SOURCE: "The Transformation of the Materials" and "The Romance of Travel," in The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville, The Modern Language Association of America, 1954, pp. 26-38, 39-53.

[In the following excerpt, Bennett compares Mandeville's Travels with the account of Odoric of Pordenone's travels, from which Mandeville borrowed extensively, and argues that Mandeville's text is far richer because his imagination and literary skills brought the materials to life.]

Mandeville has been called a forger, a "mere plagiarist," and even a "mere translator." His debt to William of Boldensele has been somewhat exaggerated, although it is real enough; but his borrowings from Odoric of Pordenone are not only extensive but continuous, and therefore they will serve best to illustrate how skillfully he transformed his materials to build up the illusion of reality which is the foundation of successful fiction. The comparison is easily made, because he follows Odoric's itinerary step by step. But he adds, deletes, revises, and changes the character of the whole, including the personality of the traveler, in a way which strikingly demonstrates his conscious artistry.

The two begin their journey together at Trebizond,¹ about which city Mandeville borrows some of Odoric's very words. He omits, however, Odoric's simple marvel of some partridges which followed a man like so many chickens. Instead he elaborates what Odoric has to say of St. Athanasuis: that he "made the Creed," and is buried at Trebizond. Madeville adds to this bare statement the story that the saint was put in prison for heresy and while there wrote a psalm with embodied his faith. He sent it to the Pope, who was thereby convinced that he was a true Christian and ordered his release.²

Next Odoric says that he went to Armenia, to a city called Erzeroum (Erzrum). The mention of Armenia reminds Mandeville of a good story, and he proceeds to tell of the castle of the sparrowhawk—a story which accounts for the sorrows of that land. This is a beautifully proportioned little folktale, involving three men and three trials with different results. Whether Mandeville invented it, or not,₃ apparently he was responsible for the attachment of this story to the legend of the house of Lusignan. The king of Armenia, when the Travels was being written, was a member of the house of Lusignan (1342-75), as Mandeville undoubtedly knew.

Next Mandeville repeats, verbatim, what Odoric has to say of Erzrum, amplifying a little the account of the Euphrates.₄ Then Odoric mentions "Sarbisacalo," the "mountain whereon is Noah's Ark. And," he says boastfully, "I would fain have ascended it, if my companions would have waited for me," although the people of the country reported that no man could ever ascend it because it was not "the pleasure of the Most High."⁵ Mandeville changes the whole spirit of the account and enriches it with graphic details. He says, first of all, that the mountain is also called "Ararat," and by the Jews "Taneez"; that it is seven miles high; and then, to Odoric's statement that Noah's Ark rests on its summit, he adds, "And men may see it afar in clear weather." In reporting the inaccessibility of the summit, he converts Odoric's futile boast into an impersonal but graphic explanation: "And that mountain is well a seven mile high. And some men say that they have seen and touched the ship, and put their fingers in the parts where the fiend went out, when that Noah said, Benedicite. But they that say such words, say their will. For a man may not go up the mountain, for great plenty of snow that is always on that mountain, neither summer nor winter" (p. 100). So no man since Noah's time has been up, except one monk who brought away a plank from the ark which is preserved in the monastery at the foot of the mountain. Marco Polo, Hayton, and Friar Jordanus all mention the snow, and the inaccessibility, and Rubruquis tells the story of the plank, although not in quite the same form. Warner found no source for the height of the mountain, for the Jewish name for it, or for the hole in the ark where the fiend went out.⁶ The last sounds like an episode in a Noah play.

Mandeville has not only changed the whole tone and spirit of Odoric's account, but he has created a visual image by adding details of sense impression—the ark can be seen afar in clear weather. He also injects a reassuring note of scepticism by his disbelief that anyone has been up to touch the ark, and he gives a characteristically reasonable explanation why it is impossible. Then he makes the difficulty of the ascent vivid by telling the story of the monk who got to the top only with the help of an angel. The economy of the whole episode, fifteen lines in Pollard's text, is perfect in its kind, and as far above Odoric as the work of a master artist is above that of an ordinary reporter.

Next, both Odoric and Mandeville speak of Tauris (Tabriz), where Odoric reports the famous "dry tree." Since Mandeville has other and more effective use for this marvel, he omits it here. He also omits Odoric's comment, "And there are many things else to be said of that city, but it would take too long to relate them."⁷ The wandering friar often expresses his impatience with his task and lets the reader down in this way, as Marco Polo does also. Mandeville seldom, or never, resorts to generalization, and one of his charms is that he has no set phrases.⁸

He follows Odoric past the summer palace of the Emperor of Persia, at Sultânieh, and on to Cassan (Kashan), which, Odoric remarks, is the city of the Magi. Mandeville drops out the "bread and wine, and many other good things," which interested Odoric, and concentrates his whole attention on the story of the three Magi. Neither does he stop here to describe the dry sea, to which Odoric devotes a sentence. Mandeville saves this marvel until near the end of his book, and then he draws upon the more imaginative Letter of Prester John for his materials.⁹

Odoric is fond of such flat and colorless generalizations as "And there are many other matters there" or "It aboundeth in many kinds of victual." Mandeville regularly omits such Statements. For example, Odoric says, "At length I reached the land of Job called Hus which abounds in all kinds of victuals." Mandeville omits the victuals and concentrates on the story of Job.¹⁰ Odoric next mentions some mountains good for pasturing cattle. Then he says, "There also is found manna of better quality and in greater abundance than in any part of the world. In that country also you can get four good partridges for less than a Venetian groat." Mandeville wastes no time on the cattle or the partridges, but he writes (out of Vincent of Beauvais) as if he had seen and tasted the manna: "In that land of Job there ne is no default of no thing that is needful to man's body. There be hills, where men get great plenty of manna in greater abundance than in any other country. This manna is clept bread of angels. And it is a white thing that is full sweet and right delicious, and more sweet than honey or sugar. And it cometh of the dew of heaven and falleth upon the herbs in that country. And it congealeth and becometh all white and sweet. And men put it in medicines for rich men to make the womb lax, and to purge evil blood. For it cleanseth the blood and putteth out melancholy" (p. 102).

Surely it is no wonder that there are four or five times as many manuscripts of Mandeville's Travels as there are of Odoric's. Mandeville knew how to select and develop his material. He takes the reader with him, giving a sense impression of what he describes, so that we can see and feel and taste it. As Lowes said of the later voyagers, he has a way "of clothing the very stuff and substance of romance in the homely, direct, and everyday terms of plain matter of fact."¹¹ He knows also the trick of comparing the strange with the familiar, cultivated to such good advantage by Hakluyt's worthies, two centuries later. Odoric says of the women of Chaldea that they wear short gowns with long sleeves that sweep the ground. Mandeville adds, "like a monk's frock."

Next Odoric describes inland India as a place where men live almost entirely on dates, "and you get forty-two pounds of dates for less than a groat; and so of many other things."¹² Here Mandeville, impatient at this dull commercial stuff, leaves him (pp. 102-108) to return to Ur of the Chaldees, and to remind us that here Abraham was born, and here Ninus, who founded Ninevah, was king, and Tobet lies buried. He speaks of Abraham's departure with Sarah to the land of Canaan, and of Lot and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he says that beyond Chaldea is Scythia, the land of the Amazons, to whose history he devotes a page, mentioning Tarmegyte (Merv?), where Alexander built cities, and Ethiopia and Mauritania, where live the men who have only one foot and use it for a sunshade.¹³ Then he passes to India to tell, not of dates, but of diamonds. He gives us a wonderful story of how diamonds breed and grow like animals, and of how, in the far North, ice turns to crystal, and on the crystal grow the good diamonds. He goes on more soberly to the various uses and kinds of diamonds, ending with practical suggestions about how to tell a good diamond from an inferior one.

Nor is he ready, even yet, to rejoin Odoric. First he must tell of the Indus with its great eels "thirty foot long and more" (according to Pliny and his successors), and of the vast population of India which travels but little because it is ruled by Saturn, whereas "in our country is all the countrary; for we be in the seventh climate, that is of the moon. And the moon is of lightly moving …, and for that skill it giveth us will of kind for to move lightly and for to go divers ways, and to seek strange things and other diversities of the world" (p. 109).¹⁴

At last Mandeville is ready to rejoin Odoric at Ormes (Hormuz), where he repeats Odoric's surprising information that the great heat makes ly perpendicles del homme, i.e. testiculi hang down to their knees.¹⁵ He adds, from Marco Polo or the Letter of Prester John, that "in that country and in Ethiopia, and in many other countries, the folk lie all naked in rivers and waters" to escape the heat.¹⁶ Then, apparently of his own invention, comes the further detail that "men and women together … they lie all in the water, save the visage … and the women have no shame of the men, but lie all together, side by side, till the heat be past" (p. 109). Mandeville actually describes what he had not seen but only imagined, while Marco Polo, who had seen it perhaps, reports without attempting to describe.

Both Odoric and Mandeville speak of the ships built without nails (a procedure for which Mandeville supplies a reasonable explanation), and of the great rats at Thana. But next Odoric gives us a long, pious tale of four friars who got into trouble with the authorities and were slain. They were able to stand unharmed in fire, so their heads were cut off. Then their flesh refused to rot, and they were finally buried by the Christians. Odoric claimed that he gathered up their bones and carried them all the way to China (by sea), performing miracles with them along the way.¹⁷ Mandeville shows no interest whatever in this typical medieval miracle. The only trace of the martyred friars in the Travels is the remark (borrowed from the midst of Odoric's recital) that at Thana the dead are not buried because the sun soon dries up dead bodies.¹⁸ The comment is oblique but revealing, both of the personality of Mandeville and of his attitude toward Odoric. In place of the long account of the martyred friars, he devotes his attention to the strange religions of India. Odoric says, "The people thereof are idolaters, for they worship fire, and serpents, and trees also."¹⁹ He is not interested in the how or the why. Mandeville is interested in both, because he recognizes that these people of strange lands are human beings like himself. His attempts to understand them gives his narrative the human interest which vitalizes it and makes his imaginary travel more real than the actual peregrinations of Odoric, or even of Marco Polo.

He elaborates the account of the religion of these people, crediting them with natural religion, "for they know well that there is a God of kind [nature] that made all things, the which is in heaven" (p. 110). They worship the sun because it is so profitable that they know "God loveth it more than any other thing," and they worship the ox because it is the most patient and profitable of beasts. He is attempting to rationalize what Odoric and others have merely reported. He adds, moreover, an account of their superstitions, mentioning similar superstitions among Christians, and adding the charitable comment that, since Christians who are well instructed have such beliefs, it is no marvel that the pagans "that have no good doctrine but only of their nature, believe more largely for their simpleness." He has seen augurs foretell the future by the flight of birds, but nevertheless "therefore should not a man put his belief in such things, but always have full trust and belief in God our sovereign Lord" (p. 112).

Mandeville's tolerance and charity are in striking contrast to Odoric's rigid orthodoxy. To Odoric the heathen are simply "idolaters" and the Nestorian Christians, who befriended the Roman missionaries in all parts of Asia, are "schismatics and heretics," or "vile and pestilent heretics."²⁰ Mandeville, on the other hand, includes nine Nestorians among the fifteen men who went with him into the Valley of Devils, a feat which Odoric considered evidence of his own special holiness. Mandeville is sure that "all the divers folk, that I have spoken of … have certain articles of our faith and some good points of our belief … But yet they cannot speak perfectly (for there is no man to teach them), but only that they can devise by their natural wit" (p. 206). His tolerance and charity give an impression of urbanity which dignifies and enlarges the mind of the author. The field of his interests is much above Odoric's.

The divergence in the account of the pepper forests of Minibar (Malabar) shows another facet of the contrast. Odoric says that the pepper forests are full of snakes which must be burned out before men can gather the pepper.²¹ Mandeville says that "some men say" fire is used to drive out the snakes, but it is not so, for fire would burn up the pepper. What they really do, he says, is to anoint themselves with the juice of lemons (the Cotton text mistranslates "snails"), and the snakes dislike the smell and do not trouble them (p. 113). Odoric's remedy for snakes in the pepper can be found in Isidore of Seville. Mandeville apparently invented his, taking a hint from another part of Odoric's Itinerary, where Odoric says that lemon juice is used in Ceylon to keep off leeches.²² Neither man is reporting from first-hand observation. Both are dependent upon "the authorities," but Mandeville creates the impression of careful observation and good sense by saying, "For if they burnt about the trees that bear, the pepper should be burnt, and it would dry up all the virtue, as of any other thing." Friar Jordanus denies the use of fire,²³ but it was not until John of Marignolli published his report, the same year the Travels was finished, that Europeans were told pepper did not grow in forests at all, but in gardens.²⁴ The passage illustrates Mandeville's tendency to disagree with his authorities and to look for a reasonable explanation which does not violate the laws of nature.

After the pepper forests, Odoric describes Polumbrum (Quilon, in Malabar) and reports the worship of the ox and the "abominable superstition" of anointing with its ordure. He also reports the sacrifice of children, the practise of suttee, and he says, "there be many other marvelous and beastly customs which 'tis just as well not to write."²⁵ Mandeville, in repeating all this, raises it from a depressing kind of anthropology to high romance. He begins by interpolating an account of the Fountain of Youth, which he borrows from the Letter of Prester John and locates at Polumbrum. He says, by way of authentication. "I have drunken there of three or four sithes, and yet me thinketh I fare the better" (p. 113)—surely a modest way of making a wild boast! Next he describes the worship of the ox, borrowing the name of the priest who officiates, the "archiprotopapaton," out of the Letter of Prester John, and making an elaborate religious ceremony out of Odoric's "abominable superstition."²⁶

So this ill-sorted pair journey uneasily together, like the two horses of Plato's chariot of the soul, one all fire and spirit, the other pedestrian and earthy, interested chiefly in the quality of the victuals and the wickedness of the heathen. Both report the worship of the Juggernaut, but Mandeville alone is moved to say: "And them thinketh that the more pain, and the more tribulation that they suffer for love of their god, the more joy they shall have in another world. And, shortly to say you, they suffer so great pains, and so hard martyrdoms for love of their idol, that a Christian man, I trow, durst not take upon him the tenth part the pain for love of our Lord Jesu Christ" (p. 117). Odoric traveled in the flesh, but how much more truly Mandeville traveled in the spirit!

Odoric, following Marco Polo, remarks that at Lamary (Sumatra) "I began to lose sight of the north star, as the earth intercepted it."²⁷ Mandeville picks up this sentence and elaborates it into his famous account of the roundness of the earth and the practicability of circumnavigation. Indeed, at every step of the way, Mandeville illuminates and vivifies and humanizes Odoric's account of his journey. He adds details which are picturesque, as in the case of the king of Campa (Cochin China), whose fourteen thousand elephants Odoric mentions.²⁸ Mandeville equips them with "castles of tree" which he says are put on their backs for fighting.²⁹ Both report the fish which come up onto the land every year, and Odoric says that the natives claim they come to pay homage to their emperor. Mandeville repeats this explanation, and then suggests that perhaps the real reason is that they come to feed the offspring of this king, who has a thousand wives (according to Odoric), and so obeys the commandment given to Adam and Eve: Crescite et multiplicamini et replete terram. Then he adds, more soberly: "I know not the reason why it is, but God knoweth; but this, meseemeth, is the most marvel that ever I saw. For this marvel is against kind [i.e., natural law] and not with kind … And therefore I am siker that this may not be, without a great token [i.e., miracle]" (pp. 28-129).³⁰ He never loses sight of the principle that God is also the creator and God of the heathen, though he has only revealed Himself to them through His works. Mandeville's assumption that the laws of nature operate even on the other side of the world is a fundamental part of his belief that it is possible to sail all the way around it. In fact, his conception of natural law as universal makes it highly improbable that he believed at all in the unnatural marvels which he retold from Odoric and Solinus and the Letter of Prester John.

Twice, into Odoric's sufficiently fanciful account of the islands of the Indies, Mandeville inserts additional marvelous islands. After Odoric's account of the dog-headed men of Nacumera³¹ he has some additions, and again after Odoric's Dondin, where men kill and eat the sick. After Dondin, Odoric goes directly to Manzi (Marco Polo's name for China), merely remarking that there are "a good twenty-four thousand islands" which he will omit. Mandeville says, at this point, that the king of Dondin has fifty-four (note the modest number) great isles in subjection, each with a king who paid him tribute. He populates these islands with a whole list of marvels collected out of Pliny by Solinus and incorporated in Isidore of Seville, Vincent of Beauvais, and others. Here are the islands of cyclops, men without heads, men with mouths in their backs, men without faces, men with upper lips so large they used them for sunshades, pigmies with mouths so small they had to eat through a pipe, men with ears that hang down to their knees, centaurs, men who go on all fours, hermaphrodites, men with eight toes, and "many other divers folk of divers natures" (pp. 133-135).

This perfect spate of absurdities, all crammed into a single page (fol. 191 of the MS. written in 1371), perhaps was brought on by Odoric's protest that "there be many other strange things in those parts which I write not, for unless a man should see them he never could believe them. For in the whole world there be no such marvels as in that realm. What things I have written are only such as I was certain of, and such as I cannot doubt but they are as I have related them."³² Mandeville's outburst fills this omission in Odoric's text. Evidently he did not want to omit any marvels, but we might well ask ourselves whether he actually believed in them, or expected his readers to believe. John de Marignolli, in his account of his embassy to the Great Khan, explains that while freaks do occur in nature, such as six-legged calves and two-headed birds, whole races of them do not exist anywhere.³³ Marignolli was a learned man, but not an intellectual giant. He denied the possibility of circumnavigation, which Mandeville argued in favor of, and he confused the great rivers of Asia in an absurd way. But he was not simple and credulous, like Friar Odoric.

Odoric reported more marvels than Marco Polo, who reported enough to discredit him with such practical men as King John of Portugal in the days of Christopher Columbus. Mandeville certainly knew Marco Polo's book, but he elected to follow Odoric, whose account of the East was much briefer and full of marvels. Odoric's contemporaries found his report hard to credit. Sir Henry Yule calls attention to the affidavit which Odoric was called upon to append to his narrative, and he mentions also the apologies made by Odoric's ecclesiastical biographers. Henry of Glatz, Odoric's contemporary, declares, "that if he had not heard such great things of Odoric's perfections and sanctity, he could scarcely have credited some of his stories."³⁴ Mandeville, in following and improving upon Odoric, was writing the first romance of travel in modern times.

The step by step comparison of Mandeville's Travels with Odoric's Itinerary shows most clearly the differences between the two works. Odoric records, without selection, whatever came to his attention along the way; or rather, since he dictated his account after his return, whatever he happened to remember. Mandeville's is a literary undertaking, the product of much reading and of literary rather than purely geographical interests. He everywhere substitutes local history for Odoric's comments on the food supply. The two accounts differ in form, in substance, and in purpose.

Mandeville was writing in a literary genre which has a long history, from the Odyssey and the lost Arimaspeia of Aristeas, through Ctesias, Megasthenes, and parts of Herodotus, Strabo, Aelian, Photius, and the lost novel of Antonius Diogenes about the wonders beyond Thule. Pliny collected these travelers' tales indiscriminately, and Solinus, perhaps Mandeville's closest forerunner, made a selection from Pliny of choice geographical wonders. Lucian travestied the genre in his True History, but St. Augustine included a chapter on the fabulous races of men in his City of God. In his day, the romance of Alexander was beginning its long history with the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the Epistle of Alexander to Aristotle about the marvels of India. In the seventh century Isidore of Seville repeated much of this lore, and shortly afterwards the pseudo-Aethicus produced his Cosmographia, which shows the same disregard for the changes wrought by time, and the same appropriation of other people's experiences complained of in Mandeville. In the Renaissance the popularity of Solinus and Aethicus tended to eclipse Mandeville!

Sometime between the third and seventh centuries a letter was invented which purported to be from "Fermes" to the Emperor Hadrian, describing a journey to the East on which the writer saw all the traditional marvels of strange beasts and stranger men. A book of Marvels of the East was made, mostly out of "Fermes." It is preserved in both a Latin and an Anglo-Saxon text.³⁵ At the opening of the thirteenth century, Gervase of Tilbury included all of "Fermes" in his Otia Imperialia. Meanwhile, about 1165, the Letter of Prester John appeared and circulated widely. In the thirteenth century, when Europeans had an opportunity to visit China, they reported not only what they saw, but what they expected to see.

As a result, they merely added some fresh marvels to the old ones, and the better educated or more sceptical regarded all alike as "great liars." Marco Polo's difficulties with the incredulous are well-known, and even Friar Odoric's sanctity did not entirely protect him from the sceptics. Mandeville was free, therefore, to add and subtract, to polish, change, and interpret what he found in his sources. He does not omit the best of the traditional wonders of the earth, but he found, in the newer reports of the Orient, things more marvelous than in the old. For example, he took from Odoric the lake at Sylan (Ceylon) formed by the repentant tears of Adam and Eve. Marco Polo reported that the king of Nicoveran had a necklace of one hundred and four great pearls and rubies, which he used, like a rosary, to say his prayers.³⁶ Odoric raises the number to three hundred pearls,³⁷ and Mandeville follows Odoric. This same king had a famous ruby, which Marco Polo said was "a large palm long and quite as thick as the arm of a man."³⁸ Odoric makes it "a good span in length and breadth," and Mandeville reports it "a foot of length and five fingers large" (p. 131). Modern critics have called Marco Polo's statement "hearsay," Odoric's "gullibility," but Mandeville's "sheer mendacity." It was, rather, pure fiction.

In his account of Manzi, or China, Mandeville shows much less dependence on Odoric than in the earlier part of the journey. He omits the visit to Zaiton, where Odoric left the bones of the four friars; and he omits some of Odoric's cruder marvels, such as the mountain on one side of which everything is black, while on the other everything is white.³⁹ He uses other sources of information, as when he substitutes otters for the birds which, according to Odoric, are trained to catch fish for their masters.⁴⁰ Both otters and cormorants were actually used, but, perhaps because birds were used for hunting in Europe, the otter seemed the greater marvel. He does not approve of crude exaggeration, however. Where both Marco Polo and Odoric say that Cansay (Hang-chow) is a hundred miles in compass, Mandeville says it is fifty-one miles.

He is much interested in the monastery, reported by Odoric, where the monks feed animals which have human faces, and which they believe are the souls of men. Odoric claimed that he argued with the monks that they were only animals.⁴¹ Mandeville substitutes a characteristic suggestion: "And I asked them if it had not been better to have given that relief to poor men, rather than to those beasts. And they answered me and said, that they had no poor men amongst them in that country; and though it had been so that poor men had been among them, yet were it greater alms to give it to those souls that do there their penance" (p. 137). The point of view which he is attributing to the Chinese monks is the same as that taken by many Christian churchmen of his day about masses for the dead, but if his intention is ironic, it is gently and subtly so.

Such implications as this constitute his commentary on mankind, and on the life of his time. He describes the strange customs of other lands and lets his reader draw what parallels he will. But we should observe that he has turned Odoric's reaction into something entirely different. He constantly assumes that human nature is the same everywhere, and he uses the familiar to explain the strange, and the strange to suggest comment on the familiar. Yet he is content to observe, clearly and simply, with the full, sympathetic, and imaginative understanding which is true charity.

The pigmies, whom Odoric reported,⁴² interested Mandeville, and he adds to every statement that Odoric makes about them, adding also their war against the cranes, which had been traditional since Homer. His greatest contribution to the literature of the pigmies, however, is his account of their relationship to men of normal size. Here, it has been suggested, he set the model for Swift. He says that the pigmies do the finer work, such as weaving, while men of normal size do the farming, "And of those men of our stature have they as great scorn and wonder as we would have among us of giants, if they were amongst us" (p. 138). So Gulliver found it.

Mandeville's descriptive skill is beautifully illustrated by his account of the palace of the Great Khan. He turns Odoric's red leather walls⁴³ into panther skins which exude a sweet smell, are red as blood, and shine in the sun (p. 141). They are prized, he says, more than fine gold.⁴⁴ Odoric mentions next some mechanical peacocks, operated "by diabolic art, or by some engine underground."⁴⁵ He gives them about six lines. Mandeville, with a better sense for creating a word-picture, sets the stage first by describing the jeweled throne of the Khan with its three "seges" of graduated heights for his three wives. Next he explains how the Khan is served at table, and how his secretaries write down every word he utters. Then he is ready to tell how, at solemn feasts, mechanical peacocks are displayed in motion. The story is much more impressive at this point. He says that the peacocks "dance and sing, clapping their wings together … and whether it be by craft or by necromancy I wot never; but it is a good sight to behold, and a fair; and it is great marvel how it may be." Then he dramatizes his own curiosity and the cleverness of the Chinese by claiming, "I did great business for to have learned that craft, but the master told me that he had made a vow to his god to teach it to no creature, but only to his eldest son" (pp. 142-143).

Next he adds the famous vine, with leaves of gold and fruit of precious stones, out of the Epistle of Alexander, De Situ Indiae, and some cups of emerald, sapphire, and topaz, from which the Emperor is served, and then he mentions the practical detail of guards kept in the hall, and explains how he came to see it all: "And ye shall understand, that my fellows and I with our yeomen, we served this emperor, and were his soldiers fifteen months against the King of Mancy, that held war against him. And the cause was for we had great lust to see his noblesse and the estate of his court and all his governance, to wit if it were such as we heard say that it was" (pp. 143-144). Here he is adapting a story of Marco Polo's to his own use, but the suggestion of scepticism effectually reassures the reader and makes it possible for Mandeville to find everything more wonderful than he had heard that it was, "insomuch that we would never have lieved it had we not seen it. For I trow that no man would believe the noblesse, the riches ne the multitude of folk that be in his court, but he had seen it." Then he adds the comparison with things familiar which distinguishes his narrative from that of his sources. He says, "it is not there as it is here. For the lords here have folk of certain number as they may suffice; but the great Chan hath every day men at his costage and expense as without number. But the ordinance, ne the expenses in meat and drink, ne the honesty, ne the cleanness, is not so arrayed there as it is here; for all the commons there eat without cloth upon their knees, and they eat all manner of flesh and little of bread, and after meat they wipe their hands upon their skirts, and they eat not but once a day. But the estate of lords is full great, and rich and noble" (p. 144).⁴⁶ The comparison not only creates the air of simple candor which is Mandeville's specialty, but it also saves the pride of his readers and sets the seal of apparent authenticity on his work.

Having drawn the picture of the Great Khan, he turns next (Chapters XXIV-XXVII in the Cotton text) to a sketch of the origin and history of the Tartars, out of Hayton, Vincent, and others. Odoric has very little to say on these subjects, but he was apparently the first to bring to Europe the wonderful Chinese story of the vegetable lamb, which Mandeville could not possibly omit.⁴⁷ He has no use, however, for Odoric's unimaginative account of Tibet, the land of Prester John. Odoric says that not a hundredth part of the stories about it are true⁴⁸ (Carpini says not a tenth part). Here Mandeville turns to the Letter of Prester John and gives his readers what will delight them.

He makes use of both Odoric⁴⁹ and Marco Polo in his story of the Old Man of the Mountain, but as usual the interpretation is his own. Probably from Marco Polo, he got the "fair halls and fair chambers depainted all with gold and azure,"⁵⁰ but Marco Polo locates the garden in a valley between two mountains. Odoric puts the wall around two mountains. Mandeville is reminded of the Christian traditions of the Earthly Paradise, so he puts it on top of a mountain on an island (where Tasso put his garden of Armida).⁵¹ Marco Polo says that it is in Saracen country, and that the Old Man represents it to his followers as the paradise promised by Mahomet. Odoric calls it simply "a paradise."

Mandeville represents the Old Man as quoting the Bible on a land flowing with milk and honey—a concept which Coleridge caught up in the line, "For he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise." Mandeville even has the Old Man hint of the higher, heavenly paradise, which also belonged in the medieval Christian tradition (p. 184). Marco Polo mentions four conduits flowing with wine, milk, honey, and clear water.⁵² Mandeville mentions these, but he adds three wells, "fair and noble, and all environed with stone of jasper, of crystal, diapered with gold, and set with precious stones and great orient pearls," which could, at will, be made to run with wine, milk, and honey. Like Marco Polo, he mentions the fruits and flowers, but he adds mechanical beasts and birds "that sung full delectably and moved by craft, that it seemed that they were quick." Perhaps he was remembering the mechanical peacocks, or similar mechanisms of the romances.⁵³ At any rate, he is probably responsible for the mechanical birds which appear in the artificial paradise described by Spenser.

Mandeville owes to Odoric much of his account of the Valley of Devils, which follows next, but here Odoric is especially vainglorious, saying, "all the Saracens, when they heard of this [that he had traversed the valley], showed me great worship, saying that I was a baptized and holy man."⁵⁴ Mandeville, on the other hand, remarks whimsically of his courage at this point in the journey, "I was more devout then, than ever I was before or after" (p. 187). He says (in the French, but not in the English text) that his party consisted of fourteen: nine Nestorians, two Greeks, and three Spaniards. Only nine passed through, but some, he says, went around another way. He describes how the party debated whether they should go through, or not, and he says that they were "shriven and houseled" by two friars minor of Lombardy that were in their company. Odoric was a Franciscan friar of Lombardy, and he traveled with a single companion! It is characteristic of Mandeville's sly humor that he should imply that Odoric was his confessor in this tall tale he is borrowing from him.

His description is far better than Odoric's, however. Odoric says that the devils that infest the valley play "nakers" and make sweet harmonies to allure travelers.⁵⁵ Mandeville turns this into "great tempests and thunders, and … great noise, as it were sound of tabors and of nakers and of trumps, as though it were a great feast" (p. 185). Odoric says the place was full of dead bodies. Mandeville marvels at the freshness of the bodies, and the great multitude of them, "as though there had been a battle between two kings, and the mightiest of the country, and that the greater part had been discomfited and slain." If he was not thinking of the fields of Crécy and Poitiers, his readers must have been reminded of them, and perhaps have drawn an inference from the fact that he makes the valley a test of covetousness. Here again, by comparing the strange with the familiar, a literary device which he did not find in his sources, he has enabled his readers to create a visual image.

After his account of the Valley of Devils, Odoric ends abruptly with profuse protestations of the truth of everything he has recounted. How he got home he does not say. Obviously he had been in the land of hearsay and pure fantasy for some time. Mandeville ends in a more orderly way, bringing his reader home through India, past the land of the Bragmans which Alexander failed to conquer, and Taprobane with its hills of gold protected by ants (out of Herodotus via Vincent of Beauvais). He tells of the four rivers of Paradise, and of the land of darkness.⁵⁶ He makes skillful use of bits from Odoric, omitted earlier, such as the funeral service in Tibet where birds are fed the flesh of the dead, and a cup is made out of the skull.⁵⁷ From Odoric's account of China he is now ready to tell the story of the rich epicure who lives "in ease as a swine that is fed in a sty for to be made fat" (p. 205). Odoric follows this by a mention of the Chinese fashion of wearing long fingernails. Mandeville puts the two together, using the nails as the reason that the man has to be fed by others, the inconvenience of long nails immediately occurring to him.

He ends with a defense of the beliefs of the heathen, and of his own. He says that they all have "some articles of our faith," but imperfectly, because they have only natural religion, and not the revelations of the Bible, to guide them. He defends the Christian use of "simulacres," which he distinguishes from idols, saying, "we worship not the images of tree or of stone, but the saints in whose name they be made after." Then, with characteristic humor (since what he is writing is fiction), he leaves the door of adventure open to his successor. He says that he has not told all of the marvels of the world, but only what he has seen (sic!); and he has not told all of those, so that other men who go thither may, as a reward for their labors, find enough that is new to tell of.

How much the travelers of the next two centuries found to tell can be read in the compilations of Hakluyt and Purchas, but in these later accounts we keep coming upon reminders that these men, in their youth, had read Mandeville as well as Pliny, Solinus, and Strabo and the more "authoritative" ancients. They could have learned some of their narrative art from Mandeville, for much that Lowes describes as the art of the voyagers—their simple, lucid style, their conveying of sense perceptions, their expression of the unknown by homely comparisons with the familiar—all these elements are characteristic of Mandeville.

There are other things which Mandeville did not borrow from Odoric or from Marco Polo. Odoric piles on his marvels indiscriminately, the bad with the good, without proportion or arrangement. Mandeville, like a careful gardener, weeds, prunes, transplants, and arranges his materials to insure variety, harmony, and continued interest. Obviously those who call Mandeville a "mere plagiarist" have not compared the two. Nor is he to be compared to Marco Polo, for Polo, as his most recent editors point out, was not writing a narrative of his travels, but a description of the world. He takes up China, province by province, and city by city, giving for each the location, size, government, religion, currency, taxes, measures, products, and the things which a merchant might want to know. His descriptions are informative catalogues, always expressed in general terms, never in pictorial detail. It has been said of him that he had "looked at everything and seen nothing."⁵⁸ His stories are artless and long-winded in a fashion which suggests that his amanuensis, the romance writer, Rusticiano de Pisan, was largely responsible for his literary form.⁵⁹ Mandeville, on the other hand, gains his effects by the proper selection and arrangement of details and the apt use of simile, in a way which could, and probably did, give lessons to such moderns as Defoe and Swift.

He writes like a man of reading and social experience, who brings to his travels more than he finds in books. He looks through the eyes of others and sees more than they have recorded. He was writing, at least in his account of Asia, entirely out of his reading; but he had read so widely that the source-hunters, intent on proving that he had not traveled at all, have succeeded in proving that he had read most geographical works from Pliny to Marco Polo. What is more important, he read with his imagination. In the school of Solinus and Aethicus he was writing an epitome of the new travel literature of his own time. He was writing literature, not a dishonest travel book.

He does not pretend to confine himself to the experience of an actual traveler. He enriches his narrative, wherever he can, by telling of the religious and literary associations of whatever place he is describing. In the first part of the book, he reports not only the religious associations of the Holy Land, but the classical and romance associations as well. He understands the use of literary allusion, and he combines the pleasures of novelty and of recognition.

He is artist enough to go a step further and create literary associations. He succeeded in attaching folk tales to new places. He has an unfailing instinct for what is appropriate. Warner remarks that his folklore is always right for the region to which it is assigned.⁶⁰ Perhaps he has had a larger share than has been recognized in forming our concepts of what is appropriate to various regions. At any rate he localized the castle of the watching of the sparrowhawk in Armenia, where it took its place quite naturally in the folklore of the East. He borrowed the story of the perilous kiss, perhaps from the romance of Le Bel Inconnu (the English version, Libeaus Desconus, by Thomas Chester, was written 1325-50), localizing it at Lango, or Cos, making the dragon-woman a daughter of Hippocrates. The association is plausible, because Hippocrates was born at Cos, was associated with the serpent cult of Aesculapius, and had a son or grandson named Draco. Whether Mandeville knew all this, or whether his invention was merely a fortunate one, its effectiveness is shown by the fact that it was adopted into both the romances and the local histories.⁶¹ The dragon-woman of Cos is referred to in Bondelmonti's Liber Insularum (ca. 1420), in Porcacchi's L'Isole più Famose (Venice, 1576), and as late as Boschini's L'Arcipelago (Venice, 1658). Mortorelli incorporated it verbatim into his fifteenth century romance of Tirante lo Blanch.⁶² Evidently Mandeville had the same power to localize folklore which Washington Irving displayed so notably. It is a literary gift of great value.

Mandeville was not responsible for localizing the tale of the Gorgon's head at the Gulf of Adalia, or Satalia. It had been traditional there from the time of the early crusades,⁶³ but he modified the story in several ways. Where others say that the head was thrown into the gulf and made it dangerous, Mandeville says that because of it the city sank into the sea and the gulf was formed. He also suppressed the cruder elements of magic in the story, converting it into a romance of a lost city,⁶⁴ and created a more polished narrative without violating the nature of the folktale he was revising.

Perhaps the best example of his instinct for what is right in folklore appears in the case of the orb which he says has fallen from the hand of the statue of Justinian at Constantinople. He says that it will not stay when it is put back, because it "betokeneth the lordship that he had over all the world," much of which had been lost by the Eastern Empire. A careful checking of the reports of other travelers indicates that the orb was still in the statue's hand in Mandeville's day,⁶⁵ but symbolism required that it should have fallen out. A similar tale of a giant idol on the shore at Cadiz, said to have been erected by Mahomet, told of a key destined to fall out of the idol's hand when a king should be born in France who should restore Christianity to Spain.⁶⁶ Mandeville may have been imitating this story in his account of the statue of Justinian. At any rate he knew what was appropriate.

Warner comments on the aptness of his mention of St. Nicholas in juxtaposition with the Greek Sea, because the Greek islanders of the Middle Ages attributed to St. Nicholas what their forefathers had fabled of Poseidon.⁶⁷ On the other hand, sometimes Mandeville may make a bold transfer of a bit of folklore; for example, he attributes to a tribe in India a superstition about the breaking of maidenheads which Julius Caesar had attributed to the Britons. The historians of travel literature have been particularly outraged by this transposition, but Mandeville was certainly right in putting the belief in a far country. In fact, he may not have been following Caesar at all, but Solinus, who tells a slightly different version of the story about the Augyles, who live next to the Troglodites in Ethiopia (which in the Middle Ages was considered to be a part of India.)⁶⁸ He has been accused of transferring the castle of the sparrowhawk from Aries to Armenia, but there is no evidence that the watching test was a part of the Mélusine legend before Jean d'Arras borrowed it from Mandeville and added it to the end of his romance of Mélusine by calling the fairy mistress of the sparrowhawk Melior (Mandeville does not name her), and making her a sister of Mélusine.

Mandeville's dependence on his authorities, and especially on Odoric of Pordenone, is so great that it does not seem possible that he had traveled in the Far East. But if he did not travel with Odoric, neither did he merely plagiarize from him. He made of the bald and undiscriminating Itinerary of the Friar what is, indeed, another book, as different from Odoric's as the personality and education of Mandeville are different from Odoric's. The Travels is incomparably richer than the materials out of which it was made because the imagination of a writer of genius has shone upon those materials and brought them to life. Mandeville is neither a plagiarist nor a "forger," but the creator of a romance of travel, a field in which he holds his place with the best.

Notes

1. For his account of the Holy Land, from Bethlehem on, Mandeville drew heavily on a De Terra Sancta which was attributed to Odoric; see Warner's notes to pp. 35 ff.
2. The story seems to be a confused reflection of the troubles St. Athanasius had with various Roman emperors, and was probably not original with Mandeville. Warner, note to p. 73, 1. 4, comments on the confusion of two bishops named Athanasius. I quote the translation of Odoric in Sir Henry Yule's Cathay and the Way Thither, II, 97 ff.
3. … Jean d'Arras added the story to the Melusine legend by making the heroine, Melior, a sister of Melusine. Leo Hoffrichter, "Die ältesten französischen Bearbeitungen der Melusinensage," Romanistische Arbeiten, XII (1928), 33-34, points out that the last king of Armenia of the Lusignan line died in Paris in 1393, after the romance of Melusine was completed, but the fairy curse falls on Armenia and the whole line of kings, not on any particular one. Hoffrichter says that the transfer of the castle from Arles to Armenia is probably due to the Lusignan connection, and R. S. Loomis agrees: Arthurian Tradition and Crétien de Troyes (New York, 1949), pp. 89-95.
4. Pollard's ed., p. 100.
5. Cathay, II, 102.
6. Notes to p. 74, 11. 17 and 23; and see Letts, p. 53 n.
7. Cathay, II, 104.
8. Some of the later, but not the early MSS., begin almost every paragraph with the word "Item," and call every country an "isle," but it is not so in the original.
9. Pollard, p. 180; and Zarncke, Der Priester Johannes, VII, 914.
10. The story of Job, Warner's French text, p. 76, 11. 29-34, beginning "Iob fuist paen …" and ending "quant il Morust, CCXLVIII ans," is omitted in the 1371 MS., but appears on fol. 48 of the better text of this redaction, Bibl. Nat. MS. nouv. acq. fr. 10723.…
11. J. L. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (Boston, 1927), p. 313.
12. Cathay, II, 111-112.
13. They are described by Pliny, Solinus, Isidore, Vincent, Higden, and even St. Augustine; see Warner's note to p. 78, 1. 22.
14. Warner, note to p. 81, 1. 5, quotes a similar passage from Gower (ed. 1857, III, 109). Hamelius hastens to point out that both England and Liège are in the seventh climate; see his note to p. 108, 1. 6.
15. See Cordier's note 4, in Yule's Cathay, II, 112-113.
16. This passage is cited by Warner, note to p. 81, 1. 17, and Sir Henry Yule, "Mandeville" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as the only borrowing from Marco Polo in Mandeville, but there are others: the mark made by the crocodile's tail in the sand, details of the garden of the Assassins, etc.… The detail of the crocodile is not in Odoric, or in Vincent, as Warner notes on p. 98, 1, 4. Marco Polo does not make the statement about the sexes; see A. C. Moule and Paul Pelliot, Marco Polo: The Description of the World (London, 1938), I, 124-125, and, on the mark of the Crocodile's tail, I, 279.
17. Marco Polo also records miracles of this type, such as the moving of a mountain by prayer, and the existence of a church in which the roof is supported by pillars which do not touch the ground: Moule, I, 105-112, 144-146.
18. Cathay, II, 137. Pollard, p. 112.
19. Cathay, II, 114.
20. Cathay, II, 117, 142. On the importance of the Nestorians in China in the 13th and 14th centuries, see Budge, The Monks of Kûblâi Khân, pp. 36 ff.; and A. C. Moule, Christians in China befare the Year 1550 (London, 1930).
21. Cathay, II, 136.
22. Cathay, II, 171.
23. The Wonders of the East, trans. and ed. Sir Henry Yule, Hakluyt Soc., No. 31 (1863), p. 27. Friar Jordanus was in India just before Odoric.
24. Marignolli's Itinerary is translated in Yule's Cathay, III (Hakluyt Soc. 2d Ser. No. 37 for 1914), see p. 217; and see Warner's note to p. 83, 11. 17, 18.
25. Cathay, II, 140.
26. See Warner's note to p. 84, 1. 18. The Zoroastrians of India use the urine and ordure of the bull in their lustrations.
27. Moule, I, 371, 373; Cathay, II, 146-147.
28. Cathay, II, 164.
29. Marco Polo mentions these "castles" on the elephants of Zanzibar; Moule, I, 433; and of Tibet and India, I, 287.
30. Warner, in his note to p. 95, 1. 24, cites records of the similar behavior of fish. Many fish, such as salmon and carp, spawn in shallow water, and one species actually buries its eggs in the sand at high tide.
31. Cathay, II, 167. Odoric created them by combining what Marco Polo says about three different islands, "Necuveran," where the men behave like dogs (Moule, I, 377-378), and "Angerman," where the men have heads like mastiffs (Moule, I, 378), and "Maabar," where a miniature of the ox is worn on the forehead (Moule, I, 404); see Warner's note on p. 97, 1. 13.
32. Cathay, II, 176.
33. Cathay, III, 254-256.
34. Cathay, II, 24.…
35. Edited by M. R. James for the Roxburghe Club (1929). In his Introduction (p. 25), James gives a brief summary of the genre. The letter to the Emperor Hadrian is discussed also by E. Farel, "Une Source Latine de L'Histoire D'Alexandre: La Lettre sur les Merveilles de L'Inde," Romania, XLIII (1914), 199-215, 353-370. On Solinus and Aethicus see C. R. Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography (London, 1897-1906), I, 250 ff., and 360 ff.
36. Moule ed., I, 383-384.
37. Cathay, II, 169. Mandeville and Marco Polo, but not Odoric, say that the king uses the jewels "as our ladies wear paternosters."
38. Moule ed., I, 380. Jordanus says much the same, op. cit., p. 30.
39. Cathay, II, 187.
40. Ibid., p. 190.
41. Ibid., pp. 201-203.
42. Ibid., p. 207.
43. Ibid., p. 220.
44. Warner suggests confusion with the stone pantheros which was described as red and shining; note to p. 106, 1. 1. Letts (p. 66) cites Vincent of Beauvais, who mentions the sweet odor.
45. Cathay, II, 222.
46. Warner gives Carpini as the source; note to p. 108, 1. 5. Jordanus gives a similar account of the eating habits of the Persians, op. cit., p. 10.
47. See Warner's note on pp. 212-213, and Cathay, II, 240-241. Bot Odoric and Mandeville compare this lamb which grows on a tree to the barnacle goose.
48. Cathay, II, 244-245.
49. Ibid., 257-260. Mandeville changes the name of the Old Man from Marco Polo's Alaodin (Ala-ed-din), the name of the last leader of the Assassins of Persia, destroyed in 1256, to Gatholonabes, and the name of the place from Marco Polo's Mulecte and Odoric's Millestorte to Mistorak. A recent account of the assassins is C. E. Nowell, "The Old Man of the Mountain," Speculum, XXII (1947), 497-519. The name of the place was Alamut in the Mulihet Mountains, according to Rubruquis. The story of the assassins was well-known in Europe by Mandeville's time, but the legend of the garden paradise does not go back of Marco Polo in Europe and seems to be of oriental origin: F. M. Chambers, "The Troubadours and the Assassins," Modern Language Notes, LXIV (1949), 245-251.
50. Moule ed., I, 129. Lois Whitney, "The Literature of Travel in the 'Faerie Queene'," Modern Philology, XIX (1921-1922), 165, notes that the Romans de Bauduin de Sebourc has an account of the Old Man of the Mountain, out of Marco Polo, which includes the gold and azure palace and streams of claret, honey, and another wine.
51. … On traditions of the earthly and heavenly paradise see H. R. Patch, The Other World (Cambridge, Mass., 1950).
52. Odoric mentions briefly a fountain of water, two conduits, girls, and horses.
53. Earlier instances of singing metal birds are noted by Otto Söhring, "Werke bildender Kunst in altfranzösischen Epen," Romanische Forschungen, XII (1900), 582-586; and Frederic E. Sweet, in his edition of Johann von Konstanz, Die Minnelehre (Boston, n.d., ca. 1934), pp. lxxii-lxxiii.
54. Cathay, II, 266.
55. Ibid., p. 264. J. L. Lowes suggests that Odoric's valley derives from Marco Polo's account of the desert of Lop, or Gobi, where also strange, alluring music is mentioned: The Road to Xanadu, pp. 489-490, n. 4, and "The Dry Sea and the Carrenare."
56. Marco Polo puts it in the far north: Moule ed., I, 472-473. He attributes the darkness to magic employed to rob the natives of their furs. He says the Tartars get in and out by using mares, since they will return to their colts without guidance.
57. Cathay, II, 254. This Zoroastrian custom is still being reported: see Lt. Col. Ilia Tolstoy, "Across Tibet from India to China," National Geographic Magazine, XC (1946), 181. He does not mention the skulls.
58. Moule ed., 1, 40.
59. P. Paris suggested that Marco Polo's companion in prison, who wrote down his account of his travels, was Rusticiano, or Rustichello de Pisan, compiler of the Table ronde, and grandfather of Christine de Pisan: "Extrait d'une notice sur la relation originale de Marc-Pol, Vénitien," Journal Asiatique, 2d Ser, XII (Sept. 1833), 244-254, extracted from the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 1st Ser, XIX (1833), 23-31. L. F. Benedetto, Marco Polo: Il Milione (Florence, 1928), pp. xiii-xxxiii, has demonstrated the truth of this theory, and Moule and Pelliot, in their edition, accept the identification, 1, 40-43.
60. Note on p. 12, 1. 16.
61. Ibid. A discussion of Mandeville's source, with references to other discussions, is G. Huet's "La Légende de la Fille d'Hippocrate à Cos," Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des Chartes, LXXIX (1918), 45-59. Huet argues that it was a local legend at Cos.
62. Warner, note on p. 12, 1. 16.
63. It is reported in detail by Benedict of Peterborough, Roger of Hoveden, Gervase of Tilbury, Walter Map, and others. Warner's note on p. 14, 1. 6, gives references and also notes that the story figures in the Vulgate version of the Livre d'Artus. See also Hamelius' note, 11, 33-34.
64. Several hundred local legends of engulfed cities, monasteries, etc., were recorded by René Basset, "Les Villes Englouties," Revue des Traditions populaires, V-XXXIV (1890-1919). The cities are usually under lakes, and were often engulfed because of sins or curses, but none of the stories resembles Mandeville's significantly. H. M. Smyser, "The Engulfed Lucerna of the Pseudo-Turpin, " Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology, XV (1933), 49-73, summarizes Basset.
65. Warner, note on p. 4, 1. 16, says that the cross on the orb was blown down in 1317 and repaired in the same year. Boldensele does not mention the loss of the orb, nor does Bondelmonti in 1422. Stephen of Novgorod (1350), Zosimus (1420), and Clavijo (1403) describe it as still in place. Schiltberger (1427) repeats Mandeville's story, but he also tells Mandeville's story of the watching of the sparrowhawk, and several others of his fictions. His learned editor, evidently unaware of his debts to Mandeville, has some amusingly puzzled notes on these points: see The Bondage and Travels of Johann Schiltberger, trans. J. Buchan Telfer with notes by P. Bruun, Hakluyt Society, Vol. 58 (1879), Chaps. 30, 31, 38, and 57, with the note on pp. 228-229. Clavijo: Embassy to Tamerlane, 1403-1406, translated by Guy Le Strange, is in the Broadway Traveler Series (London, 1928), see p. 72. Robert Fazy, "Jehan de Mandeville: Ses Voyages et son séjour discuté en Egypte," Asiatische Studien, 1-4 (1950), 30-54, argues that this and other details of the account of the Near East are authentic and show that Mandeville had been there.
66. C. Meredith-Jones, Historia Karoli Magni et Rotholandi ou Chronique du Pseudo-Turpin (Paris, 1936), Chap. IV, pp. 100-102; R. N. Walpole, Philip Mouskés and the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle (Berkeley, 1947), pp. 327-433, provides a source study; and another text in "The Burgundian Translation of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle in Bibliothèque Nationale (French MS. 25438)," Romance Philology, 11 (1949), 177-215; also edited by H. M. Smyser, The Pseudo-Turpin, Mediaeval Academy of America Publications, 30 (1937), see p. 60 and p. 20 and note.
67. Note on p. 11, 1. 16.
68. See Chap. 31 of the Polyhistor, ed. Th. Mommsen (Berolini, 1864); or A. Golding's translation (London, 1587), Chap. 34.