John Mandeville departs England with the encouragement of the king - BNF Fr2810 f141
This is the script of an episode that can be listened to here.
I’ll begin here with a quote, and a quote that is, appropriately enough, from a beginning. It goes like this:
“Because it has been a long time since there was a crusading expedition overseas, and because many men long to hear about that land and various countries nearby - and from that I take great pleasure and comfort - I, John Mandeville, knight, although I am not worthy, who was born in England in the town of St. Albans, set sail on Michaelmas Day in the year of Our Lord 1332 and have been abroad a long time since then. And I have seen and traversed so many kingdoms and lands and provinces and islands, and travelled through Turkey and Armenia the Lesser and the Greater, and Tartary, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, Libya, Chaldea, and most of Ethiopia, Amazonia, Upper India and Lower India, and through lots of islands near India, where many kinds of people live, of different customs and shapes… . And I shall describe a part of what each one is, according to how I remember it, especially for those who wish and intend to visit the holy city of Jerusalem and the holy places thereabouts. And I will tell you the route to take to get there, because I have travelled and ridden this way many times with numerous noble companions.”
End quote.
In his long winded way, the writer informed us of his intentions, to tell of the world and the people and places in it, most especially those in and around the holy land, and he provided us with his undeniably impressive qualifications. Why, he had been just about everywhere in his world-wanderings, on a journey he would later tell us took up thirty-four years of his life, and there were few travellers of his era who could compare.
And of course, he also told us who he was, but there we come to a bit of a sticking point. John Mandeville he says, a knight born in England near St. Albans, he says, but was there really such a person?
If he was not a knight, then what was he? If he did not go by that name at all, then who was he? Who had written the book? Had he really gone to all these places he said he had, so wonderfully widespread, and so brimming with headless men, monstrous snails, and supremely powerful priest-kings. When we consider all the material he’d drawn from other sources, had he really gone anywhere at all? On the other hand, with their concerns bundled up in ideas of authorship and authenticity, are the answers to these questions really so very important?
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that explores medieval history using the travellers that wound their way through it, whether they be crusader or envoy, merchant or friar.
At this point in the podcast I point out that the podcast is in large part supported by listeners like you on Patreon and that you can be part of that at patreon.com/humancircus. At this point I also want to thank my newest Patreon supporter, and today, that means sending out my gratitude to Jesse. Thank you very much!
And now, to the story.
With this episode, we’re embarking on a new story. It is, as you just heard, that of Sir John Mandeville and his Book of Marvels and Travels, following our ultimately unreliable narrator on a guided tour of pilgrimage from England to Jerusalem and then on into the lands beyond, into those of the Mongols and Prester John with their griffins, gems, and finery. He would, he claimed, serve an Egyptian sultan and a Mongol Khan. Unreliable it may be, but it’s never uninteresting.
We won’t quite be leaving on those travels just yet. We have some things to talk about first. And I should note before going any further that the translation I’ll be working with here is Anthony Bale’s, published in 2012.
Now, let’s set the scene.
It’s the early 14th-century. It is, if we listen to our guide and chronicler, 1332. To put that in perspective alongside some of our previous travellers, this is about 85 years after Friar Giovanni returned from his visit to Guyuk Khan and 77 after Friar William had come from his time with Mongke Khan. It’s been about 45 years since Rabban bar Sauma, born near present day Beijing, met with Pope Nicolas IV in Rome, nearly 40 since Marco Polo is said to have returned to Venice. And it will be about 60 years before Johann Schiltberger leaves his Bavarian home for crusade against the Ottomans, almost 100 before he comes home. In terms of travellers we haven’t quite yet gotten to, the Franciscan missionary Giovanni da Montecorvino had died as archbishop in the capital of Yuan China just 4 years earlier.
More broadly, recent decades had seen the establishment of the Avignon Papacy and the violent fall of the Knights Templar. Dante’s Divine Comedy had been published in the not so distant past, and tensions were increasing that would, in the very near future, bloom into the Hundred Years’ War. Joan of Arc was a long way off still, but the battles at Crecy, Poitiers, Calais, and elsewhere were not. The Black Death was just around the corner; Timur, aka Tamerlane, was just about to be born; Mansa Musa of Mali had just made his pilgrimage to Mecca.
In England, some of these events were really going to hit home - the Black Death, of course, and the Hundred Years’ War. More specifically, there had been the unpleasantries that had led to the killing of William Wallace and the defeat of rebellious forces from Scotland, Wales, and elsewhere. It had also seen the deaths of Edward I and II, and then the rise of Edward III, in 1332 just five years into a fifty year reign. Edward was king as Mandeville departed and he would be still when he came back.
And we can zoom in a little more, on the place Mandeville was born, on St. Albans itself, a Hertfordshire city some 20-25 miles northwest of London where Francis Bacon, Stephen Hawking, and Stanley Kubrick would all at one point live, where - as a semi-personal aside- author Micheal Morpurgo would live, and if you’ve ever taught middle grade novel studies that name might ring a bell for you. But before all of that, its Benedictine abbey would go through what has been called a “monastic renaissance.”
In just under 20 years, the coming of the Black Death to St. Albans would be devastating and kill nearly 50 monks and the abbot himself, but Mandeville’s date of departure put him in a happier time, one of rich intellectual activity. And it was a good place, an appropriate place for a book like Mandeville’s to be produced, a far-roaming text that looked well beyond the confines of that English abbey. It was the place where Matthew Paris had spent the first half of the 13th-century chronicling not just the goings-on of contemporary England but world history too, where he’d mapped among other things an itinerary to the Holy Land, and where he’d written of everything from Henry III’s elephant to the way the Mongol invasions of the Rus had affected Yarmouth’s herring sales. St. Albans was in other words a highly appropriate place to be associated with this text, said to have been written in 1356 or 57.
By the end of the century, Henrique of Portugal would be born, the man you may know as Henry the Navigator for his sponsorship of so many exploratory voyages and all the consequences those would bring. And as I’ve already alluded to, western Europeans were already in China.
And out into that interconnected medieval world went Mandeville, out he went from St. Albans, a good choice for departing on a worldly adventure … or writing about one … or simply selecting as a convenient fictional setting. And I suppose we should get into that awkward question of authorship now, into the question: Was there really a Sir John of Mandeville, knight from St. Albans, England?
The answer, it seems, is no, there was not, and this despite his having apparently had a tomb at St. Albans cathedral .... more than one even, with the other at Liege, despite the relics that are attached to his name - some rings at St. Albans, an item at Canterbury, some fragments of aloe wood said to have been brought home from his journey, despite the immense popularity of the work. And this last point deserves dwelling on.
By the late 1400s the book would be read in Latin, Danish, German, Italian, Czech, French, Flemish, Castilian, and Aragonese, among others. It’s popularity would be attested to by the simple fact that some 300 manuscripts of it survive, and if that doesn’t sound like a great deal, know that Chuacer’s Canterbury Tales survive in about 80 manuscripts, Marco Polo’s travels in about 70, and Gawain and the Green Knight comes down to us only in a single manuscript. So it’s safe to say that happy accidents and turns of misfortune aside, the numbers here represent a quantifiable popularity. The book had an impact.
As M. C. Seymour informs us, it was, by the 1360s, “part of the staple of the Parisian stationers.” Its range of owners included a Yorkshire rector, the Bolton Augustinians, and Richard Lee, a member of the London Grocers’ Guild, and it was also reaching an elite audience, reaching King Charles V of France, given by Jean the Fearless to the Duke of Berry, and in ownership of King Edward III’s son, Thomas, Duke of Gloucester. It would meet with further success in print, and new editions would be produced in new languages, taking on changes as they went. They would reach an audience that was reshaping the world.
Mandeville would be used as a source for the Catalan Atlas in 1375, probably also for the Andrea Bianco map of 1434, and definitely for the Nuremberg globe of 1492. A copy of Mandeville would be owned by Cristopher Columbus, for whom it along with Marco Polo may have defined “the East” he thought he was reaching, and it would be quoted by Walter Raleigh.
But as I said, for all of this, it seems that there was no St. Albans born John Mandeville, knight of England, serial drinker from the Fountain of Life, and military servant to distant rulers. So who was the author?
As to that question, there’s long been some disagreement. One name connected to the text is that of Jean Bourgogne, a physician from Liege. He was said to have admitted as much on his deathbed to the historian Jean d’Outremeuse and to have further claimed to have once been forced to flee from England after killing a noble. For a time, Outremeuse was taken to be the real author, but he appears only to have written a later version. There has been a suggestion in Christiane Deluz’s book on Mandeville that Liege is where we should look, that the Mandeville author was likely an Englishman living there in the 1350s, while another theory has it that the monk and writer Jean le Longue of Ypres might have been responsible, his work in translating a number of travel accounts, Marco Polo’s among them, making him a very appealing candidate. His skills with Latin however, don’t seem to have fit with those of the Mandeville writer.
Rounding out these theories, it should be mentioned that there is actually a man named, wait for it, John Mandeville, a man from Hertfordshire who had called upon Isabelle of France at Hertford Castle, quite close to St. Albans, with a pair of deer in the Christmas of 1357. Though not a knight, he appears to have been around at the right time and place, having come back from France the year before, and had the right name obviously. But this attribution is uncertain. It’s all uncertain and is likely to remain so, so let’s accept that uncertainty and move on to what the author accomplished.
The Mandeville text is something of a collage that sits awkwardly alongside our own ideas of authenticity and plagiarism. Its author claims the knowledge and experiences of others as their own. It makes heavy use of the Franciscan Odoric of Pordenone’s writings and of the Dominican William of Boldensele’s, on the latter basing a lot of the material for the holy sites of the holy land, and on the former the stories of wonders farther east. But it also shows familiarity with a much broader reading than just these. As Anthony Bale points out in his introduction to the edition I’m using, the author seems to have consulted authorities such as the 6th and 7th century scholar, Isidore of Seville, and the earlier historians Orosius and Josephus, as well as the more recent works including that of Vincent of Beauvais. Material is sourced from the Bible, the Alexander Romances, The Letter of Prester John, and a work of early 13th-century science by John of Holywood, among others. Even if it remains an open question as to how widely-travelled this writer really was, that they were widely-read seems beyond dispute.
Out of this material, the author crafted a work of lasting influence and popularity, something that could be read as a travel itinerary and also as an instrument of pilgrimage to be contemplated by those who could not make the physical journey themselves, something that could be read as a call to crusade and also as a geography of wonders, of marvelous and monstrous places and races with serious theological implications.
And after this quick break we’ll get into those stories. We’ll put aside this introduction and begin the journey to the Holy Land.
…
Quote:
“First, if someone sets out from the western side of the world - that is, England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Norway - they may, if they like, go through Germany and through the kingdom of Hungary which borders the land of Poland and the lands of Pannonia and of Silesia.”
So begins the journey east, the author having already said he would not be listing every last one of the cities and castles one would pass. He notes the power of the King of Hungary, his vast realms with their many peoples. He notes how huge is the Danube, its mighty waters fed by some forty other rivers, flowing “from beneath the hills of Lombardy,” running “through Hungary, Greece, and Thrace, and enter[ing] the sea with such strength and in such a tumult that the sea-water there is fresh within twenty miles.”
One carries on through Belgrade, crossing the stone bridge over the River Maritsa, passing into the lands of the Pechenegs, a Turkic nation that had moved into Byzantine territory in the 9th century. You enter Greece, see the cities of Sternes and Philippopolis - now the Bulgarian cities of Sofia and Plovdiv; you reach Adrianople, now Turkish Edirne and then about three decades from being taken by Ottoman Sultan Murad I. Next is Constantinople, and our guide - we may as well just call him Mandeville rather than “the author” - has quite a bit more to say about that.
He writes of seeing the finest and most beautiful church in the world, and before it the figure of Justinian, mounted and crowned atop a marble pillar, its hand now having lost the apple it once held, just as the emperor had lost much of his empire. And just as the Byzantine efforts to recover the lost territories had failed, attempts to replace the apple in the hand had proven impossible.
In that city was a catalogue of relics, though this being after the Fourth Crusade, a little shorter list than it had been. Much, Mandeville tells us, was now in the king’s chapel in France. Still, he says, there was a sponge and reed from which Christ had drank, one of the nails from the cross, a spear-head, said to be to one that had pierced Christ’s side - though there were competing claims - and a piece of the crown, not of thorns, but of sea-rushes. And here our author pipes up to claim that he has a fragment of one of these rushes, the crown constantly shedding when it was moved about to be displayed to distinguished visitors.
And there was something else too, a relic held to be much older even than the crown. That was the sheet of gold found atop a body buried below the Church of Sophia, and on it the prophetic words, in Heberew, Greek, and Latin, “Jesus Christ shall be born of the Virgin Mary and I believe in him,” and a date of around 2,000 years B.C. The body was said to be that of Hermes Trismegistus, the “thrice-great” father of Hermeticism.
Mandeville says of Constantinople that it is “a very beautiful and great city with strong walls and it is three cornered.” It’s imperial palace is lovely, as is its court for jousting where the horses are housed under marble columns beneath the seats. “There is a strait of the sea that people call the Hellespont, and some call it Constantinople’s Mouth, and some call it St George’s Arm.” Above rise the mountains Olympus and Athos, the latter reaching such heights that no animals can live there in its pure, dry air. Further up the coast, he says, “is where the great city of Troy used to be, on a beautiful plain, but that city was destroyed by the Greeks.”
For Mandeville, this part of the world is alive with the doings of the Ancient Greeks and Macedonians, with those of Alexander, with the great feasts and councils held at the altar of Aristotle’s tomb in Stagira, where it was hoped that God or Aristotle might inspire them to better judgement.
As for Mandeville’s present-day Greeks, he speaks of their religion, which, he notes, was not that of his assumed audience. “Even though it is true that all people in the land of Greece are Christian,” he says, “it’s a very different faith from ours.”
Supporting this statement is a rapid run through of practices and beliefs within the Greek Orthodox church, covering the marriage of priests, the crucial nature of beards, the absence of a purgatory, and of course, the refusal to yield to Rome. My favourite detail here, apparently unsupported by documentary evidence, is a response - and it’s not entirely clear whose response, perhaps a patriarch’s - to overtures from Pope John XXII.
Quote:
“We confidently believe that you have great power over your subjects. We will not tolerate your great arrogance. We do not propose to satisfy your avarice. May the Lord be with you, because the Lord is with us. Goodbye.”
Goodbye, indeed, and so Mandeville says goodbye to Constantinople and its lands, and we continue on our journey with possibilities opening before us: the way by land, going first towards Nicaea, or by water, first the waters of what Mandeville calls St. George’s Arm and you may know better as the Dardanelles or the Hellespont. We’ll take the latter and enter the Aegean Sea, heading south toward Chios, with its little mastic trees, and on to Patmos, where St. John was said to have received his visions and recorded the Apocalypse.
The way is filled with such things, what with Ephesus, where the saint made his grave while still alive and where the ground still stirs around his tomb as if the body below is ever prepared to rise with the Day of Judgement, where Paul too is associated. There’s Patara, where St. Nicholas was born, and Myra, where he was made bishop and where the rich, strong Myran wine was made. And then, with quite a different legacy in the book, there’s the island of Lango, where Hippocrates, the “father of medicine” once ruled, and where Mandeville sets one of his more fantastical tales. It goes like this.
There on Lango lives Hippocrates’ daughter. She has not taken after her father, and I don’t just mean that she is not looked to as a founding figure in medical studies or that we do not evoke her name in an ethical oath for physicians. The more fundamental difference is that she takes the form of a hundred foot dragon, or so it is said; Mandeville admits he has not seen this himself.
The dragon lives in a cave within an old castle, keeping pretty much to herself and only revealing herself three times a year. It’s said she had been transformed into her monstrous form by the goddess Diana. It’s said, in a very familiar piece of plotting, that she waits to be kissed by a knight brave enough to do so, and that this will transform her back to her original state, though not for very long, as it’s also said she will die soon after.
So what knight would answer such a challenge? Apparently one had quite recently, a hospitaller of Rhodes - or in some versions a templar - who had bravely ridden up to the castle and into the cave. But when the dragon had raised her head towards him, he had recoiled from her hideous appearance and not quite so bravely run away. The hospitaller had fled for his life in horror, but the dragon had pursued her would-be suitor, plucked him from his mount, flown him up to rock overlooking the sea, and cast him down to his death. It was not a situation for those who lacked commitment.
On another occasion, a young man who knew nothing of any such dragons or enchanted women, happened to wander from his ship, and to roam about the island until he came upon that castle. He found his way in, into the cave inside, and into a bedroom, where he saw a woman who sat surrounded by treasure. He was wary at first, thinking it a trap, but when she saw him reflected in the mirror and turned to him, he forgot his misgivings entirely.
This time the suitor was informed that he could not be the woman’s lover, not yet, for he was not a knight. He should go away and become one and then come back. He should come up to the cave the next morning at which point she would come out and ask for a kiss, and he would become lord of the islands and all their treasures. Her instructions were very clear. There was, she stressed, some chance that he might find her quite disturbing to look upon, but he shouldn’t worry as however she appeared, that was just the work of magic and the reality was indeed as he saw it just then. He should not, she insisted, be afraid.
So the young man went away with all he needed to do in his head. He went away to his ship, and, though it’s not clear how he arranged it so quickly, he became a knight, getting that necessary bit of business out of the way. And in the morning, as directed, he returned to the cave ready to receive land, lordship, and the company of the woman he’d left there the day before.
But despite her warnings, he was not ready for the sight of her emerging in her dragon form, and like the hospitaller before him, he turned and ran. Again, she pursued, but this time, seeing that he would not be coming back, she simply wept and went back. The newly knighted man, though this time not thrown to the sea, still, somehow, died immediately, and the woman, still under her curse, re-entered her cave. There, Mandeville, tells us, she remains.
The story is not entirely a unique one. It has many similarities to the tradition of Melusine legends with their serpentine character marrying into nobility, and we come across something very similar in the story of Sparrow Hawk Castle found in the early 15th-century Travels of Johann Schiltberger, the subject of my first run of episodes. And this is not the only familiar story to be found in the region.
Once we’ve left Lango, it’s on to Rhodes with its Hospitallers, and to Cyprus with its lovely grapes, the whitest being “utterly translucent and hav[ing] the best scent,” and its fine cities; Famagusta is picked out for its excellent harbour and people of many nations. We read of the births of saints such as Bernard and Sozomenos and of customs such as dining while seated on the ground and hunting with large cats, larger than lions apparently and better hunters than hounds. And we also get a version of a story we’ve covered before on this podcast, one I told a few episodes ago with Walter Map’s cobbler of Constantinople. There are differences though.
In Map’s rendition, we watched the cobbler’s character increasingly twisted in pursuit of a woman until the child he produced with her corpse, not so much a child as a gorgon head, became a terrifyingly effective weapon with which he devastated all who opposed him. Here, more than a century after Map’s death, we learn that a young man’s excessive affections for his deceased beloved did not result in something he would use as a warlord. Instead, after the 9 months had passed, the head flew forth from the grave and circled the city of Attaleia, submerging it entirely and making sea-crossings in the area even more perilous than before.
It’s worth noting that Attaleia was really doing just fine as the Mandeville author recorded this, and still is actually.
But details aside, we’re getting close to our initial destination now, and so is our St. Albans born knight of England. If the wind is with you, it’s a day and a night to the reportedly ruby scattered shores of Tyre, to where the cathedral once stood and to what had been a formidable crusader stronghold on the coast but had fallen to the Mamluks in 1291.
Locations here are situated in their Christian historical context. We read that at Tyre there was a rock where Jesus sat and preached, a woman who said to him “Blessed is the womb that bore thee,” and a well described in the Song of Songs as “The fountain of gardens and the well of living waters.”
Further down the coast you go, past Acre which had also been taken by Mamluks in 1291, and into Jaffa, “the oldest town in the world,” Mandeville tells us, “constructed before Noah’s flood,” and then named after Japheth, his son. It’s the nearest port to Jerusalem, only a day and a half’s travel away, and I’ll let Mandeville describe that last stretch of the journey.
Quote:
“From Jaffa one travels a short distance to Ramleh, a beautiful city. Near that city is a fair church dedicated to Our Lady, where Our Lord revealed Himself to her in three shadows signifying the Trinity. Also nearby is a church dedicated to St George, where his head was chopped off, and then on to the castle of Emmaus, and then on to Mount Joy, from which many pilgrims first see Jerusalem, and then to Mount Modein, and then into Jerusalem.”
And that’s where we’ll leave our traveller today, not yet mixing with dog-headed men or anything of that sort, not quite yet inside of Jerusalem. Next episode, we’ll get to that, and we’ll journey with Mandeville into Egypt.
If you’re listening on the extended Patreon feed, then do please keep listening. Otherwise, I’ll be back soon, but likely not pre-Christmas, so I’ll say happy holidays now. Thank you all for listening to my little project this year. I’ll be back in the new year with more Mandeville and more medieval travels.