SOURCE: An introduction to The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Penguin Books, 1982, pp. 9-39.

[In the following excerpt, Moseley discusses the work's author, reputation, values, and sources. The critic contends that the popularity of Mandeville' s Travels demands that the work be given serious attention if scholars want to understand the world view of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.]

When Leonardo da Vinci moved from Milan in 1499, the inventory of his books included a number on natural history, the sphere, the heavens—indicators of some of the prime interests of that unparalleled mind. But out of the multitude of travel accounts that Leonardo could have had, in MS or from the new printing press, there is only the one: Mandeville's Travels. At about the same time (so his biographer, Andrés Bernáldez, tells us) Columbus was perusing Mandeville for information on China preparatory to his voyage; and in 1576 a copy of the Travels was with Frobisher as he lay off Baffin Bay. The huge number of people who relied on the Travels for hard, practical geographical information in the two centuries after the book first appeared demands that we give it serious attention if we want to understand the mental picture of the world of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Yet soon after 1600 Bishop Joseph Hall can speak of 'whetstone leasings of old Mandeville', Richard Brome can hang an entire satiric comedy (The Antipodes) on the book and its author—which suggests just how widespread was knowledge of the book—and assume (rightly) that virtually nobody then would regard the work at all seriously. The modern dismissive attitude to the book is heir to this later tradition; yet its astonishing popularity (which continued even after it had ceased to command respect as a work of information) can be shown to depend on genuine merits. Ironically, both the earlier attitude of uncritical acceptance and the later rejection are based on a distorted view of what the author was trying to achieve.

1 The Book and its Author

The Travels first began to circulate in Europe between 1356 and 1366. Originally written in French (quite possibly in the Anglo-Norman still current in English court circles), by 1400 some version of the book was available in every major European language; by 1500, the number of MSS was vast—including versions in Czech, Danish, Dutch and Irish—and some three hundred have survived. (For comparison, Polo's Divisament dou Monde is extant in only about seventy.) The very early printed editions testify at once to the importance attached to it and to its commercial appeal. The MS history is extremely complicated; briefly, the MSS divide into two broad groups, a Continental and an Insular version. The latter—circulating, so far as one can see, mainly in England and mainly preserved in British libraries—makes no mention of a peculiar story in the Continental version which connects the author with a certain Dr Jean de Bourgogne (author of an extant treatise De Pestilentia) and a dull, wordy and industrious Liège notary, Jean d'Outremeuse. There is no serious doubt that d'Outremeuse handled a text and influenced the scribal tradition considerably, but there is not a shred of evidence which would compel the conclusion that 'Mandeville' was either de Bourgogne's or d'Outremeuse's nom de plume, as was first suggested at the end of the nineteenth century. If d'Outremeuse is an unreliable witness (as we know from elsewhere he is) and if the references to de Bourgogne depend on d'Outremeuse, one would be inclined to regard the MSS of the Insular version as the less contaminated. But here is not the place to go into this complex matter fully¹—and what I have just said makes the cutting of the Gordian knot look diffident by comparison; the text I have chosen for this edition is one of the three (I think the best) early English translations from the Anglo-Norman of the Insular version (all extant in MSS of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries). Its relation to the others is briefly indicated in the note preceding the text.

Despite the ingenuity of scholars, then, nothing is known of the author apart from what he tells us in his book, and he may, of course, be creating to a greater or lesser degree a fictional persona. He tells us that he was an English knight, that he travelled from 1322 to 1356 (1332 to 1366 in some texts) during which time he saw service with the Sultan of Egypt and the Great Khan. He may indeed have been one of the Mandevilles of Black Notley in Essex, but the evidence is again inconclusive. Nevertheless, the case for an English author is quite good: the narrative is wholly consistent in its references to 'this country', 'our country', the discussion of the peculiarly English letters Ʒ and þ, the barnacle geese reputed to breed in Britain, and so on. The unsystematic consistency of such little details is persuasive.² Moreover, the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, writing probably between 1370 and 1396, in his discussion of famous people connected with St Albans, as Mandeville is reputed to have been, clearly accepted the story of the English authorship, and the Abbey of St Albans seems to have been something of a centre of dissemination for MSS of the Travels. But the really crucial question, as yet unanswered, is, if the author was not English, what conceivable motive had he in so cleverly pretending to be? (And if he was not, then our opinion of his book must be the higher because of the brilliant and convincing fiction.) The original's being in French is no argument, for the natural language for literary endeavour of a secular (non-religious and non-scholarly) nature for an Englishman born in the early 1300s would be Anglo-Norman French —even if, like Henry of Lancaster (or John Gower) he felt the need to apologize for his handling of it.³ There is nothing in the early texts against our accepting the author's own account of himself as an Englishman.

How far he travelled (if at all) is a similar question. The post-Renaissance view of Mandeville is to see him as the archetypal 'lying traveller'. He claims to have travelled as far as China, though not, interestingly, as far as the Japan visited by Marco Polo. Though very unusual, such journeys were not in themselves improbable. The Franciscans, like Odoric of Pordenone or John of Plano de Carpini, and a few merchants, like the Polos and Balducci Pegolotti, penetrated in some numbers during the period of Tartar hegemony— roughly the century after 1220—to the Far East and lived to write their memoirs. But two factors have severely damaged Mandeville's credit. First, since the European voyages of discovery, we have a completely different picture of the world and no longer accept the stories of monstes and marvels that descended to the medieval mind from Pliny, Aethicus, Solinus and Herodotus. If Mandeville reported them, then he was a liar. But this is not an entirely valid argument; for what you see (and can write about) depends to a large extent on the conceptual and methodological structures you have in your mind; the fact that we see lepers as victims of a disease while the ancient writers saw them as 'flatfaces' (or, similarly, sufferers from elephantiasis as sciapods) depends on our respective assumptions. The cargo cults of the Pacific provide an illustration: to us, a prosaic aeroplane, yet to a different mind—and equally 'truly'—a great silver bird which brings gifts from the gods. The second factor is the convincing demonstration of Mandeville's vast dependence on a large number of earlier accounts of the East. This has led one critic to say roundly that Mandeville's longest journey was to the nearest library. But this again is far from conclusive. The medieval convention - not only accepted but admired—of reworking 'olde feeldes' for 'newe corne', 'olde bokes' for 'newe science', the reliance on auctoritas, would make a book that did not rely on others unusual in the extreme. Plagiarism is a charge beside the point; borrowing is an accepted artistic norm. Marie de France, for example, can rework Robert of Flamborough's Poenitentiale, using the first person and thus claiming experiences she could not have had, without any unease. Likewise, Mandeville's claim to have lived with the Great Khan at Manzi (p. 144)—an imitation of his source Odoric of Pordenone— is impossible as it stands since the kingdom of Manzi fell at the end of the Sung dynasty in 1278. So far, then, Mandeville is working within a normal pattern. But, more to the point, later travellers, like Johann Schiltberger, captured after Nicopolis in 1396, and about whose wanderings there is absolutely no doubt, can be shown to have borrowed freely from Mandeville to flesh out their own accounts. Even the estimable Polo, like Herodotus before him, repeated hearsay. Neither of these factors, then, disproves Mandeville's having travelled. Indeed, there are some elements and details, inexplicable in terms of sources, which just could be firsthand reporting. The story of 'Ypocras" daughter at Cos, for example, has no known source; yet the reliable Felix Fabri found it current in the island when he visited it in 1483. Again, Mandeville says the walls of the Great Khan's palace were covered with the sweet-smelling skin of 'panthers' (p. 142), a detail not in his source Odoric, who mentions only leather. The detail is included for no obvious reason. The commentators have discoursed about the sweet smell the Bestiaries attached to the panther; but the red panda does smell of musk, and the Nepali word 'panda' could easily be misheard as the Latin 'panthera'. Finally, it would be very odd indeed if a man with so great an interest in far countries should have found no way of getting at least as far as the Holy Land in a century when (just as on the Muslim Hajj to Mecca) relatively large numbers of people of all social classes took advantage of the pilgrim routes thither; these were organized almost as comprehensively as the modern package tour—even to the hiring out of sleeping rolls for the sea voyage by a man who worked from the Piazza San Marco in Venice. The motives for going, then as now, were never entirely pure. Some just liked 'wandringe by the weye'—whatever Chaucer may have meant by that; some went out of genuine devotion; all looked for souvenirs. It is entertaining that Mandeville reports a Saracen solution to problems of tourist pressure on ancient monuments identical to that adopted by the Department of the Environment (p. 77). Now none of this proves Mandeville travelled; but equally it is not possible to dismiss his claim entirely. If this man did not travel at all, our opinion of his literary ability must be the higher: his book conveys a superbly coherent illusion of a speaking voice talking of firsthand experience, even to the important (and often amusing) disclaimers when he is unable to tell us something: 'Of Paradise I cannot speak properly, for I have not been there; and that I regret' (p. 184). The irony is that the more one questions Mandeville's truthfulness, the higher one has to rate his literary artistry.

But these questions, though interesting, are relatively side-issues. Many people wrote travel books; only this one achieved an enormous and lasting popularity.⁴ The reasons for that popularity and the considerable influence it exerted must be sought in the nature of the book and its treatment of its material—and in the handling of the audience's assumptions. To a modern reader, the form seems loose and inconsequential. This is deceptive. The journey narrative has the great advantage of being inclusive of many diverse elements (a quality beloved of the medieval mind) and provides a basic structuring for the material against a landscape (in the first half of the book at least) geographically and politically recognizable to fourteenth-century eyes. At least in part, too, the narrative caters for the same sort of taste as the Alexander Romances and Prester John's letter (which latter had lost, by the time Mandeville was writing, some of its initial political urgency). Mandeville uses elements of both. The language and form are accessible to a wide audience, and thus provide an ideal medium for a haute vulgarisation of authoritative 'geographical' thought. Mandeville was a serious writer, taking his matter from sources he believed (generally correctly) to be accurate; his book was as accurate and up to date and account of knowledge of the world as he knew how to make it. He deliberately draws together—remember the medieval delight in the summa and the compendium—material of very different kinds that could not so readily be found elsewhere; but unlike the compendium writer—for example, Vincent of Beauvais, whose Speculum Naturale and Speculum Historiale he used—he does not just compile. One of his most remarkable and interesting achievements is to have synthesized so many sources so that the joins do not show. He adapts and shapes to fit his plan, unifying all with the stamp of a valuing subjectivity. The medieval ideal of lust and lore—pleasure and instruction—seems to be the goal. We must not forget, either, the medieval (and indeed Renaissance) assumption that all writing must have a serious moral intent which is discoverable by intellectual understanding penetrating the surface of the text. The earth, likewise, is to be understood as a factual place first; therefore we have the careful and authoritative account of the size and shape of the earth; but it is also to be understood morally, and so we have a pleasant story of the reproduction of the diamond followed by its moral significance from the lapidaries (pp. 118-19), or an emphasis on there being a significacio for fish coming to land to be caught (p. 133). It is also a place where we must judge experience: 'Let the man who will, believe it; and leave him alone who will not' (p. 144). The medieval view of the world, as of literature, was polysemous, carrying many meanings; the physical world itself was the umbra from which Faith could be supported by Reason:

Yit nevertheless we may haif knawlegeing
Off God Almychtie, be his Creatouris …
(Robert Henryson, The Morali Fabillis
of Esope the Phrygian, ll. 1650ff.)

'All that is written is written for our profit.' And so Mandeville's impeccable geographical thought (in the sense in which we use the term 'geographical' in our methodology), despite its intrinsic interest for us as the picture of the world that a well-educated medieval man would have held, is only part of the importance of the Travels, just as is the delight in strange things (p. 44) that Mandeville assumes in his reader or hearer (p. 189).

It is really the difference in our mental maps and assumptions governed by them that makes a just assessment of Mandeville's impact in his time so hard. We simply do not look at the world in the same way. The precise spatial relationships of, for example, Dante, are almost unique in the writing of this period, and even those are moral and philosophical metaphors drawing heavily on a Thomist world model. The physical face of the earth is never, in my experience, as concretely articulated as Dante's universe. The landscape of the romance King Alisaunder, or the Roman de toute chevalerie of Thomas of Kent, is completely lacking in physical sequence and detail. The spatial vagueness and mysteriousness of descriptions of the earth in this period is more akin to a kind of description found only in fiction and fantasy now—the sort of setting in E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ourobouros or Ursula 1e Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. But these two latter are the result of choice. Mandeville's, or anybody else's, was not. Thus it is meaningless to attempt, as some editors have done, to plot Mandeville's places and journey on a modern map outline, for the rigid spatial relationships of the modern map, for us so important a part of the meaning of map conventions, are conceptually incompatible. Even direction is vague to the medieval mind. We easily forget how much the relatively modern inventions of coordinates and the compass rose have altered our modes of understanding our world. But that we see the world differently does not imply that the medieval idea was in its time unworkable—it clearly was not—nor that we are more 'right' than they were. Indeed, it is the root from which our way of thinking has grown. Mandeville's insistence that had he found company and shipping he too could have girdled the entire globe (and it is, incidentally, a modern slander that the medievals believed the earth to be flat) played, with his discussion of the Pole star, some part in the dissemination of important geographical concepts and in preparing for the great voyages of the next century on which our world-view is partly based.

Learned though it is, 'a compendium' is not the only key to the nature of the book. It also includes Romance elements and stories, which I discuss below. It shares to some degree that element, easily forgotten by us, in all western writing about the East that is not pure romance, of political interest in a strategic linking with the Tartars and Prester John against a menacing Islam. (This strategic concern was one of the three chief motives that spurred Prince Henry of Portugal to his sponsoring of the voyages of discovery—and it is one of the reasons he was so interested in Mandeville.) It provides a moral and political perspective (quite deliberately) for Europe (for example, pp. 149, 156). European's assumptions about their superiority in politics, law, virtue and religion are either directly or ironically challenged. And last, it is, at least in part, a quite careful and genuine pilgrim's devotional manual for the journey to the Holy Land. One owner of the Cotton text apparently so used it (see p. 23). Now these different genres, homogenized by the journey narrative, result in a complex and subtle book which can very easily make a fool of an inattentive or incautious reader. These elements, including the handling of sources, will need some discussion later, after we have looked in more detail at the structure and control of the book.

The tight categorical and proportional structuring of narrative, where everything relates to everything else, where balanced structure is an important clue to meaning, that we find in, for example, Dante, Gower or Chaucer, is largely lacking. There are, however, certain topics Mandeville refers to frequently—the insistence on Christians' unworthiness to possess Palestine, the corruption and complacency of the Western Church, the goodness in works of non-Christians. These could be said to be the thematic keys of the work. Almost exactly half-way through, the division is clearly marked between the parts dealing with the Holy Land and the Far East. Both these parts open and close with a repeat of their first ideas—the ways to the Holy Land, and the division of the world by the four rivers of Paradise. The last pages echo the ideas of the prologue. The narrative is clearly signposted, the signposts marking divisions of the matter (for example, pp. 44, 103, 111, 188). I also see a certain almost 'typical' linking between the repeated insistence on the inability of the Christians to take Palestine (not recognizing their need for moral and social reform before so doing) and the impossibility of Mandeville himself reaching the balm near Alexander's Trees of the Sun and Moon (p. 181, cf. p. 66), or the impossibility of great lords with all their power attaining to the Earthly Paradise (p. 185) because of the opposition presented by the very nature of the world. So a simple formal structure is supported by a thematic one.

The response of the audience is controlled in crucial places by the device of a persona. Though nowhere near as complex or as developed as, for example, Chaucer's or Langland's, nevertheless Mandeville's persona is significant. It is set up as a somewhat sceptical reporter, firmly rooted in experience—the 'first-hand' convention. It is very noticeable that in the early versions the persona is carefully made to question and to refuse to give an opinion, as well as, occasionally, to affirm the truth of the material; later redactions are marked by a multiplication of asseveration, often in a style much more emphatic than what we find in the earlier—'I, John Mandeville, saw this, and it is the truth.' The building up of this figure is interestingly oblique. He introduces himself, with an engagingly modest protestation of this unworthiness, as an experienced pilgrim who travels in good company (p. 45); he possesses a thorn from the Crown of Thorns (a king's ransom!) and implies he was given it by the Byzantine Emperor; he served as a soldier with the Sultan, and was offered a princess in marriage—'but I did not want to' (p. 59); he is experienced in the tests for good balm, and shows a sturdy independence of mind at the monastery of Saint Katherine on Sinai (pp. 66, 71). The Sultan gave him special letters of introduction ('to me he did a special favour', p. 80) to the Temple authorities. He has a 'private' talk with the Sultan (p. 107). He is ready to disclaim knowledge 'I never followed that route to Jerusalem, and so I cannot talk about it', p. 103). He is very plausible in relating what is supposedly his own experience in seeing the southern stars (p. 128). The boasting is amusing; but gradually his trustworthiness as a guide for us in our response is built up. He is made to be detached about his own job as a reporter or narrator; he is cautious about the Ark on Ararat (pp. 113-14), and about the supposed cross of Dismas in Cyprus and other relics (pp. 46, 55). He is sensible about the pepper forests (in fact he contradicts his source, p. 123, because it is talking patent nonsense) and reflective about the problems of belief in unfamiliar material (p. 144). When going through the Vale Perilous, there is a linguistic emphasis on seeming, illusion, fantasy—a distrust of his own cognition (p. 173)—and, by implication, ours, and our response to his material. Almost the last remark in the book is deliciously ironic: 'I shall cease telling of the different things I saw in those countries, so that those who desire to visit those countries may find enough new things to speak of for the solace and recreation of those whom it pleases to hear them' (p. 188). This persona is also used for comic or evaluative effect. Sometimes this is done by tone, or by the positioning of a clause. I have already quoted his apology for not telling us about Paradise, but he did drink of the Well of Yough, and characteristically claims not the instant rejuvenation one would expect from the (interpolated) Letter of Prester John, but 'ever since that time I have felt the better and healthier'. Going through the Vale Perilous (one of the stimuli, by the way, for Bunyan's Valley of the Shadow) he and his companions were much afraid: 'We were more devout then than we ever were before or after' (p. 174). In Lamory, he reports the 'evil custom' of fattening children for the table; but our expected horror is pointed by the deadpan, sardonic positioning at the end of the paragraph of the simple remark: 'They say it is the best and sweetest flesh in the world' (p. 127). The statement that '[Hippopotami] eat men … no meat more readily', is carefully booby-trapped by the insertion of the clause 'whenever they can get them' (p. 167). But most important are the occasions when the persona involves himself in dialogue. During his confidential talk with the Sultan his laconic unease introduces the Sultan's fluent indictment of Christian conduct, and he is wrong-footed at every turn (p. 108). This episode is comic in precisely the same way as the persona Gulliver is comic when talking to the King of Brobdingnag. But he can also be used not only to trigger a moral assessment of his own culture but to point out false values in others'—for example, his expostulation at the obscurantism of the monks on Mount Sinai (p. 71). Or he can modify our initial reactions in the direction of sense and understanding; for instance, when he asks Judas's question of the monk of Cassay (p. 139) who is feeding the animals, it elicits two things: the good organization of a state so that the poor do not exist and the fact that there is a rational explanation for a very odd act. (His source, Odoric, merely 'laughed heartily' at this pagan piety). And is not that act exactly parallel to the European custom of Masses for the dead? At the court of the Great Khan, the persona is confident that the marvels are not 'diabolic' as Odoric said, but capable of rational explanation on terms he can understand. And, finally, the persona can direct our moral response in a quite unambiguous way. The approval and admiration for the Gymnosophists is supported by a second reference to the important figure of Job (p. 180, cf. p. 115). All the accumulated authority of this figure is behind the remark 'we know not whom God loves nor whom He hates'—a generalized statement subsuming all the hinted warnings against too uncritical a judgement or too ready an acceptance of the unusual and strange. The handling of the persona, therefore, is the key to the book's success.

2 The Use of the Sources

We must now look at the handling of sources and the genres used in the book. Apart from those I mentioned above (p. 12) there are important elements for which no source is known. Some of these are Romance elements like the story of the Castle of the Sparrowhawk, or the story of the circumnavigation of the world. But the list of discovered sources is large:

Albert of Aix, Historia Hierosolomitanae
    Expeditionis
Jacopo de Voragine, The Golden Legend
William von Boldensele, Itinerarius
Jacques de Vitry, Historia Hierosolomitana
Haiton of Armenia, Fleurs des Histors d'Orient
William of Tripoli, De Statu Saracenorum
Odoric of Pordenone, Itinerarius
pseudo-Odoric, De Terra Sancta
Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum
Pilgrims' manuals
The Letter of Prester John
Alexander Romances, including Alexander's letter
    to Aristotle
Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Historiale and
    Speculum Naturale, including extracts from
    John of Plano de Carpini, Pliny and Solinus

and possibly:

Burchard of Mount Sion, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae
John of Sacrobosco, De Sphaera
Brunetto Latini, Livre dou Tresor

Quite a reading list. Even allowing for the fact that several are anthologized in Vincent of Beauvais, and that many of the travel accounts occur conveniently in the compendium of travels made by Jean le Lone of Ypres (which Mandeville quite possibly used), Mandeville still did a good deal of research. But the sources are used with quite remarkable assurance: there are certainly verbatim liftings (as there are in Shakespeare) but one is never conscious of where Mandeville leaves one source and moves to another. He moves backwards and forwards between them with complete confidence, dovetailing Haiton into Odoric and mixing in Vincent exactly as he requires.⁵ This, however, suggests a mere scissors-and-paste job; the impressive thing is the freedom with which the source has been altered and shaped. Reported speech is transposed into the much more arresting direct—for example, when Mandeville reworks Haiton's story of the advice of the dying Great Khan (p. 148). Many elements are amplified with considerable ingenuity. Three examples will show the different levels on which this is done.

First, Odoric,⁶ that homespun Odysseus, has one sentence (Yule, p. 114) on his trip on one of the stitched ships (which, incidentally, still exist in the Gulf region). Mandeville uses the story twice: once, briefly, in describing Ormuz (p. 120)—the right region for them, in fact; again, as a result of one of the many perils of the sea off Prester John's land. Odoric's sentence is blown up into a circumstantial account, full of personal observation. It is vastly more interesting.⁷ Second, Odoric's story of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (Yule, p. 240f.): Mandeville again expands, and alters the whole tone of the incident. Odoric merely mentions an unusual 'melon' he has been told of, which story (he feels) may be true, as there are trees in Ireland which produce birds. Mandeville's account is much more circumstantial, both of the fruit and his reaction:

There there grows a kind of fruit as big as gourds, and when it is ripe men open it and find inside an animal of flesh and blood and bone, like a little lamb without wool. And the people of that land eat the animal, and the fruit too. It is a great marvel. Nevertheless I said to them that it did not seem a very great marvel to me, for in my country, I said, there were trees which bore a fruit that became birds that could fly; men call them barnacle geese, and there is good meat on them … And when I told them this they marvelled greatly at it. (p. 165)

The persona's intervention emphasizes by implication one of Mandeville's key ideas—that the same Nature rules everywhere and what is impossible in Europe is impossible in Cathay. If the impossible seems to happen, either our knowledge or our interpretation is at fault. He hints that just as the East looks odd to the West, the West looks odd to the East.

Finally, Odoric's journey through the Vale Perilous. His account demonstrates both the problem of assimilating new experience outside normal conceptual patterns, as mentioned above, and the essential qualities of his narrative. Odoric was undoubtedly a truthful reporter and a man of considerable courage. The singing sands of the deserts of Asia are quite beyond his previous experience, but the idea of devils is not; and so the noises and appearance of the Valley become supernatural and threatening:

I went through a certain valley which lieth by the River of Delights. I saw therein many dead corpses lying. And I heard also therein sundry kinds of music, but chiefly nakers (drums) which were marvellously played upon. And so great was the noise thereof that very great fear came upon me. Now, this valley is seven or eight miles long; and if any unbeliever enter therein he quitteth it never again, but perisheth incontinently. Yet I hesitated not to go in that I might see once for all what the matter was. And when I had gone in I saw there, as I have said, such numbers of corpses as no one without seeing it could deem it credible. And at one side of the valley, in the very rock, I beheld as it were the face of a man very great and terrible, so very terrible indeed that for my exceeding great fear my spirit seemed to die within me. Wherefore I made the sign of the cross … I ascended a hill of sand and looked about me. But nothing could I descry, only I still heard those nakers play which were played so marvellously. And when I got to the top of that hill I found there a great quantity of silver heaped up as it had been fishes' scales, and some of this I put into my bosom. But as I cared nought for it, and was at the same time in fear lest it should be a snare to hinder my escape, I cast it all down again to the ground. And so by God's grace I came forth scathless. Then all the Saracens, when they heard of this, showed me great worship, saying I was a baptized and holy man. But those who had perished in that valley they said belonged to the devil. (Yule, pp. 262-6)

Now compare Mandeville's version (pp. 173-4). This is obviously much expanded and much more vivid, particularly in the development of details. But, crucially, Mandeville has made the crossing of the Vale a test of covetousness; he develops Odoric's picking up and then casting away of the silver into a warning— for some fail the test. Odoric, somewhat complacently, relies for safety merely on his profession of faith; Mandeville insists that to be safe even Christians must be 'firm in the faith … be cleanly confessed and absolved' and must 'bless themselves with the sign of the Cross'. Mandeville not only questions the evidence of the senses and judgement based on them—a serious enough issue in itself, and one not insignificant as a motif in the whole book; he also, with some finesse, suggests that he was accompanied by two Franciscans who sought safety in numbers! Mandeville tempers Odoric's seriousness with a wry humour. Clearly the passage is the work of an extremely competent writer, who knew exactly what he wanted.

This shrewd judgement in the handling of sources cannot, of course, be separated from the use of the persona. Too emphatic a commitment to the personal experience of everything would diminish returns rapidly; and Mandeville knew that. So the sources are not only shaped by amplificatio but sometimes, as in the case of Haiton's personal experience of the Land of Darkness, abbreviated and objectified. Generally, then, the sources are unified and the key ideas controlled by the device of the persona and the journey framework.

3 Modes and Values

The modes (and the expectations they arouse) used in this book are an interesting and unusual mixture. The hearer or reader coming to the book for the first time might easily assume he is embarking on a devotional guide, a manual of the pilgrim voyage to the Holy Land, like many others of the period. There are striking methodological and stylistic parallels between Mandeville's description of Jerusalem's relics and places and the description of those of Rome and Jerusalem in the pilgrims' manuals, like The Stacions of Rome or the Informacōn for Pylgrymes into the Holy Londe, printed by de Word in 1498. This sort of book was useful as a reminder to the returned pilgrim, a guidebook for the new, and an armchair voyage for the sedentary. In all three cases there was some devotional response—at the lowest level, the detailed recalling of the events and places that witnessed the individual reader's salvation. The concrete place is frequently used as a mnemonic stimulus for a biblical text and for a figuring of the Passion.⁸ Wherever Mandeville is dealing with the Holy Land or the Saints of the Church and their miracles, this stylistic mode is used. Sometimes, indeed, the details are so vividly filled in—as in the story of Samson, or the detail about the auger hole in the Ark whence the Devil escaped (pp. 57, 113)— that one wonders whether Mandeville is drawing on another religious mode as well, the mystery play. Just as Mandeville certainly used pilgrims' manuals, so a number of later works—some much later—borrowed Mandeville's remarks and incorporated them into devotional guides. (For example, the Pylgrymage of Sir Richard Guylford to the Holy Land A. D. 1506, and the forgery based on it, the Pylgrymage of Sir Richard Torkyngton, 1517.) One owner of the Cotton text of the Travexls tore out those pages that could be used as a pilgrim guide—one suspects in order so to use them. (The mode itself is astonishingly durable, still being traceable in Henry Maundrell's A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter, 1697.) The pilgrimage motif is itself a metaphor for the life of man on earth as a journey to the Heavenly Jerusalem, specifically picked up in the last words of the book, and this casts an ironic light on Mandeville's claim to be writing in furtherance of a crusade. The 'Land of Promise'— earthly or heavenly—can only be won if Christians reform themselves according to the truth they profess. (The alert reader will notice an ironic backward glance at Christian pilgrimage when Mandeville speaks of the devout pilgrims to the shrine of the Juggernaut, pp. 125-6.) And when the need arises, he can adopt the quite recognizable style of the sermon (for example, p. 180, with its careful array of biblical texts). With this devotional interest is mingled a deal of practical advice on the various routes, of modern observations on tourist attractions and on a tourist vandalism familiar to us today (pp. 77, 99). A choice of pilgrimage could quite sensibly be based on Mandeville's description of the different journeys.

But the first half of the book, on the ways to Jerusalem, does not deal only with devotional material. Here, as later, the narrative is frequently suspended by digressions into other modes. Mandeville is fond of a good story, and he took them from other places as well as the appropriate Golden Legend. They rarely remain only stories. The lurid mixture of necrophilia and disaster in the story (current in the chroniclers) of the 'Bane of Satalye', near Adalia in Turkey (p. 55) is used not simply to account for the ville engloutie which fascinated many pilgrims but to make a moral point about the consequences of man's sin in the macrocosm. The charming story of the Field of Flowers is similar to one told of Abraham's daughter; it is paralleled in Machaut's Dit du Lion (1342) and the Apocryphal legend of Susanna; Mandeville, however, uses it rather like a Golden Legend story, to account for the existence of roses and to demonstrate the saving grace of God. The Watching of the Sparrowhawk (pp. 112-13) is a splendidly told story (which reappears in the Mélusine romance which was thus linked to the House of Lusignan) which is concerned not just with sensation but with personal moral and ethical choice and behaviour. Later, the Old Man of the Mountains is worked up from Odoric to emphasize the conscious and mechanically engineered deceit of his fake Paradise. Europe had heard enough of that medieval Mafia boss to be fascinated by how he got his assassination squads to work. Similarly, the long-nailed Mandarin, whom he took from Odoric again, is made much more voluptuous and then is 'placed' as an icon of gluttony. (He reappears in The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.) So the stories generally are used to demand a moral response from the audience. Some actually do not need overt moralizing; the well-known ones, like the story of the 'hills of gold that pismires [ants] keep' (p. 183) are automatically a symbol of the foolish industry of men working to gather for themselves what they cannot possess and another enjoys. The digressions, then, are not only enjoyable diversions but functional supporters of the central ideas of the book.

Those central ideas spring essentially from two concerns: the moral state of Christendom, and the nature of the world we inhabit. Some critics have been so impressed by the remarks about Christendom that, like the late Professor Hamelius, they have seen the Travels as no more than 'an anti-papal pamphlet in disguise'. This is going too far, despite the demonstrable coolness towards the papacy, and oversimplifies a very complex book. Nevertheless, the amount of moral comment and how it is achieved demands our attention.

I have already referred to the way Mandeville insistently reiterates the need for moral reform before Christians can hope to possess the holy places. First, it is set out clearly in the prologue: the scheme of salvationhas been set up, yet 'pride, envy and covetousness have so inflamed the hearts of lords of the world that they are more busy to disinherit their neighbours than to lay claim to or conquer their own rightful inheritance'. The common people are left leaderless, like sheep without a shepherd. Social divisions have a moral origin. The same note is sounded again, briefly, as a hope for eventual reform, in the most appropriate place, the chapter on Jerusalem (p. 77). Then Mandeville attacks from a different angle. The persona is made to suffer the Sultan's comprehensive and systematic attack on the gap between profession and practice; all the sins are noted and the behaviour of the estates castigated (p. 107). The force of this is increased by having it in direct speech, and by making the speaker a Muslim who condemns Christians on Christian terms. We are made to see the attack as an objective appraisal from outside the Christian sensibility and données of the persona—in fact, we partly identify with the persona. Europocentric confidence in moral and religious superiority is challenged often. The Saracens, benighted as they are, administer justice better than Christians: 'They say that no man should have audience of a prince without leaving happier than he came thither' (p. 61).⁹ The pagan monk of Cassay indicates a social system more efficient in preventing poverty than a religion that specifically honours the poor. The Bragmans (Brahmins) take the idea further; here is a detailed account of a people not Christian yet living lives which, in terms of works, Christians ought to envy. The passage (pp. 178-9) is full of echoes of Dominical injunctions. Alexander is said to have wanted to conquer them, and Mandeville uses their traditional reply to attack the vainglory and deceitfulness of Western values. Alexander, like the persona earlier, is sent away with his tail between his legs. Mandeville is deliberatelysetting up more or less differing mirror societies as a commentary on Christian practices and failings—just as, indeed, Utopian fiction was later to be employed, often using Mandeville's own travel motif (for example, Utopia itself, or Bishop Hall's Mundus Alter et Idem).The attack starts destructively but gradually becomes more and more idealistic, finally culminating in the deliberate repetition of the account of the virtuous Bragmans in the paradisal innocence (symbolized by nakedness) of Gynoscriphe (the land of the Gymnosophistae; pp. 179-80). In the process, the good, peaceful government of the Chinese is used as a contrast to the internecine quarrels of Europeans; Prester John's kingdom is the ideal Christian state; the almsgiving of the Saracens challenges the moral superiority of Europe. The account of suttee is used to show that pagans take Heaven more seriously than Christians, and the horrific piety of the pilgrims to the Juggernaut (pp. 125-6) first shocks by its violence, and then by its direct moral: 'And truly they suffer so much pain and mortification of their bodies for love of that idol that hardly would any Christian man suffer the half—nay, not a tenth—for love of Our Lord Jesus Christ.'

This general critique is not unsupported by detailed complaint. Hamelius was right to detect an anti-clerical note—virtually every writer in this century (even the churchmen) forcefully attacks the abuses of the Church. Those who should be the shepherds are specifically criticized. The manner can vary from the open 'For now is simony crowned like a king in Holy Church' to the more oblique suggestion whose thrust is pointed by the positioning of the clause and the falter in the rhythm: 'They sell benefices of Holy Church, and so do men in other places.' Both these examples come from the generally accurate account of Greek Orthodoxy, the first of many descriptions of different rites and religions. The summary of the Greek position is remarkably neutral at a time of strained relations with Byzantium. Mandeville quotes without comment a letter of the Greeks to Pope John XXII damning the claims of the papacy and accusing it of avarice. His silence suggests approval and enjoyment of the Pope getting his comeuppance. The Jacobite Christians practise a real devotion, despite their not using 'the additions of the popes, which our priests are accustomed to use at Mass' (p. 79). The Tibetans have a religious leader (p. 186), 'the Pope of their religion, whom they call Lobassi … and all the priests and ministers of the idols are obedient to him'; the sentence and the paragraph close with the deliciously sardonic phrase, 'as our priests are to our Pope'—this, in the century of the Babylonish Captivity when the respect for the papacy reached probably its lowest ever level of respect!¹⁰

The consequence of this cool look at western Christendom is apparent in the attitude to other sects, religions and societies. His accounts of the Eastern Churches and Islam are quite untypical of the period in their accuracy and lack of animus. Despite centuries of contact and trade, it was not only in 'popular' writing that the Saracens were seen, with a total ignorance of their theology, as virtual devils incarnate. The miracle plays, and romances like The Sowdone of Babyloine, echo the standard idea Lydgate repeats of Muhammad as a false prophet, glutton, and necromancer (Fall of Princes, IX, 53ff). The scholars (some Mandeville's sources), despite odd exceptions like Abélard, William of Malmesbury and Roger Bacon, are no better. Few men studied Islamic books at all deeply; those who did, like Ramon Lull and Ricold of Monte Croce (both of whom preached in Arabic), either carried little weight or confirmed the prejudices of their audience. Lull's agonized vision of a vast army of souls trooping down to Hell for want of Christian doctrine led him to plead in 1315 at the Council of Vienne for centres of Islamic study; the plea was ignored, and even Lull comes round to advocating military force. Ricold used his learning to seek points of difference, merely writing polemic. A bishop of Acre, Jacques de Vitry, shows complete misunderstanding of Muslim theology; even the remarkably fair-minded Burchard of Mount Sion gives a far less neutral account than Mandeville. The same intolerant ignorance extends to other religions and peoples; John of Plano de Carpini, Mandeville's source on the Tartars, clearly loathed them; Ricold, despite wide travels, only abuses them, and William of Rubruck saw all eastern religions as diabolic aberrations. The politic Greek was distrusted (not without reason); nevertheless it is chilling to find the gentle Burchard recommending the seizing of Constantinople and the burning of all dubious books. Ludolf von Suchern emphasizes that the Pope has given full permission for the forcible dispossession of Greeks from their lands and for their being sold as cattle. Now it is fair to object that all these writers are clerics and have, to some extent necessarily, a parti-pris position; but elsewhere it is clear from the silence that tolerant understanding is not even considered. Gower, perhaps, reveals moral unease at the idea of a crusade (Confession Amantis, III 2488-96), as did Wiclif; and Langland's Anima hopes that Saracens and Jews will alike be saved (Piers Plowman, B, 382ff, 488ff., 530ff). But that is as far as it goes. There is nothing comparable to the Muslim Averroës' assertion that God is worshipped satisfactorily in many ways.

The importance of Mandeville's treatment of these topics has been largely overlooked. The imaginative leap necessary for his tolerance is itself remarkable; and because the book was so widely read, many would get their first reasonably accurate account of the Koran from it. His summary of Muslim attitudes to Jesus and Muhammad is fair, sensible and detailed. (It is noticeable how this balance and openness was coarsened and indeed cancelled in later reworkings of the Travels. The norms reassert themselves.) Similarly, he treats the Greeks, the Muslims, the Jacobites and the Bragmans as interesting and honourable and worthy of sympathetic respect, not merely as sticks to beat European complacency with. He not only diverges from his source, de Vitry, on the Jacobites and Syrians. He describes their rites neutrally, supports their doctrine of confession with a goodly array of biblical texts (pp. 97-8) and he concludes merely with the sentence— astonishing in its period—'all their differences would be too much to relate'. Most of his contemporaries would have revelled in the castigation of such variance.

The same tendency radically to redirect his source is apparent in the descriptions of Far Eastern cults and societies. Odoric's sensibilities were particularly upset by the cannibalism and sexual promiscuity of Lamory: 'It is an evil and a pestilent generation', he cries (Yule, p. 127). But Mandeville delights in expanding the details and provides a biblical text to justify the sexual licence—'Increase and multiply and fill the earth' (p. 127). Thus he forces his audience to justify the opposite standards they take for granted. He can so easily climb inside the skin of a man brought up in a totally different, if invented, culture that the preconceptions of Europe must necessarily be questioned. Perhaps the best example of this redirection of material and consequent upending of European assumptions is Mandeville's interpolation (drawing, possibly, on Isidore of Seville) in Odoric's account of Tana; where he saw only 'idolaters', Mandeville saw 'a variety of religions' (p. 121) and introduces a long discussion of the philosophical and cult difference between an image (simulacre) and an idol. It is conducted resourcefully and intelligently, and allows him to 'place' the worship of the ox, and human sacrifice. His implication is that intention to worship is more important than any failing in cultus. Odoric's marvellous and beastly customs' hide universal man.

The crucial idea, that men behave rationally according to their lights, is the key to understanding how Mandeville treats all other strange societies. Just because the society of Amazons reverses our social norms, it does not mean it will not work. Just because we are revolted by Jainism, or necrophagy, or the strange use of one's ancestors' skulls in Tibet, does not mean that there is not real piety in the actions. All these threads of tolerance, understanding, charity and questioning are woven together in a crucial passage linking those Bragmans who live well by works with the virtuous pagan Job (p. 180): 'And even if these people do not have the articles of our faith, nevertheless I believe that because of their good faith that they have by nature, and their good intent, God loves them well and is well pleased by their manner of life, as He was with Job, who was a pagan … For we know not whom God loves nor whom He hates.' And notice that in the passage is a warning of the fallibility of human judgment.

The diversity of the world we inhabit, then, is comprehensible by reason. The final topic we must briefly mention is Mandeville's idea of nature. Nature is a mirror of providence, a reliable guide to understanding. The Dead Sea (p. 89) has qualities that are apparently 'against nature', yet those qualities are consequences of sin 'against nature', and designed by God so that man's mind by contemplation of the marvel will understand the sterile denial of nature implicit in all sin. (The Gawain poet uses the Dead Sea in this way too.¹¹) First appearances are a dubious basis for judgement; the pygmies (p. 140) cannot be dismissed as the freaks their appearance might suggest; they are 'very clever, and can judge between good and evil'.

Throughout the book there is the implication that nature is ultimately rational, if one looks far enough. A necessary consequence of this insight that the marvellous is explicable is that men may have confidence in the world behaving according to the same rules wherever they travel. And, if they have company and shipping, they can travel everywhere.

The Travels, then, is a complex and thoughtful book, executed with skill of a high order. The diverse material that has been gathered into it has been drawn into the service of a unified purpose, controlled successfully by a clever manipulation of the reader's response. Its immediate popularity rested on its meeting a number of tastes—the interest in the mysterious East, the desire for devotional Baedekers, and its provision of a very considerable amount of information. But that popularity could not have been achieved and sustained had the book not had that indefinable quality, that quidditas, which distinguishes the outstanding from the merely competent. I think much of that continuing attraction lies in the credibility of the persona's good sense and good nature. Mandeville, whoever he was, old, infirm and travel-worn, deserves the prayers he asks for.

4 The Career of the Travels

All old authors suffer from the vicissitudes of reputation. The differing estimates held of a book reveal quite as much about the readers as they do of the book, and thus almost any significant work can be used as a tool to diagnose the values and emphases (and blind-spots) of a culture. Up to 1750 only Chaucer among other fourteenth-century English works has a comparably large and constant body of readers; and Mandeville's was a more heterogeneous body than Chaucer's and his reputation much more complex. The response to and use of the Travels can be used as a kind of intellectual litmus to test the assumptions, values and perceptions of a given period. There is, unfortunately, not space to go into this entertaining question here. It is only worth mentioning in order to emphasize that significant shifts in the reputation and use made of the Travels need seeing in a wider context. All we can do is sketch the importance of the Travels in Renaissance geographical thought and discovery, and its literary influence.

The happy accident of its being written first in French ensured that it immediately acquired a European readership as well as an English one. Within a hundred years of its writing the rapid proliferation of MSS made it available in most countries of Europe; the early translation into Latin—the language, significantly, of scholarship, and thus an indicator of how some early readers felt about its material—allowed it to cross any remaining linguistic boundaries. These MSS do, of course, show a greater or lesser degree of adaptation and contamination. Some of them are not so much copies as versions, made for special interests. The spread of the printing press probably tended to standardize the text in general circulation on a copy text; thus in England after Pynson's edition of Defective (1496) (see p. 38), all subsequent printed editions known in English of the Travels in the sixteenth century are offshoots of Defective, and the same process is repeated after the 1478 and 1481 Augsburg editions of Anton Sorg, or the 1480 Milan edition of Comeno. The earliness of these printings is remarkable: before 1500 eight German printings are known, seven French, twelve Italian, four Latin, two Dutch and two English. There are Czech and Spanish editions before 1520. Clearly there was money as well as interest in Mandeville.

Very early on in its manuscript career, the Travels was included in the compendia, collections of important texts on a particular area. It was included, with Odoric of Pordenone, in the Livre de Merveilles of 1403, an authoritative collection of material on the East. Michel Velser's German translation, made about 1393, is included in an MS miscellany of astronomical works, presumably because the compiler thought the account of the Pole star important. A couple of centuries later, this still goes on. Hakluyt's first edition of the Principall Navigations (1598) was specifically gathered to provide a ready fund of information for his countrymen aspiring to commercial exploits in the Orient—the book is both commercial inducement and geographical information; it includes Mandeville in the version known as the Latin Vulgate (a Continental text). Hakluyt extolled the scholarship and good sense of Sir John, yet is aware that the text has been corrupted by scribes and printers—blanket acceptance or rejection of the text as fact will not do and only the discerning mind will find it useful. Hakluyt's view of Mandeville's usefulness changed radically as the next ten years saw a flood of information about the New World reaching England from English travellers and translated Spanish sources, and he dropped Mandeville from his second edition. But Samuel Purchas, a most eager Elisha, clawed Hakluyt's mantle down on himself in his publication of Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625)—a text which Coleridge loved. His collection is less concerned with trade statistics and discovery than with picturesque descriptions and theological and missionary musings. A heavily cut Mandeville appears, and his portrait appears on the title page with Columbus and King Solomon and others. It is important that two writers, one ostensibly following the other, should, in so short a time, use Mandeville for such different purposes. The Travels was also pillaged, extracted, or epitomized in such seminal books as the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), and Münster's Cosmographia (1544), chiefly for its information on the East. Much of Mandeville's material then flows indirectly through these conduits, as well as directly, into the sum of European knowledge in the Renaissance.

The practical importance of this sort of dissemination cannot be discounted. The Travels was anthologized because it was authoritative; it was given new authority by being anthologized, and so it gets into the hands of men who over two centuries were responsible for the European discovery of the East and of America. The Travels was used as a source in the outstanding Catalan Atlas of 1375. Abraham Cresques made this atlas for Peter III of Aragon, who was very interested indeed in reports of the East and Prester John. It incorporates the very latest geographical knowledge. The Travels again seems to have been used (as Polo was not) in the Andrea Bianco map of 1434. And the so-called 'Behaim' globe made in Nuremberg in 1492— the earliest to have survived—quotes Mandeville wholesale, with great respect. Now this is crucial; these maps represent the picture of the world the explorers took with them and the basis on which their backers financed them.

Prince Henry of Portugal is not unique in being interested strategically, commercially and religiously in the East, nor in having his agents scour Europe for information on the East; the hard-headed German commercial empire of the Fuggers put money into these voyages, and one wonders whether the Augsburg editions of the Travels may have some connection with Fugger interest. (It is indeed a curious coincidence that right up to the end of the sixteenth century there are noticeable increases in the frequency of editions of the Travels coinciding with major voyages of exploration.) Several important explorers are known to have used Mandeville as one of their sources of information—for example, the principal sources of Columbus's ideas were Polo, Mandeville and Ptolemy. It may indeed be that Columbus's determination to sail west to Cathay was fuelled by Mandeville's story of circumnavigation. Frobisher, in his attempt on the Northwest passage, took with him a copy of Mandeville for its information on China. The expectations aroused by Mandeville led the first discoverers to see the New World not objectively but in preconceived terms: Columbus seems, from surviving letters, to have died believing he had found islands off Mandeville's Cathay. Even after America was known to be a new continent, the old legends were still operative, merely being transferred to the unknown interior. When the native Amerindian myth of the regenerative land of Bimini reached the ears of the first Spanish settlers, they eagerly grafted on to it the story of Mandeville's Well of Youth, of which Mandeville had drunk, and Ponce de Leon led two expeditions, in 1513 and 1521, to look for it. The result was the finding of Florida. The English descriptions of the Roanoke voyages, again, are full of the topoi of the travel literature of the past, and (probably unconsicously) exploit the conceptual and semantic parameters of the icons of innocence from the Bragmans to the Earthly Paradise. Sir Walter Raleigh's Discoverie of Guiana shows clearly his heavy conceptual dependence on these old accounts of the wonders of the East, and, indeed, he quotes Mandeville by name. Once again, the new is misunderstood in terms of the old, as we see with Odoric; and seeking Cathay to satisfy the dream of their fathers, the voyagers found an image of Paradise for their children.

It is somewhat oversimple to look at the geographical influence of Mandeville in this way. It is nevertheless doubly useful; first, it shows a deliberate and widespread use of only a part of what we saw above as the totality of meaning of the Travels; secondly, the effect of the explosion of geographical knowledge resulting partly from Mandeville and his confident and unusual insistence that the world was everywhere traversable radically altered the esteem in which the book was held and the uses to which it could be put. Although Richard Willes, in his Historie of Travaile (1577) can still treat Mandeville as a prime authority, this is becoming less and less possible. Gerard Mercator in that same year, in a letter, accepted Mandeville's story of his circumnavigation (and used him as a source for his map) but seriously questioned his judgement in reporting what he saw—an unease felt, as noted above, by Hakluyt. Although Mandeville's material still found its way into scientific compilations, it did so less and less frequently. By about 1600, his reputation has fallen sharply; he is now outdated by new knowledge and his work often treated with contempt. There are however, supplementary reasons for this.

Just as the Travels' real nature had been distorted to serve the interests of the learned, so it was reworked for other partialities. At the same time that Prince Henry was using it for political and commerical information, it was available in re-editings as a book merely of wonders, as a devotional guide, as a romance. Part (much cut) was put into heavy-footed octosyllabic verse at about the end of the fifteenth century, as a popular account of the East, strongly pointed with a muscle-bound Christianity; another late-fifteenth-century ancestor of McGonagall made a nearly complete version in coarse octosyllabics, as a sort of popular Romance (the Metrical Version) incorporating many other legendary wonders. Everything is sensationalized, and the original delicate balance between matter and treatment has completely gone. The Metrical Version points firmly to the much later career of the book as a chap-book for children; it is the nearest thing to the 'film of the book' (complete with regular stars like Alexander and the Nine Worthies) that the Middle Ages could manage.

So, by the end of the fifteenth century, 'Mandeville' could mean many different things to different people— or to the same person at the same time. The process intensifies. William Warner in 1586 published in Albion's England an account in fourteener verse of mythical English history down to the voyages of his time, and in Books XI and XII interlards it with a surgary romance in which Mandeville's travels are reduced to knight errantry resulting from an unhappy love affair. Albion 's England seems to have been an influential source for the Elizabethan dramatists and also for Milton. It must have been difficult to have taken Mandeville seriously as a source of information or anything else when Warner's bland fourteeners plodded into your consciousness.

It would be even more difficult if you had seen the play of Mandeville which ran fairly successfully in the 1590s; if, as I suspect, the source was Warner and it is to this play Nashe refers in his Nashes Lenten Stuffe (1599), the prospect of such vapid drama is alarming. Clearly, by the end of the century, the knight is an almost mythical figure, the archetypal traveller, the grandfather of lies that are like truth. It is exactly in this way that Richard Brome's comedy The Antipodes (1636) regards him. Significantly, his name can even be used in a book title: The Spanish Mandeuile of Miracles (1600), the title given to the translation of Antonio de Torquemada's Jardìn de Flores Curiosas (1570). The multiple Mandeville tradition plus the revolution in knowledge of the world finally killed the book's serious career as a work of information—even though as late as the eighteenth century we find the odd anomalies of Dr Johnson recommending it to a friend for information on China, and a catchpenny re-editing (claiming Mandeville set out in 1732!) with the travels of the excellent Jonas Hanway and Lionel Wafe issued about 1760 by a consortium of London publishers. Nevertheless, illustrated printed editions and chap-book versions still continue to be made and sold. The knowledge of the Travels remains general; the attitude to it changes irrevocably.

It is a labour of very doubtful value to seek out specific borrowing from Mandeville in other authors. It can be done, and a list of Man deville's debtors, from the Gawain poet to Coleridge, is huge. The really interesting thing, which can here be touched on only briefly, is how the Travels as a whole fertilized something already in a writer's mind and helped it to fruit. For example, the development of Mandeville's use of 'mirror' societies was clearly a most useful tool for Saint Thomas More whose Utopia is the parent of all subsequent writing in that important mode. It is significant how often satiric or moral Utopias of the sixteenth or seventeenth century borrow details and techniques from the Travels. Again, Mandeville is the first fully to develop the travelfiction form; it was enthusiastically adopted by Rabelais, by Joseph Hall, by Richard Head—whose debt in The English Rouge to Mandeville is very large—and by Defoe and Swift. (Oddly enough, the 'I' of Robinson Crusoe—especially in The Further Adventures—and of Gulliver's Travels both seem close to the persona of the Travels; Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719, Gulliver in 1725 and the Cotton text of Mandeville in 1725.) Interestingly, these uses (particularly the latter) depend on both reader and author taking for granted that what is consistenth presented as truth is in fact fiction. Such a sophistication is, I feel, present in some degree in the Travels and is not framed by the usual suspenders of disbelief we find commonly in medieval poetry. The final example of this curious symbiosis between the Travels' nature and the mood, interests and assumptions of various ages is in fact the beginning of a totally new development in the reading of the Travels in the eighteenth century. In the 6 November 1711 issue of the Spectator, Addison sounds for the first time the note that will resound in La Natchez and, modulated, in Ivanhoe, the 'delight in contemplating those Virtues which are wild and uncultivated'. Steele, in The Tatler No. 29 (1710), connects this half-moralizing taste for the outlandish with an escapist delight in 'unscientific' travel-books—especially Mandeville 'all is enchanted ground and Fairyland'.¹²

Here is a revolution indeed! No moral disapproval of the lying traveller, only a delight in fiction as a safe escape. Here is the germ of that curiously sentimental and patronizing early-eighteenth-century delight in old books simply because they are old—a germ that developed into the foundations of serious medieval scholarship as we know it. The publication of the Cotton text in 1725—the first scholar's text—could hardly have happened without this taste being present; and it is extremely significant in itself. In an entirely new way, Mandeville is now in the province of the scholar and the dilettante; the chapbooks and the continuing Defective versions are clearly to be distinguished from an authoritative old text, and gradually we meet a growing surprise at the quality revealed when the Travels are read in a good text. But that very change in taste and attitude ensures that from then on the lively luxuriation of Mandevilliana will stop; as the integrity of the book was at last guaranteed, its power to change and inform imaginative thought was almost killed. Nothing grows in formalin.

And I, like John Mandeville, 'am now come to rest, as a man discomfited for age and travel and feebleness. I must now cease telling of diverse things so that those who follow may find things enough to speak of.' …

Notes

1. The most helpful discussions of this tangled matter are in the works by Drs de Poerck and Seymour and by Mrs Bennett. … Mrs Bennett's book contains a list with descriptive details of the known extant MSS.
2. When authors try to assume the character of a national of a country not their own it is very common to find slips which betray them. For example, in 1708 the London Monthly Miscellany published a 'Letter from Admiral Bartholomew da Fonte', purporting to describe a voyage from the Pacific to the Atlantic in 1640. The circumstantial detail is good. But the fictious da Fonte's credibility is destroyed by having him reckon his dates from the accession of Charles I of England. (Reprinted in H. R. Wagner, 'Apocryphal Voyages to the West Coast of America', Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 41 (1931), pp. 179-234.) Similarly, George Psalmanazar (1679?-1763) was unable to maintain his assumed Formosan nationality and passed from ridicule to obscurity, despite the friendship of Dr Johnson.
3. 'Jeo doie estre escusee, pur ceo qe jeo sui engleis et n'ai pas moelt hauntee 1e franceis' (Livre de Seyntz Medecines, ed. E. J. Arnould (Oxford, 1940), p. 239). The rhetorical figure of diminutio—a polite apology for one's real or potential inadequacy—may be behind Henry's and Gower's remarks. But it is just possible that both are aware of the growing fashionableness at this period of the Paris French dialect as a literary language. Chaucer's cutting remark about his Prioress's Flemish French suggests that one so conscious of what is comme il faut ought to have been more up to date in the matter of a polite language.
4. This and the previous point are highlighted by comparing the Libro del Conoscimiento (ca. 1350) written by a Spanish Franciscan (translated for the Hakluyt Society by C. Markham, 1912). This man did go all over Africa and the East, and did not just compile; yet he includes all the fabulous monsters and stories of the ancient tradition. His ineffable dullness and lack of detail underline how vastly more informative and entertaining Mandeville is.
5. This does not mean that there are not occasional awkwardnesses, which modern filing systems and methods of writing books would have sorted out. Sometimes the sources are not fully digested, and very occasionally two conflicting versions of the same event happen—for instance, the two stories of Muhammad's prohibition of wine, Chapters 9 and 15. Sometimes one single ultimate source comes to Mandeville by two routes, and is thus doubleted—for for instance, the double account of Silha and then Taprobane (chapters 21 and 33). But this last is in no way Mandeville's fault.
6. Translated by Sir Henry Yule, in Vol. II of Cathay and the Way Thither, an invaluable collection of accounts of the East. …
7. One might here just note how different Polo, Odoric and Mandeville are: Odoric plods worthily on his way, Polo is a keen and accurate observer, and Mandeville is the creator of a memorable fanciful trope. See The Travels of Marco Polo (Penguin Books, London, 1958), p. 66.
8. The strong devotional interest in the book is borne out by the way it was illustrated, Among Other things. The early-fifteenth-century MS, Addit. 24189, in the British Library, is simply a picture-book Mandeville, without text; it has a picture for each of the Crownings of Our Lord, and the first five chapters are expressed in twenty-eight superb illustrations. Another illustrated Mandeville appears in the compendium MS Addit. 37049, which is entirely composed of devotional material.
9. This may be deliberate irony: Pope Clement VI used to say this of his own role.
10. The story of the book'S having been authorized as true by the Pope is an interpolation, found only in the English versions, that must date from after 1377, when Gregory XI returned the papal seat to Rome.
11. Compare Clannes 977-1052, And below, P. 34. See also the comments in Gollancz and Day, Clannes: Glossary and Illustrative Texts (Oxford, 1933), pp. 75, 91-2, and 96-8, and in R.J. Menner, Yale Studies in English 61 (New Haven, 1920), p. Xlff. It has long been recognized that the Gawain poet knew the Travels, and I have argued elsewhere that Chaucer and the poet of the Alliterative Morte Arthur did too.
12. See p. 37. Mandeville is here well on the way to being bracketed with Münchausen in most people's minds—yet they make a pair only in the alliteration of their names.