Physician, traveller and writer (1523-1585), Hugo Favolius was born of Italian parents in the Dutch town of Middleburg. He received the education befitting the child of a prosperous bourgeois family of his time, pursuing his studies in various important centers of learning and in the end studying medicine in Padua. In 1545 he met a former classmate, Matthieu Lauryn, in Venice and accompanied him on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople, which lasted about a year. The rest of his life was spent in Antwerp, practising medicine. His literary activity resides mainly in the composition of poetical texts and epigrams. The work for which he is best known is the Hodoeporici Byzantini Libri III, an account of his travels in the Ottoman Empire written in dactylic hexameter. He also wrote a poem on the Battle of Naupactus and published a treatise on astrology and astronomy.