SOURCE: "The Times," in Sir John Mandeville: The Man and His Books, The Batchworth Press, 1949, pp. 23-40.

[In the excerpt below, Letts describes the historical context in which Mandeville wrote and remarks on his critical reception and influence on other writers.]

Before we come to the journey itself, it may be well to sketch in outline the historical background against which Mandeville lived and wrote. During practically the whole period covered by the so-called travels England and France were at war. The Hundred Years' War broke out in 1338. Crécy was won in 1346, Calais was taken in 1347, and at Poitiers, in 1356, the French King was taken prisoner. Mandeville speaks in his Epilogue of the destruction and slaughter and the accumulations of evils produced by the war, and of the two kings having made peace, but writing, as he appears to have done, in his library at Liége, the struggle, under God's protection, left him untouched. Liége cannot, however, have been always a haven of rest. The town went through much the same domestic upheavals as other Flemish towns, and local disturbances must have figured largely in the daily life of the people, even if they left our author in peace.

During the whole of the century the hope of recovering the Holy Land was never absent from men's minds. The Crusade of 1270 led by Louis IX of France had ended in disaster, and Mandeville, like others, must have viewed the growing power of Islam with dismay. He refers again and again to the need for a new crusading spirit, but he realised that, unless Christian princes composed their differences and presented a united front with the Church, there was no hope of success. The Holy Land was lost by sin and could only be recovered by righteousness. But quite apart from the quarrels of princes, the affairs of the Church were in such disorder that no joint effort was possible. Between 1305 and 1378 the popes were at Avignon. The Franciscans were demanding evangelical poverty for the pope and all churchmen. They denounced the wealth and splendour of the papal court and were preparing the way for Wycliffe. Mandeville makes no effort to conceal his feelings about the papacy, but he was probably only reflecting the views of thousands of others. There is no reason to believe that his anti-papal feelings affected his general outlook or disturbed his peace of mind.

There was one event, however, which must have gravely affected our author's tranquility—the Black Death, which decimated Europe from 1347 onwards. There is no reference to this in the 'Travels,' but Mandeville, alias de Bourgogne, lived through it. He speaks of himself in his de Pestilentia as having practised medicine for forty years, and refers to his experiences at Liége during one outbreak which raged there in 1356.

Mandeville knew what he was doing when he sat down to write a book of travels, for during the first part of the fourteenth century, travel was in the air.¹ The Polos had returned to Venice in 1295 from their long sojourn in Asia, and for the next fifty years, that is roughly between 1290 and 1340, a steady stream of travellers took the eastern road. The Tartar conquests of the first part of the thirteenth century had accomplished one of the most striking revolutions in history, by bringing the East into touch with the West. In 1214 the Tartars swept from Mongolia upon China, taking Peking and conquering most of Eastern Asia. They then turned westward, spread across Asia and over a large part of Russia, into Poland, Hungary and Persia, so that by 1259 one empire extended from the Yellow River to the banks of the Danube, and from the Persian Gulf to Siberia. At first Europe was horror-struck by the invasion. It seemed as if the end of the world was at hand, and that Gog and Magog and the armies of anti-Christ had at last burst forth from their mountain fastnesses to destroy Christianity and overrun the whole world. Then, after much hesitation and confusion of mind, it dawned upon the West that, horrible and brutal as the conquerors were, they might be useful as allies in breaking down the power of Islam. The Tartars were known to be tolerant of all creeds. The first thing was to convert them to Christianity, and then, with their help, to recover the Holy land. It was a vain hope, but it produced a wave of missionary zeal which is one of the glories of the medieval Church—the episode of the missionary friars. There are few brighter or more romantic stories in history than the tale of the journeys, successes and failures of the Christian pioneers in Asia. But, although the best travel-books were written by missionaries—Mandeville makes use of two of them—the real impetus to travel was given by trade, and it was by the traderoutes that merchants took the road to Cathay. The journey must have been hazardous enough, according to modern ideas, but the merchants seem to have made light of it. They appear to have penetrated everywhere in the East. Luckily, we know a good deal about their journeys and the difficulties they had to face from the Pratica della Mercatura,² a kind of merchants' handbook, written about 1340 by Pegolotti, an agent of the great Florentine house of Bardi. The book deals with the trade between the Levant and the East, and describes the route from Tana to Peking, with all kinds of practical suggestions for the novice. He must let his beard grow and hire a dragoman at Tana. His servants must speak Kuman and he would be wise to take a Kuman woman with him if he wished to study his comfort, although comfort is a strange word to use when one realizes that the journey was likely to take some six or seven months (Mandeville says eleven or twelve months from Venice or Genoa to Cathay), travelling at times with ox-wagons, camel-carts and pack-asses, with only outlying and remote halting places for rest and refreshment. One of the most striking commentaries on medieval commercial intercourse is the statement by Pegolotti that the road from Tana to Peking was perfectly safe whether by day or night, but this must surely be an overstatement. Mandeville has several references to merchants, but he never makes light of their difficulties.

Mandeville's ideas of geography were those of his age. By his time geography had lost its character of a science and had become once more the subject of myth and fancy. In the Middle Ages there were two schools of geographical thought, the ecclesiastical or patristic, and the Arabic. The Arabs' approach to geography was scientific, speculative and progressive. The ecclesiastical outlook was traditional, stereotyped and hide-bound by authority, and it is with this school that we are concerned. The Fathers of the Church would have nothing to do with original thought. For them the Ptolemaic writings and the studies of Arabic geographers might never have existed. Nothing could be sanctioned which had not the authority of Holy Writ. This clerical hold on scholarship was responsible, among others, for two conspicuous features of medieval geography—the belief that Jerusalem was the centre of the earth—'I have set it in the midst of the nations' (Ezekiel V.5)— and the situation of the Earthly Paradise. Both the Earthly Paradise and Jerusalem as the centre of the earth figure largely in Mandeville, as they do in all the medieval picture maps, and in the pilgrim and other geographical literature of the Middle Ages.

Taken as a whole, Mandeville's world was a circle enclosing a sort of T-square. The east was at the top. Jerusalem was plumb in the centre. The Mediterranean sea straggles across the lower half, which was divided between Europe and Africa. The top was devoted to Asia, which was expanded to an enormous extent, and, as very little was known about it, the medieval mapmakers filled up the blanks with monsters and other strange creatures which they took from the Bible, Crusaders' tales and other sources. If we want to know what Mandeville's world looked like we have only to examine the great Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral which was made about 1300. The T-square fits into it perfectly. The Earthly Paradise is at the top. Jerusalem is in the centre, and here and there, particularly in Africa, are pictures of all the strange monsters described by Mandeville, with their idiosyncracies pithily set forth in crabbed Latin legends. I shall have more to say about this map later, but the resemblance between it and Mandeville's notion of geography is too marked to be overlooked.

Mandeville had no doubt that the world was round, that its circumference was 20,425 miles (or more) and that in the heart and midst of it was Jerusalem. There could be no doubt about this, for men could prove and shew it 'by a spear that is pight into the earth, upon the hour of midday, when it is equinox, that sheweth no shadow on no side,' which seems to imply that the Holy City was on the equator! Mandeville was concerned about the antipodes because of the suggestion (by the supporters of the flat-earth theory) that, if the earth were in fact a sphere, the men on the sides and lower surface would be living sideways or upside down, even if they did not fall off into space, and, if men could fall off the earth, there was no reason why the great globe itself (being so great and heavy) should not topple over into the void, which was of course unthinkable. 'But that may not be, and therefore saith our Lord God, Non time as me, qui suspendi terram ex nihilo.' Moreover, as Mandeville implies, if a man thinks he is walking upright he is in fact walking the right way up, as God meant him to do, and that is all that matters. As to the roundness of the earth, it was beyond all question, for in his youth Mandeville had heard tell of a worthy man who went so far by sea and land that he came at last to an island where, to his amazement, he heard a ploughman calling to his beasts in his own language. The traveller had encompassed the whole earth without knowing it.

To these observations the author adds some sensible remarks on the way in which astronomers apply mathematical reasoning to the mapping of the firmament and the earth. These observations, and his familiarity with the use of the astrolabe, suggest that he was not only abreast of, but actually at times in advance of, the scientific knowledge of his time. …

It is not easy to trace the development of modern criticism concerning Mandeville, and it is strange how the pendulum swings to and fro. An air of verisimilitude was undoubtedly given by the statement in the English versions that Mandeville, on his way home, submitted his book to the pope at Rome, and that the holy father approved of it, but this passage does not appear in any of the French manuscripts and is clearly an interpolation. For most contemporary readers the book had to rest on its own foundations, and as the marvels which Mandeville sets down as sober facts can be capped and even outrivalled by other writers—the author of Prester John's Letter, for instance—the reading public of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries probably swallowed their Mandeville whole. Bale, who published his Catalogue of British Writers in 1548, had no doubt about the authenticity of the 'Travels,' and his contemporary Leland (who died in 1552), goes even further, for he placed Mandeville above Macro Polo, Columbus, and Cortez and other travellers (nemo tarnen illorum tamdiu labori insistebat, quam noster Magnovillanus), and he compares Mandeville with Mithridates for his knowledge of foreign languages.³ Leland tells us that as a boy he heard much about Mandeville from an old man called Jordan, and that at Canterbury he had seen among the relics at Becket's shrine a crystal orb containing an apple, still undecayed—an offering, so he was told, from Mandeville himself.

Purchas⁴ thought Mandeville 'the greatest Asian Traveller that ever the World had,' and accused some other writer (probably a friar) of having stuffed his book full of fables. He placed Mandeville next (if next) to Marco Polo, and accused Odoric, who really was a great Asiatic traveller, of thieving from Mandeville, whereas in fact the substance of Mandeville's travels in India and Cathay was stolen without acknowledgement from Odoric. As we shall see, Mandeville, in his account of his adventures in the Valley Perilous, states that among his companions were two friars minor from Lombardy. The whole passage is worked up from Friar Odoric, and the reference to the two friars may well have been intended to anticipate a possible charge of plagiarism, and to suggest that Mandeville and Odoric travelled together. The result can be seen in a manuscript at Wolfenbüttel of the Liber de Terra Sancta, attributed to Odoric, which begins: 'Itinerarius fidelis fratris Oderici, socii militis Mandavil, per Indiam, licet hic prius et alter posterius peregrinationem suam descripsit.'⁵ As Sir George Warner points out, the friar is doubly wronged here by the assertion that Mandeville's work was written first, whereas Odoric's was written in 1330. It may be noted that in the Antwerp (Gouda) Latin edition of Mandeville, printed in 1485 (and reprinted in the first edition of Hakluyt), frequent references to Odoric have been inserted in the text, and the description of the Valley Perilous ends with a statement that Odoric did not suffer as much there as Mandeville. The whole subject is discussed later (p. 89).

But poor Odoric was to suffer still greater indignities at a later date. In the collection of travels called 'Astley's Voyages' published in 1745-7 Odoric's narrative is described as superficial and full of lies, and in the index he fares even worse, his name being entered as 'Odoric, Friar, Travels of, IV, 620. A great Liar.'

There is a curious Mandeville reference in the English translation of Estienne's Apology for Herodotus, 1607, by R. Carew. In his Introduction to the Reader, the translator writes: 'imagine not that thou hast either … Goularts Admiranda, or Wolfius his Memorabilia, or Torquemeda's Mandevile of Miracles, or any such rhapsodie of an indigested history.' This last reference is to the "Jardin de Flores Curiosas" by Antonio de Torquemada, 1570 translated by Ferdinando Walker as "The Spanish Mandevile of Miracles," 1600.'

But the English title is not quite fair either to the Spanish author or to Mandeville. The book is a curious but amusing hotch-potch of monsters, the vagaries of fortune, strange countries, dreams, spirits, witches and hags, mostly from Spanish sources, such as Robert Burton would have loved. There is a good deal about the Earthly Paradise, Cathay and Prester John. Mandeville is mentioned here and there, and we learn with interest, what Sir John does not tell us, that he received wages and a pension from the Great Chan, but most of the eastern stories come from Marco Polo. The translator seems to have done his work well and does not appear to have added anything of his own, nor is there anything in his Dedication to explain the title-page. All we can say is that he must have been reflecting the views of his contemporaries.

Neither Robert Burton nor Sir Thomas Browne subscribed to Purchas's opinion of Mandeville. The former dismisses Mandeville quite briefly as a liar.⁶ It does not appear from the list of Burton's books at the Bodleian and Christ Church that he even possessed a copy of the 'Travels.'⁷

Sir Thomas Browne says much the same but in more temperate language.⁸ The writer on Mandeville in Chalmer's Biographical Dictionary (1815), asserts that many things in the book, which were looked on as fabulous for a long time, had then been verified beyond all doubt, but giving up his giants of fifty feet high, there did not appear to be any very good reason why Sir John should not be believed in things that he relates from his own observation, and this seems to be the line taken generally in the eighteenth century. But it is difficult to know what is meant by personal observation. Mandeville claims in his Prologue to have visited all the countries he mentions, and the not infrequent interjections—'This I saw not': 'I was not there' and so on—imply that he saw and experienced whatever else he describes; but in Pollard's edition, containing 209 pages, I have counted only twenty-three specific personal statements—I saw, I dwelt, I came, I departed, I asked, and so on. And of these, one at least, the passage through the Valley Perilous, required a good deal of justification at the hands of the German translator, Velser, before it could be presented to his readers.⁹ Hugh Murray, in the early nineteenth century, was shrewd enough to realise that much of Mandeville was lifted from Odoric and others and had no hesitation in pronouncing the work to be pure and entire fabrication—'What he added of his own consists, I think, quite exclusive of monstrous lies.'¹⁰ We can cap this with a quotation from an old Play:¹¹

Drake was a didapper to Mandevill.
Candish and Hawkins, Frobisher, all our
  Voyagers
Went short of Mandevill.

But shortly after Murray's indictment an anonymous writer was busy compiling a long justification of Mandeville, which appeared in the Retrospective Review for 1821, vol.III, part II, p. 269. The writer protests in no uncertain terms against the great outcry of fraud which had been raised against Mandeville. There was no question of falsehood. All that could be charged against him was want of judgment. The writer's concluding words are worth quoting. 'The literature of the middle ages has scarcely a more entertaining and interesting subject; and to an Englishman it is doubly valuable, as establishing the title of his country to claim as its own the first example of the liberal and independent gentleman, travelling over the world in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge unsullied in his reputation; honored and respected wherever he went for his talents and personal accomplishments.' Curiously enough, this is much the line taken by Halliwell in his Introduction to the 1839 reprint of the 'Travels.' And so matters remained until the 1870's when Nicholson laid the foundations for a new approach to the whole subject in his letter to The Academy on 11 November, 1876. His subsequent letters appeared in that journal on 12 February, 1881 and 12 April, 1884.

But whether truth or fiction, Mandeville's influence on the literature of the sixteenth century was profound. Many of his stories and most of his monsters, as depicted by his artists, found their way into the Nuremberg Chronicle, and Münster's Cosmographia (1544). Like the Nuremberg Chronicle, Münster's book was extremely popular, there having been as many as forty-seven editions in seven languages before 1650.

Münster was a very learned person. He had 120 collaborators to help him in his work, and when he wrote there was already a considerable literature in existence with which he was perfectly familiar, and to which he could have turned for an accurate and sober account of late geographical discovery. But, so far as Asia, India and Africa are concerned, he made little use of this material. Instead, we have the old stories and pictures of cannibals, one-eyed, one-legged and headless men, Amazons, pigmies and Brahmans, dragons, unicorns, gold-digging ants and griffins. Münster does not mention Mandeville by name (he acknowledges his debt to Marco Polo and Haiton, the Armenian), but it was Mandeville who created the popular demand for stories of this kind, and it was a demand which had to be met.

There can be no doubt that this demand was increased by the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Eastward and westward by 1530, the route lay open to the Indies, and although the English at first had troubled little about conquest and the planting of colonies, the foreign press teemed with accounts of the New World and the East, and each returning traveller added something fresh. Münster's Cosmographia was abridged and translated into English in 1552, and in 1564 appeared a curious and interesting book which showed that the English were not to be outdone in the hue and cry after wonders and marvels. This was A Dialogue against the Fever pestilence by Wm. Bullein, a man of learning and a physician. Bullein had obviously read and studied Mandeville, Münster and any other books of travel he could come across, and he disliked and distrusted what he read—and a good many other things as well. But he did a very dangerous thing. He satirised travel literature as a whole.

The result, which Bullein cannot have foreseen, is that his book owed any popularity it may have had, not to his attacks on usury, lawyers, legacy-hunters and the Church of Rome, not even to his timely and suitable remarks on fresh air, diet, and herbs as remedies for the plague, but to the introduction into his dialogues of a traveller called Mendax, one of the most amusing and attractive liars in literature. The name Mendax, we learn, signifies 'in the Ethiope tongue, the name of a great Citie, the mother of holie religion and truth,' and once the reader has met Mendax his interest never flags. It would be out of place here to follow Mendax in his travels in the East, diverting as they are, but it is sufficient to say that, among other adventures, he was turned into a dog (only temporarily), whereas his boy, a gentleman of good house, and would have married with one Jone Trim, was so strongly bewitched that he was a dog still. Most of Mandeville's stories re-appear, including the loadstone rocks, which Mandeville saw afar off, but on which Mendax and his companions were wrecked, escaping with their lives but losing their treasure.

Mandeville has much to say about the Antipodes. It was reserved for Mendax to discover there, foot against foot, another England, where were 'Gaddes Hill, Stangate Hole, Newe Market Heath, like ours in all points,' with this exception that, whereas there one found honest men, here there were none at all. We read of dancing geese, of parrots playing chess with apes and discoursing in Greek or singing descant, of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba seen in a magic mirror, attended by 14,000 ladies, and a race of men who cast their skins like snakes: 'Marie,' says he, 'they were full of hooles.' Here we have lying reduced to a fine art, but what Bullein did not realise was that the English have always loved a good liar and that satire is a two-edged weapon. It is possible that his book actually increased the demand for tall stories instead of killing it. In any event Mandeville continued to sell. A popular English edition with wooducts appeared in 1568. In the eighteenth century the 'Travels' appeared as a chap-book. The sales went on all through the nineteenth century and its popularity has never waned, whereas Bullein's satire is now almost entirely forgotten.

Notes

1. On the whole subject see the brilliant chapter by the late Eileen Power, 'Routes to Cathay' in Travel and Travellers of the Middle Ages (1926), ed. Newton.
2. Extracts in Yule's Cathay and the Way Thither, Hakluyt Society, second ed. vol. III.
3. Bishop Tanner's Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica (1748), p. 505, quoted by Warner, p. 31.
4. His Pilgrimes (1625), reprint XI, pp. 188, 364.
5. Warner, p. 22. Cf. Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, II, p. 45, who refers to another MS at Mainz with the same opening statement.
6. Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Shilleto, II, p. 46. But then Burton also calls Marco Polo a liar.
7. Oxford Bibliographical Society, Proceedings, I pt. III, 1925, p. 224 ff.
8. 'Vulgar Errors,' in Works, ed. Wilkin, II, p. 236.
9. See below, p. 92.
10. Historical Account of Discoveries and Travels (1820), I, ch. iv.
11. Quoted by Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, III, p. 322.