Why did people travel much in the Middle Ages
People traveled for several reasons in the Middle Ages. Some traveled for reasons of state, and these included everything from envoys and ambassadors to spies and young princesses on their ways to marry some king. Many people, millions, went on Crusades. These were men and women, young and old, and many did not go on one of the nine major and several minor crusades to the Holy Land but on other crusades to other places. Many people went on pilgrimages. A lovely picture of one such group is the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, which is especially interesting because it was a contemporary description of pilgrims traveling along the roads and taking meals and sleeping in the inns of southern England. A lot of people who traveled were merchants, without whom the Middle Ages would not have progressed as they did (and without whom the Black Death would not have spread the way it did.) Students had to travel to go to any of the more than seventy universities that sprang up at the time. There were classes of people whose lives revolved around travel. Tinkers were one group. There were itinerant cobblers, and other craftsmen. Also, there were musicians of various types and other performers, who most commonly travelled, unless they were able to get posts at some court. Yet another group was the Romani, who arrived in Europe during the Middle Ages. All of these groups are referred to as travelers or Gypsies (though the later term is mostly applied to the Romani, who, by the way, were related to neither the Romans nor the Romanians, nor to the Egyptians, after whom they were being called).
