USEFUL TRAVEL TIPS FROM THE MEDIEVAL TIMES FOR TODAY

Travel has always involved vexations. 

Especially in the Middle Ages --

If not enormous insects in Spain, then quicksand;

 if not quicksand, then 

“evil toll collectors” who “stand in the way of the pilgrims with two or three big sticks.” 

Consider the following advice:

 “Guard your face carefully from the enormous insects,” 

instructs the guide for 12th-century pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela, 

“and if you do not watch your feet carefully, you will slip rapidly up to your knees in the quicksand.”


Also sounds like good advice to surviving listening to a debate with Trump, doesn't it?


Europeans of the med­ieval and early modern period ventured abroad for a variety of reasons

 — trade, crusade, exploration — 

but the bulk of the practical travel advice pertains to pilgrimage.

With many people following the same routes and, evidently, slipping rapidly into the same quicksand along the way, 

a genre of guidebooks emerged to help foundering pilgrims.


 When asked for travel advise in 1480, Eberhard, Count of Wurttemberg:

“There are three things that no one can advise another person for or against. 

One is marriage, another is waging war and the third is visiting the Holy Sepulchre."

He ended with: “These things often end badly.”

That summation stays true for two of those things even today, right?


16th century French pilgrim Jean Zuallart could be talking of our travels in life today when he says:

 “A traveler must be willing to adapt himself to the times, places and people with whom he finds himself 

and will have to converse, either rich or poor, noble or base, Christian, Jew, Turk, or Arab.” 

But here’s the real test for those both in past and present: 

“It is also required of the pilgrim to patiently and discreetly 

put up with the stupidities and imperfections of his fellow pilgrims and companions.”

What do you think?

Does this apply to today?

{Many thanks to Elizabeth Archibald, medieval historian.}