ABSTRACT
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Europeans entered their first phase of heroic travel. Pushing well beyond the confines of Europe and the Mediterranean, pioneer travelers began to venture as far east as China. Their trips were important in themselves, in bringing direct knowledge of Chinese goods and technologies. Their accounts, further, fired ambitions back home, leading subsequent generations to think about how to reach out toward even more ambitious routes and rewarding destinations. European travel, in other words, began to influence later phases of world history, just as Islamic travel had already done.
