A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages

Rich and wonderful. This is the world as you've never seen it before. Ian Mortimer describes it as a joyful, erudite book, calling it a global Middle Ages for our times. The New Yorker states that wisdom fills the pages of this immensely entertaining history.

From the bustling bazaars of Tabriz to the mysterious island of Caldihe, where sheep were said to grow on trees, Anthony Bale brings history alive in A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, inviting the reader to travel across a medieval world punctuated with miraculous wonders and long-lost landmarks. Journeying alongside scholars, spies, and saints, from western Europe to the Far East, the Antipodes, and the ends of the world, this is no ordinary travel guide. It contains everything from profane pilgrim badges, Venetian laxatives, and flying coffins to encounters with bandits and trysts with princesses.

Using previously untranslated contemporary accounts from as far and wide as Turkey, Iceland, Armenia, North Africa, and Russia, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages is a living atlas that blurs the distinction between real and imagined places. It offers the reader a vivid and unforgettable insight into how medieval people understood their world—a world of stories, desire, and fantasies, of cherished pasts and longed-for futures.

Dr. Helen Castor, author of Blood and Roses, describes it as masterful, panoramic, beautifully written, and vividly imagined—a book to be savored. Seb Falk, author of The Light Ages, calls it an enthralling journey into the past and across the world, noting that this book takes us to barely imaginable places, but the most remarkable thing we find may be ourselves.