How Far Did Knights Actually Travel? It's actually a lot further than you'd think!

My son asked me over the weekend whether Jack and Fire Pud had ever been to Greece on holiday (we were packing for a holiday to Greece). He asked this with the seriousness of a medieval cartographer planning a campaign. I asked him if he knew where Greece was and he confirmed that he did not, but had decided it was a good place for a fire-breathing dragon to visit or live or fly too - I am sure both would love a trip to Corfu, but I wasn't sure how far they would have been able to travel (obviously the wings would have helped a lot).

What surprised me, though, was discovering how far real medieval knights actually travelled. Not just to Greece, but to Jerusalem, North Africa, Spain, the Baltic coast, Sicily, Constantinople and places that make you realise the medieval world was far less isolated than we sometimes imagine. It just took a long time to get there.

At their height, knights moved across enormous distances. On horseback. By ship. In armour. Without modern maps, modern medicine or anything remotely resembling reliable weather forecasts.

Some of them travelled further in a lifetime than many people did even a hundred years ago.

Most knights stayed fairly local

It is worth saying upfront that the average knight was not constantly riding across continents looking for adventure. Most medieval knights spent much of their lives fairly close to home.

They trained. Managed land. Collected taxes. Settled disputes. Attended tournaments. Occasionally went to war with whoever lived over the next hill and had recently become annoying. A knight in Yorkshire might spend most of his career within northern England. A French knight might never leave his region at all.

But when major religious wars or military campaigns happened, everything changed. And suddenly knights began travelling astonishing distances.

The Crusades changed everything

In 1095, Pope Urban II called on the knights of western Europe to travel east and help reclaim Jerusalem, which had come under Muslim control centuries earlier. Thousands answered.

The First Crusade began with armies leaving France, Normandy, Flanders, Italy and the Holy Roman Empire before crossing into Byzantium and marching through Anatolia toward the eastern Mediterranean.

By 1099, crusading armies had captured Jerusalem. That journey from northern France to Jerusalem was roughly 3,000 to 4,000 kilometres depending on the route taken. And they did it without modern roads, modern navigation or reliable supply chains. Just packed up and climbed on to a horse - no need for tiresome border queues with a passport!

Some travelled partly overland. Others sailed across the Mediterranean. Many never returned. The sheer scale of the movement is difficult to grasp now. Medieval Europe suddenly became connected, militarily, commercially and culturally, to places many western Europeans had previously only heard about in sermons.

Knights didn’t just visit the Holy Land, they stayed

One of the strangest things about the Crusades is that the knights did not simply fight battles and go home again. They built states.

After the First Crusade, crusaders established the Kingdom of Jerusalem along with the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch and the County of Tripoli. Collectively these territories became known as Outremer, meaning “overseas”.

European knights settled there permanently. They built castles. Married locally. Raised children. Governed towns. Negotiated alliances. Fought wars. Some families remained in the eastern Mediterranean for generations.

This is the part school history lessons often skip: medieval knights were not operating in a tiny isolated European bubble, they weren't just walking around Warwick Castle. They were participating in a world that stretched from England to Syria. And they travelled constantly within it.

The military orders went even further

The most mobile knights of all belonged to the great military orders. The Knights Templar, Knights Hospitaller and Teutonic Knights were not just warriors. They were international organisations with property, money and influence spread across huge distances.

A Templar knight might begin his career in France, travel to Acre, escort pilgrims through the Holy Land, then later return to command a house in England or Spain. The Hospitallers eventually controlled Rhodes and later Malta, operating naval fleets across the Mediterranean for centuries.

The Teutonic Knights followed perhaps the strangest route of all. Founded during the Crusades in the Holy Land, they later shifted north into the Baltic region, where they fought campaigns across what are now Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

At their peak, the military orders operated across a geographical range stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the Baltic Sea. Which is a very long way to travel wearing chainmail and carrying a lance!

Spain became another frontier

While crusaders were fighting in Jerusalem, knights were also travelling south into Iberia. Large parts of modern Spain and Portugal had been under Muslim rule since the eighth century. Over several centuries, Christian kingdoms gradually expanded southward in a long series of conflicts now known as the Reconquista.

Knights from France, England and elsewhere joined campaigns there, attracted by religion, reputation, land and, occasionally, the promise of loot. The fighting lasted centuries.

The turning point came in 1212 at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, when Christian forces dealt a major defeat to the Almohad Caliphate. But the Reconquista was not fully completed until Granada fell in 1492. It was quite the extended period of bloodshed!

That means medieval knights were fighting campaigns in Iberia for almost four hundred years.

Long enough for entire generations to know almost nothing else but violence.

The Baltic Crusades are barely spoken about now

The least-known knightly campaigns happened far to the north. From the thirteenth century onward, crusading orders, particularly the Teutonic Knights, launched campaigns around the Baltic Sea against pagan groups in Prussia, Livonia and Lithuania.

This eventually led to the creation of a powerful monastic state centred around enormous brick castles such as Malbork Castle in modern Poland. The geography here matters.

Knights who had originally travelled toward Jerusalem eventually found themselves campaigning near the shores of the Baltic, close to the latitude of southern Finland. From the deserts around Acre to the forests of Lithuania is an extraordinary geographical spread for the medieval world. And yet knights operated across it routinely.

Travel was slow, dangerous and completely normal

This is perhaps the strangest part to modern readers. Knights travelled because medieval people travelled more than we sometimes assume. Pilgrims crossed Europe. Merchants sailed enormous distances. Diplomats moved between courts. Students travelled to universities in Paris, Bologna or Oxford. Armies marched constantly.

Travel was dangerous, uncomfortable and expensive. But it was not unusual. A medieval knight might see more of the known world than many later peasants living centuries afterwards. Just look at the travels of Kevin Costner in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves!

I told my son that knights really did travel to Greece. And Jerusalem. And the Baltic Sea. And Spain - we looked at a map. He looked at it with a lot of enthusiasm. And asked me whether Santa was from where his grubby little finger was pointing (which at the time was in the middle of the North Sea). After some more thought he asked whether knights would have taken their dragons as well?

I told him the historical evidence was inconclusive, but Fire Pud would 100% have travelled with Jack, like he always does and they would have got to their final destination at dragon-neck speed, well ahead of the other knights!