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Travels and trips by Pedro Tafur (originally Tractado de las andanças e viajes de Pero Tafur or Itinerario) is a medieval travel book written about 1454 by the Spanish gentleman, writer and traveller Pedro Tafur. In it he recounts his journey between 1436 and 1439 by places of the Mediterranean (Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, Chios or Egypt), of the Middle East (the Holy Land, Smirna, Trebisonda and Crimea) and much of Europe (Strasbourg, Brussels, Mainz, Bohemia, Vienna, Venice, Switzerland, Hungary), including Rome and Constantinople (Byzantium), a city he visited shortly before his Muslim conquest.

It is kept in a single manuscript of the principles of the and it makes a geographical, political and social description of the places it visits.

Introduction and contextualization
But Tafur lived, carried out his journey and the preparation of his work, in him. John II of Castile is proclaimed king in 1406, when Henry III of Castile dies and ends his reign with his death in 1454, but he is not of age until 1419 and it is in 1426 when his reign begins. With the death of the monarch, Tafur begins the elaboration of his travel book, in the second half of the. In 1454 the reign of Henry IV began in Castile and in 1479 Fernando II of Aragon ascended to the throne and ended the dynastic union between Castile and Aragon.

He begins a period known as the Age of Discovery, which is extended to the beginning of the. This time was marked by a large territorial expansion by Portuguese, British and Spanish. From the hand of these territorial discoveries came a series of discoveries and technological advances in this century such as: compass, printing, astrolabe or carbella. Although the plague in Europe reached its peak in it, it was still marked by the consequences of it.

Analysis of the work

General description
Pedro Tafur visited the three continents known in his time, although Asia and Africa more superficial, and described both the populations (of which he was particularly interested in the cities) and the customs of their inhabitants. He also observed nature and fauna, often exotic to a European. It does not fail to describe the policy, society, industry and trade of the lands it went through, historically contextualizing these aspects to the extent of its knowledge and the information it received. One of the points of interest of the story is his encounter with the famous Venetian traveller Niccolò dei Conti, who provided him with news about the Middle and Far East with which to complete the description of the world until then known.

Answers and trips are already quoted by Ambrosio de Morales or Gonzalo Argote de Molina, who had it among the manuscripts he consulted when writing his masterpiece Nobleza de Andalucía. Both call it Itinerary instead of the name assigned to it by the manuscript of the, although the first name is less appropriate