders from the Temple. The evidence for traders tends to be mostly based on archaeology and surviving charters, though they do occasionally appear in chronicles and histories. Often their addition is because of some sin they have committed, but they do also do good; such as the assistance of Genoese merchants at the siege of Jerusalem in the First Crusade or the apocryphal theft of the relics of St. Mark from Alexandria by Venetian merchants.
Long distance trading was nothing new, however. The Phoenicians had traded across the Mediterranean, and even reached the tin mines of Britain, a thousand years before the birth of Christ. Though the collapse of the Roman empire and the Muslim conquests had lessoned its scale, Western Christians continued to travel and trade throughout the period. The Crusades opened up new markets, but perhaps the biggest improvement came with the Mongol conquests. The stability this brought to Eurasia (Pax Mongolica) allowed Western merchants and missionaries to travel all the way to India and China, journeys which would have once been hazardous at the best of times. The most famous of these travellers, dubious authenticity aside, is Marco Polo.
After the collapse of Mongol control, these journeys once again became hazardous, and Christian traders started seeking new routes to the Far East. The Portuguese began trying to circumnavigate Africa under Henry the Navigator in the early fifteenth century. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and Vasco de Gama reached India by this route ten years later. Not all of these journeys were devoid of religious motivation. The most famous of the explorers, Christopher Columbus, ‘discovered’ the ‘New World’ whilst trying to find a trade route to Asia in order to fund a Spanish Crusade to reconquer Jerusalem.
America had, of course, already been ‘discovered’ by the Native Americans. But Columbus had been beaten five hundred years earlier by the Vikings under Leif Ericson, who established a settlement somewhere in what is today North-Eastern Canada. The Vikings are perhaps the best place to end this article. If one is looking for non-religious travellers in the Middle Ages, the Vikings are they. They traded, raided and settled their way from America to the Volga River in Russia, and their descendants, the Normans, conquered Antioch, Southern Italy, and England. Travel could exist without religion. Nevertheless, the certainty of faith gave men the motivation to go further.
*****
Attila the Hun: “Do not underestimate the power of an enemy, no matter how great or small, to rise against you another day.”
Marco Polo: “I have not told half of what I saw.”
Wisdom from the Icelandic Viking sagas: “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”