ABSTRACT
Byzantium became a focus of western travel accounts towards the end of the middle ages, which was a great period of travel writing in the west. A generation later Philip de Meziferes reviewed western Christendom's relations with the east, including Byzantium. Mezieres used his fame as a crusade propagandist to set himself up as the conscience of the age. One of the lessons of The Book of Deeds of Marshal Boucicaut is that Byzantium provided an arena where western knights could show off their prowess. The lack of sympathy for Byzantium is all the more surprising because Bertandron de la Broquiere and Pero Tafur visited Constantinople when negotiations over the Union of Churches were under way. To conclude, later medieval travel accounts played an important part in fixing a western view of Byzantium that held good well into the eighteenth century.
