ABSTRACT
In the travelogues in this chapter, ideas of home and connections to the Czech lands often accompany descriptions of the Islamic world. Bohemia's lack of a coastline did not keep Czechs from participating in one of the great features of the history of early modern Europe long-distance travel. The most common types of Czech travellers who journeyed outside of Central Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land and imperial administrators accompanying political embassies. The embassy set out from Prague and travelled down the Rhine, through the Low Countries, England, France, the Iberian Peninsula, and northern Italy before returning home, unsuccessful. Though the explicit goal of Jan Hasistejnsky z Lobkovic's travelogue was to describe the Holy Land and secondarily the Mediterranean system in which it participated, the narrative also reflects on the place of the Czech lands in the world as Lobkovic imagines it.
