ABSTRACT
The medieval world was a world in motion. People traveled in groups, small or large – rarely alone – from a variety of motives. Merchants transported goods of many kinds over short or long distances. Recent research even proposes that diseases like the plague travel along with people and by plotting the path of a pandemic manifold “corridors of communication” are thereby revealed crisscrossing the medieval landscape. This last approach, however, is not the object of the present chapter. Rather, the aim is more modest, to examine who traveled and why, the means employed for the journey, distances and routes covered and difficulties encountered. Two examples drawn at random from quite different medieval Arabic sources will serve to formulate some initial questions concerning the nature of travel in a world distant from the present day dominated by the airplane and the periodic venture of the spaceship.
