During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries travel literature became increasingly popular
and influential in Europe as more people travelled and brought back tales from far-off lands.
The Far East in particular China came very much to the fore at the end of the seventeenth
century and provided an important example of tolerance which contrasted starkly with the
persecution rife in Europe. Travel accounts about such countries had a strong impact on Pierre
Bayle (1647-1706) a Huguenot exiled in Rotterdam who had himself suffered persecution and in
his writings waged a ceaseless campaign against it. Without the ideas borrowed from récits his
writing would not be what it is.
