Medieval Travellers: The Rich and Restless - Softcover

Margaret Wade Labarge takes a medley of upper-class men and women of the thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries and illustrates how they travelled throughout their known world. She presents such unforgettable and indefatigable travellers as Eudes of Rouen, who averaged 2,500 miles a year during his term as archbishop of Rouen; Mary, daughter of Edward I and a most restless nun; Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, Castilian ambassador to the court of Timur at Samarkand; and Bertrandon de la Broquiere, the Burgundian squire who disguised himself as a Turk in order to join a caravan returning from Mecca. Their stories, and those of their fellow travellers, underlie the mobility and the accompanying splendour which kings and queens, lords, ladies and leading ecclesiastics took for granted as the normal pattern of life in the later Middle Ages.

Margaret Wade Labarge was educated at Radcliffe College and Oxford University. She was a part-time lecturer in Medieval history at Ottowa University and Carleton University between 1950 and 1962 and a visiting professor at many other universities both in Canada and abroad. She is the author of nine books, is a Member of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She lives in Ottowa, Ontario.