ABSTRACT
With the failed crusades, the plague and the papal schism, the fourteenth century inaugurated a period of crisis for the feudal institutions of military, economic and ecclesiastical expansion. In effect the late Middle Ages are characterized by the growth of ethnography within the related genres of geographical literature, ambassadorial reports, mission and even pilgrimage itself. The development of the missionary ideal is perhaps the most obvious expression of the shift of emphasis and helps in understanding the extent to which the crisis of the traditional paradigms of pilgrimage and crusade led to rationalist ideologies and to historical narrative practices within what, essentially, were religious visions. Throughout the late medieval period, mission and crusade were interrelated, rather than opposed to each other, as ideologies of religious travel. Despite the continuing importance of the traditional genres of pilgrimage and chivalry, the transition from occasional to systematic empiricism in travel literature first took place in the more practical field of political reportage.
