Travel, whether medieval or modern, was born out of the desire to discover diversity, but it was also the result of the thirst for knowledge, the ambition to acquire spiritual or merely material goods. Some travellers were driven on their wanderings by the sheer pleasure of coming into contact with different civilisations, comparing and correlating them. Whatever their purpose, travel impressions written down are the result of fine observations, of a true dissection of the world around them.
Despite economic, social, cultural and religious differences, travel has the gift of bringing people closer together, no matter how great the distances between their home countries. Felix Fabri, a Dominican from Ulm, wrote on his return from two long pilgrimages to the Holy Land and to the sanctuaries of Christian Egypt: "Thus it happens that those who were strangers because of their distance live, through navigation, in affection. Who would have thought that the Brother could become the companion of unbelievers and the friend of the house of the unbaptized."
Every traveller wants to share his journey with others and therefore describes his impressions either in letters, intended only for a small family group, or in diaries, with the ambition to publish them, or he just tells the story when he returns home. And so real travel guides are born, the fruit of the pilgrim's experience, suggesting itineraries, revealing the economic, cultural, social and spiritual aspects of the places he has passed through.
Decades have passed since the first volume of the Foreign travellers about Romanian countries, collection conceived and realized in the Institute of History "Nicolae Iorga", as a vast corpus of external narrative sources, starting from the Middle Ages and continuing for the modern age.
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