ABSTRACT
Medieval Jewish, Muslim and Christian travel writers consciously created cultural products. They knew that they were shaping a world view and tried to assert themselves as authority figures in the dialogue between reader and writer. This chapter discusses the writers, who crossed from the western side of the Mediterranean to its eastern end, visiting an area referred to variously as the Land of Israel, Palestine and the Holy Land between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. These years are characterized by heavy traffic over the Mediterranean and by significant travel writing in three religious traditions. The anonymous thirteenth-century author of the City of Jerusalem begins his account with a description of Jerusalem as it was some thirty years before he saw it, when it was still under Christian rule. The history of travel literature is intimately bound up with colonialism. The genre of 'medieval pilgrimage accounts' was first born as an independent body of writing at the height of British Empire.
