Even if Europeans felt some hostility towards the Muslims, this did not deter them from risking their lives on dangerous sea voyages, intent as they were on making pilgrimage to the Christian holy places and increasing the lucrative trade with the infidels. This mercantile outlook was typified by men such as Francesco di Marco Datini of Prato, a wealthy Florentine merchant who headed his account books ‘In the name of God and of profit’. Foreign travel too had a certain cachet: the traveller became a focus of attention, a person of importance on his return. It was considered that a Florentine who was not a merchant, and had not travelled through the world seeing foreign nations and peoples and afterwards returning to Florence with some wealth, was a man who enjoyed no esteem whatsoever. Boasting of achievements, however, did not win friends and displays of wealth could well attract unwelcome taxes; Cosimo de’ Medici (the Elder) (1389–1464), a cautious and somewhat secretive man, ever watchful of potential enemies, warned against winning too much attention, advising that envy is a weed that should not be watered.

Little was known about pharaonic Egypt in fourteenth-century Europe; it was considered as being shrouded in the mists of antiquity, full of mystery and wonders. But with the revival of classical learning a rather incomplete picture of that ancient country, composed of both fact and fantasy, gradually unfolded. In his preface to the Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari was ‘fully aware that all who have written on the subject firmly and unanimously assert that the arts of sculpture and painting were first derived from nature by the people of Egypt’.

Biblical stories of Egypt told of Joseph the vizier of Pharaoh, and of Moses discovered in the bulrushes by Pharaoh's daughter. Egypt was the country that gave shelter to Mary, Joseph and Jesus when they fled from the persecutions of Herod; these narratives were familiar even to the illiterate who saw them as subjects of paintings, frescoes and mosaics in their churches. The artists who had never been to Egypt used local models, perhaps with a few idealised camels thrown in to give an Eastern flavour, painted against a background of their own familiar countryside.