[In the following essay, Haraszti provides an overview of Mandeville's Travels, remarking on the subjects treated in the account, the identity of its author, and the work's sources and textual history.]

At the Kreisler Sale held in New York on January 1949 the Boston Public Library acquired a number of extremely valuable fifteenth-century and other early printed books. One of the most valuable among them was a copy of the German translation of the Travels of John Mandeville—Reysen und Wanderschafften durch das Gelobte Land—printed by Anton Sorg in Augsburg in 1481.¹ This was believed to be the first appearance of the German text in print until Professor Schramm called attention to an earlier, undated edition by Sorg, probably printed in 1478, an imperfect copy of which he had discovered at Munich.²

The volume is printed in small folio format, comprising ninety-one unnumbered leaves. The type is that round Gothic characteristic of the work of most of the Augsburg printers. The text is illustrated by 117 woodcuts, each enclosed in a double border. Most of these measure 76 x 78 mm., but some, 74 x 118 mm. There are two full-page cuts, of the size of 118 x 197 mm. The first, which serves as frontispiece, represents a young knight with a sword on his left side and holding a banner in his right hand; through the open door a landscape with a church is visible, and above a scroll is inscribed "Johannes Montevilla," the Latin form of the author's name. The second large cut shows the Emperor of Cathay, seated at his table with his three wives, his scribes recording his words. In the Library's copy the first leaf with the frontispiece is supplied in facsimile; otherwise the copy is in excellent condition—the pages are clean, the woodcuts are uncolored, and the binding (oak-boards, half-covered with tooled leather) is original.

"I, John Mandeville, Knight," the narrative begins, "that was born in England, in the town of St. Albans, passed the sea in the year of our Lord Jesu Christ, 1322, in the day of St. Michael; and hitherto have been long time over the sea, and have seen and gone through many diverse lands, and many provinces and kingdoms and isles and have passed throughout Turkey, Armenia the little and the great; through Tartary, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Egypt the high and the low; through Lybia, Chaldea, and a great part of Ethiopia; through Amazonia, Ind the less and the more, a great part; and throughout many other Isles, that be about Ind; where dwell many diverse folks, and of diverse manners and laws, and of diverse shapes of men. Of which lands and isles I shall speak more plainly hereafter …"³ The work ends with the return of the knight, now suffering from gout and "artetykes," thirty-four years later. On his way back he visited the Pope, who absolved him of all that weighed on his conscience. "Amongst all," the author writes, "I shewed him this treatise, that I had made after information of men that knew of things that I had not seen myself, and also of marvels and customs that I had seen myself, as far as God would give me grace …" Upon his request, the Pope had the book examined by his council which proved it for true.

The marvels which Mandeville reported were remarkable indeed. He knew of giants thirty feet tall who ate nothing but raw flesh and fish; of people who had no heads and whose eyes were in their shoulders; of others who had a flat face, without nose and mouth; and of pygmies who could not speak but made signs to one another, and who lived by the smell of wild apples. Some islands were inhabited by a folk with horses' feet, or by evil women who had precious stones in their eyes, slaying men with their glances as do the basilisks. He could tell endless stories of the great Chan of Cathay—of his prodigious palace dubbed with precious stones and pearls; of his sumptuous private banquets and magnificent public feasts; of his journeys from country to country, riding in a chariot drawn by four elephants and accompanied by innumerable kings and lords. He could not miss, of course, gathering first-hand information about the Christian Emperor of the Inds, Prester John, who dwelled in the Isle of Pentexoire. Prester John's domains were full of splendor and abounded in all kinds of goods, but they also had deserts peopled with wild men who were horned and grunted like pigs. Mandeville passed through the whole length of the Empire. He drank of the Well of Youth at Polombe; descended into the Vale Perilous which was guarded by a horrible devil, and where the ground was strewn with gold, silver, and jewels. He had not visited the Earthly Paradise, the Garden of Eden, so modestly he told only what he had heard about it from wise men. In the islands of the Sea of Java he met hordes of vicious cannibals, yet in that sea was located also the Land of Faith. The happiness of the Isle of Bragman was marred by no thief, murderer, loose woman, or beggar; its people prized no wealth, but lived soberly and long. "And albeit that these folk," the English traveller observed, "have not the articles of our faith, natheles, for their good faith natural, and for their good intent, I trow fully that God loveth them." On the other island he found that the king was chosen not for his riches but for his good manners and could not doom any man to death without the assent of his councillors.

Of all the wonderful descriptions of the world, Mandeville's Travels was the most fabulous. It was natural, therefore, that it was read avidly by all the nations of the West. The blending of the personal element with the mass and variety of information added to the fascination of the book. The public of Marco Polo was limited compared with the multitudes who read Mandeville; and not one out of a thousand of his devotees ever heard of the voyages of William of Boldensele or of Odoric of Pordenone, whose narratives, taken over verbatim and then embellished by fables, constitute the larger portion of the Travels. Well over three hundred manuscripts of the work exist, and the fifteenth-century printed editions alone—in Latin, French, English, Dutch, German, and Italian—number at least thirty-five.

To be sure, the value of the work was questioned even by some of the earlier writers. Jean-Pierre Niceron, for instance, remarked in his Memoires of 1734 that the book was rare, which however, was no great loss, for it was "a mass of fables and little else." Yet Dibdin still spoke of Mandeville with his customary enthusiasm as "a venerable English author"; and J. O. Halliwell, in reprinting the 1725 English edition of the Cotton manuscript, regarded the suggestion that Mandeville might never have gone to the East at all but had compiled his book out of previous journals as a "wholly unjustifiable conclusion."

Mandeville's trustworthiness was first seriously attacked after the middle of the nineteenth century. In his Bibliographia Geographica Palaestinae, published at Leipzig in 1867, Titus Tobler explained the small number of the Latin editions by the fact that "the adventures and lying stories with which the author tried to win readers did not particularly appeal to learned people, and therefore in every country the work assumed the character of a folk-book." Finally Sir Henry Yule, an eminent geographer, and Edward B. Nicholson, librarian of the Bodleian, demolished all belief in Mandeville's veracity and good faith. In a joint article published in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in 1883, they called attention not only to Mandeville's dependence upon Boldensele and Friar Odoric, but also showed that the rest of his story was mainly taken from Vincent de Beauvais's Speculum Historiale and Naturale and from Voragine's Golden Legend. Since then the origin of every passage of the Travels has been investigated by two scholars working independently—Albert Bovenschen, of the University of Leipzig,⁴ and George F. Warner, of the British Museum.⁵ Indeed, with the exception of one or two sections, the entire work has been proved to be a patchwork of various narratives, a compendium of plagiarisms—a rank literary imposture.⁶

The first part of the Travels treats of the Holy Land and the routes to it, together with Egypt and Sinai. "If any of the matter was drawn from personal knowledge and observation," Warner writes, "it is contained within the first fifteen chapters only."⁷ It has been thought probable that Mandeville had really travelled as far as Palestine and Egypt, although the description of the route to Constantinople, through Hungary, has nothing in it of a personal nature. "Troweth not," the reader is warned, "that I will tell you all the towns and cities and castles that men shall go by, for then should I make too long a tale; but only some countries and most principal steads …"—and these latter were taken from the history of the First Crusade by Albert of Aix. In the chapter on Constantinople, which the author pretends to know intimately, he copied verbatim William of Boldensele, and in that on the routes from Constantinople to Jerusalem, the twelfth-century Latin Itineraries. The account of Egypt, for which no sources have been found, may be the most important part of the work. Mandeville claims to have spent a long time in the service of the Sultan, fighting in his war against the Bedouins. "And he would have married me full highly," he writes, "to a great prince's daughter, if I would have forsaken my law and my belief; but I thank God, I had no will to do it, for nothing that he behight me."⁸ Even Sir Henry Yule, among the first to brand Mandeville a "profound liar," saw here evidences of personal experience.

The larger part of the work, all that comes after Palestine, was appropriated from Friar Odoric and then from the Voyages of Joannes de Plano Carpini, Hayton (Hetoum) the Armenian, and other writers, the whole "swollen" with interpolated fables. Yet Mandeville never mentions Odoric; nor does he give any hint about his other sources. As to his use of Pliny, Solinus, Jerome, and Isidore of Seville, Dr. Warner remarks that he may have consulted these authorities directly or he may have derived his information from Vincent de Beauvais's excerpts.⁹

However, one should not deny Mandeville his due. He insists that Jerusalem is in the midst of the world, where a spear stuck into the earth has no shadow on shadow on either side at midday in the time of the equinox; yet some of his astronomical notions were correct. He knew that latitude could be ascertained by the observation of the lode-star, and that there were antipodes. "Men may well perceive," he wrote, "that the land and the sea be of round shape and form; for the part of the firmament sheweth in one country that sheweth not in another country. And men may well prove by experience and subtle compassment of wit, that if a man found passages by ships that would go to search the world, men might go by ship all about the world and above and beneath."¹⁰

The deceitfulness of the author, made even more obvious through his constant reiteration of minute personal knowledge, has led to doubts about the existence of Mandeville himself. The name is not rare in English records of the period; however, no connection of it with St. Albans has been discovered as yet. John Bale's catalogue of British writers, first published in 1548, contained a lengthy notice of Sir John Mandeville, but this was based entirely upon statements found in the work.¹¹ Mandeville's tomb at Liége has been described by several early historians, who note that he was a physician, died in 1372, and was also called "John with the Beard." The contemporary Liége chronicler Jean d'Outremeuse, however, offers the surprising information that there died in the city in that same year a certain Jean de Bourgogne "with the Beard," who on his deathbed had revealed himself to him as Jean de Mandeville, knight, seigneur of Montfort, lord of the isle of Campdi and Perouse, who, having killed a count, was forced to leave his country. It should be noted that, in the common Latin version, Mandeville relates that he met at Cairo, at the court of the Sultan, a venerable and skillful physician who was "sprung from our own parts"; and that long afterwards at Liége he wrote his Travels at the advice and with the help of the same man. It was by chance that they met again. Mandeville, confined by his gout, was treated by several physicians, in one of whom, "Master John with the Beard," he recognized his old acquaintance.

Dr. Warner suggests that the bearded doctor's real name was, and always had been Jean de Bourgogne; and that, "having written his book of travels under the assumed name of Mandeville, he was tempted by its success to secure himself a posthumous fame by reversing the facts and claiming as his veritable name that which was fictitious."¹² The same writer also found that there was in England a certain John de Bourgoyne, chamberlain to John de Mowbray, who in 1322, after the execution of his patron, was banished—the date agreeing with that of Mandeville's departure for his voyages.

The identification is based, admittedly, on mere speculation; and the problem is becoming more and more complicated by the discovery of new candidates. Thus more recently a John Mangevilayn has been put forward, a man who was similarly embroiled with Mowbray in Thomas of Lancaster's revolt. The name may be a variant of Magnevillaine, meaning "of Magneville"; and it has been pointed out that the Mandevilles, Earls of Essex, were originally styled "de Magneville." Endless variations of the name seem possible. The situation has been summed up with fairness by Dr. Warner:

The last word on the subject has doubtless not yet been spoken; but after all, now that the work is known for what it is, the question of its authorship is of greatly diminished importance. Whether it was written by a real or fictitious Mandeville, whether the Liége physician's story was more or less true or wholly false, or whether it was a mere invention by its reporter, the belief in the great English traveller who spent the best part of his life in wanderings through the known world from England to China and returned home in old age to write an account of them—this still lingering belief must be finally abandoned as an exploded myth. The Travels indeed remain, and it is to be hoped, will always be read, both for curiosity of matter and certain indefinable charm of style; but to quote them as possessing any authoritative character, and to count Sir John Mandeville among our English worthies as a foremost pioneer of travel and adventure is utterly unwarrantable.¹³

The prologue of the English version contained in the Cotton Manuscript (British Museum) ends with the assertion: "Ye shall understand, that I have put this book out of Latin into French, and translated it again out of French into English, that every man of my nation may understand it." The other prominent English version, that of the Egerton manuscript (also in the British Museum), has no such passage; but the French version from which it was derived states: "Know that I should have put this book into Latin to be more concise; but seeing that many understand Romance better than Latin, I have put it into Romance …" The priority of the French version was, indeed, conclusively proven from internal evidence by Carl Schönborn, who also made it clear that none of the Latin texts originated with Mandeville.¹⁴ In fact, there are no less than five distinct Latin versions, each with errors of its own and each pointing to a French original.¹⁵

The Cotton manuscript's ascription of the authorship of the English translation to Mandeville himself is without foundation. Both the Cotton and Egerton manuscripts, dating from 1410-1420, contain a number of glaring errors which prove that the translators often completely misunderstood their texts. (For example, the Cotton MS. renders montaignes as "hille of Aygnes" and signes du ciel as "swannes of heuene," and the Egerton Ms. calls ly Comainz—that, is, the "Cumani"— "comoun pople.") The seven other English manuscripts in the British Museum have a big gap, lacking a part of the section on Egypt as well as chapters on Sicily, Mount Sinai, and the Church of Saint Catherine. Dr.Warner assumed the existence of a similarly defective common ancestor of the Cotton and Egerton MSS., both of which, he thought, were filled out later from a complete French manuscript. On the other hand, J. Vogels, who was the first to compile a census of all the English manuscripts, maintained that the Cotton manuscript was the original English version, and that the Egerton manuscript, which made use also of a new Latin translation of the French text, was a mere reediting of it.¹⁶ In any case, the anonymous author, whoever he was, produced one of the earliest prose works in English.

The German version published by Sorg was made by Michel Velser (Michelfeld), probably a native of Bavaria. He must have finished his work before 1409, for there is a German manuscript in Munich which is dated of that year. Little is known of the translator, except that he had travelled in Italy, visiting Pavia and Genoa. He used a French text, which he faithfully followed, apart from a few abbreviations and explanatory sentences. The language is simple, yet indicative of an intimate understanding of the text. The manuscript has often been copied; in Munich alone there are five codices. It is illustrated with pictures which served as models for the woodcuts of the first printed edition.¹⁷ About the same time, Otto von Diemeringen, a prebendary of the cathedral of Metz in Lorraine, prepared another version, also based on a French original, which however omits many of Mandeville's adventures.¹⁸ This version was first printed at Basel, probably in 1481.¹⁹

Muther described the woodcuts as "naive," adding that the nudes are "not unskillfully depicted." Schreiber finds them "done with ability, and their engraving carefully executed," so that "the work occupies an important place among the Augsburg imprints of the period." He also notes that the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 copied many of the monsters and curious animals. This is, however, a mistake. Folio xii of the Chronicle contains twenty-one such pictures, none of which resembles the woodcuts of Mandeville. They are illustrations of stories of Pliny, Augustine, and Isidore—the common sources of inspiration of both the Chronicle and the Travels.

All the printed editions of Mandeville are extremely rare. The one issued by Sorg exists in two other copies in America.

Notes

1. Hain *10647; Muther 166; Schreiber 4798; Klebs 651.1; Stillwell M142; Schramm iv, 579-698.
2. Albert Schramm, Der Bilderschmuck der Frühdrucke, Leipzing 1921, 11.
3. Quoted from A. W. Pollard's version of the Cotton Manuscript in modern spelling, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, London 1915, 5. This epilogue is not included in the German text as printed by Sorg, which ends with the brief statement: "I Johannes de Montevilla … returned and had to rest because of my illness, although I would have gladly experienced more wonders; and I was away twelve years." The difference of the duration of the travels is especially noteworthy.
4. Die Quellen für die Reisebeschreibung des Johann von Mandeville, Berlin 1888.
5. The Buke of John Maundeuill, Printed for the Roxburghe Club, Westminister 1889.
6. Characteristically enough, C. Raymond Beazley's comprehensive work The Dawn of Modern Geography, Oxford 1897-1906, devotes only four pages to Mandeville as against 144 to Marco Polo and 37 to Odoric. "As a masterpiece of plagiarism," the author writes, "the work will always deserve attention; but, except for the student of geographical mythology and superstition, it has no importance in the history of Earth-Knowledge." (III, 320.)
7. Warner, op. cit., xv.
8. Pollard, op. cit., 24.
9. Warner, op. cit., xxiii.
10. Pollard, op. cit., 120.
11. Illustrium Majoris Britannae Scriptorum … Summarium, Ipswich 1548, f. 149b. An English translation was printed in the preface to the 1727 edition, and also reprinted by Halliwell.
12. Warner, op. cit., xxxix.
13. Warner, op. cit., xli.
14. Bibliographische Untersuchungen über die Reise-Beschreibung des Sir John Maundevile, Breslau 1840.
15. J. Vogels, Die Ungedruckten Lateinischen Versionen Mandeville's, Crefeld 1886. Quoted by Warner, op. cit., vi.
16. Handscriftliche Untersuchungen über die Englische Version Mandeville's Crefeld 1891, 35, 41. Yule and Nicholson regard Vogels's explanation "labored and improbable."
17. Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, Leipzig 1895, XXXIX, 576.
18. Francis Edward Sandbach, Handschriftliche Untersuchen über Otto von Diemeringen's Deutsche Bearbeitung der Reisenbeschreibung Mandeville's, Strassburg 1899, 7-8, enumerates eighteen such passages.
19. The annotation for No. 283 in the Fairfax Murray Catalogue is altogether confused: "Second (?) edition of the first German translation, by Otto von Diemeringen, canon of Metz cathedral, but it is not at all certain that it might not precede Sorg's edition of 1481 (Augsburg), considered the first, though it certainly seems more probable that the book was first published in Germany."