When Christopher Columbus set out to find a new trade route to the East, he carried with him two influential travel narratives written centuries before his voyage. One was The Book of Marvels, composed around 1350 and attributed to John de Mandeville, an English adventurer (writing in French) who claimed to have reached the far horizons of the globe. The other was Marco Polo’s Description of the World, an account of that Venetian merchant’s journey through the vast Eurasian realm of the Mongol Empire to the court of the Great Khan in China. He had dictated it to an author of popular romances around 1298, when both men (Marco Polo and his ghostwriter) were in prison—coincidentally, in Columbus’s own city of Genoa. Both books were the product of an extraordinary era of unprecedented interactions among the peoples of Europe, Asia, and the interconnected Mediterranean world. And both became highly influential, inspiring generations of mercantile adventurers, ambitious pilgrims, and armchair travelers. Eventually, they would fuel the imaginations of those future mariners who launched a further age of discovery (see Chapter 3).

In many ways, these narratives were as fantastical as they were factual, making them problematic sources for historians. But they are representative of an era that seemed wide open to every sort of influence. This was a time when ease of communication and commercial exchange made Western civilizations part of an interlocking network that had the potential to span the globe. Although this network would prove fragile in the face of a large-scale demographic crisis, the Black Death, it created a lasting impression of infinite possibilities. Indeed, it was only because of this network’s connective channels that the Black Death wreaked such devastation, beginning—as recent research shows—in Asia at least a century before its arrival in Europe around 1347. Looking back, we can see the century leading up to this near-worldwide crisis as the beginning of a new global age.

Europeans’ integration with this widening world not only put them into contact with unfamiliar cultures and commodities but it also opened up new ways of looking at the world they already knew. Novel artistic and intellectual responses are discernible in this era, as are a host of new inventions and technologies. At the same time, involvement in this wider world placed new pressures on long-term developments within Europe, notably the growing tensions among large territorial monarchies, and between these secular powers and the authority of the papacy. By the early fourteenth century, the papal court was literally held hostage by the king of France. A few decades later, the king of England openly declared his own claim to the French throne. The ensuing struggles for sovereignty would have a profound impact on the balance of power in Europe, and further complicate Europeans’ relationships with one another and with their far-flung neighbors.