In 1188, when Henry II was about to start out on the Crusade, he sent Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury into Wales to preach there and urge the people to take the cross. Giraldus accompanied the archbishop on this tour and subsequently wrote an account of it in his _Itinerarium Kambriae_. Together with the _Descriptio Kambriae_ that followed a few years later, this contains many accurate and important remarks and notes on the physical and human geography of Giraldus’ native land. These treatises on Ireland and Wales hold a unique position in the literature not only of our period but of the entire Middle Ages. Brewer, in his introduction to the collected works of Giraldus, says that the _Topographia Hiberniae_ is a “monument of a bold and original genius” and that Giraldus “must take rank with the first who descried the value and, in some respects, the proper limits of descriptive geography.”[532] Though this may be a little too strong, we readily agree with Dimock’s estimate of the treatises on Wales: “His account of the land and the people of Wales will bear very honourable comparison with any topographical attempt that had appeared up to his time and with any that appeared for many ages afterwards.”[533] Giraldus was in a very real sense the forerunner of the modern writer of the better sort of book of travel. His works reveal to us a mind keenly interested in the results of its own observation and not merely in collecting what others had said. Giraldus was certainly enthusiastic, and we are almost tempted to say that he was endowed with an “outdoor” and even “Rooseveltian” interest in the world about him. Before leaving the topographical works, mention should be made of a little anonymous guide to the monuments and antiquities of Rome, the _Mirabilia urbis Romae_,[534] dating from the late twelfth century and widely read during the years that followed. _MAPS_ From the age of the Crusades date several of the most characteristic medieval maps. These highly important sources, which serve so admirably to illustrate the geographical conceptions of the time, have been made the object of such thorough and careful research by Konrad Miller,[535] the results of whose investigations are well summarized in Beazley’s _Dawn of Modern Geography_,[536] that it hardly seems necessary here to devote a great deal of space to them. Let us merely indicate what the more important maps were, and show in a general way their relation to the literature of the age, leaving for Chapter XI a brief discussion of them as typifying medieval geographical thought. We saw in Chapter II that the maps of the world drawn before 1100 and now extant could nearly all be classified in four groups. ZONE MAPS