Detail from Add. MS 18866, a Mamluk manual on horsemanship
Today, after our one episode delay, where I lingered overlong in Jerusalem, saw the sights that a 14th century Mandevillian figure might see, and also pushed past recording with a head cold, and with mixed results, we’re going to Egypt. We’re going to talk about Mamluks a little, renowned balsam gardens, mind-blowing eggs, Joseph’s barns, all the usual Egyptian things. The stuff one wrote of when one wrote of Egypt in a Latin-Christian travel narrative in the 14th century, whether you were indeed making the trip yourself or, as in our case, weaving a well-read tapestry from those who had been before, combining the observations of travellers separated by decades into one moment adrift in time, a kind of 13th through 14th century collage with a Mamluk sultan sitting there as something solid to hang its coat on.
There is not, as I’m sure you’ve picked up on over the last two episodes, and honestly is often the case with medieval accounts, any strong sense of a story here as the modern reader might expect. Its protagonist is not actually “doing things” with any great regularity. Rather, those ostensibly autobiographical elements just peak above the surface every now and then, reminding us that Mandeville is there.
There is one scene that stands out in this section from the others, one that brings together the figure of that Mamluk sultan with our text’s English knight. It’s one that raises the question of religion, and it allows us to examine the author’s views and framing of the topic, his intentions, and his beliefs about the world. But we’ll not get into that just yet.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that trots through the middle ages on the heels of its travellers. And at this point I’d like to point out to you that the podcast is on Patreon. I cannot confirm rumours that after signing up the air will taste cleaner, the coffee more juicy, that strangers will regard you with new respect and admiration, that financial success will be sudden and joyful, or that your avocados will always be at just the right stage of ripeness. All of that is strictly hearsay. But you can find out all about it yourself by way of my website at humancircuspodcast.com or by going directly to Patreon.com/humancircus, where I just posted a members only episode combining a thank-you with a story of fleeing from the Mongols. And speaking of thank-yous, I want to send out my gratitude to fellow travelers Adam Boardman, Juan Alvarez, and Luke Ferguson for coming aboard. Thank you each and all very much.
And now, the story. Let’s start with Egypt, with early-to-mid-14th-century Egypt, solidly in the grip of Mamluk rule.
We have met the Mamluks before on this podcast, though at a kind of distance. There’s been mention of their ending of Ayyubid rule in Egypt when I was finishing up with Salah ad-Din, repeated allusions to their largely successful opposition to the Mongols, and in the Rabban bar Sawma series, we saw them as the rivals against whom the Ilkhan was attempting to organize an alliance with Latin Christian leaders, saw how that attempt played out.
But what was the Mamluk Sultanate? What was this formidable power that had risen from the ashes of the Ayyubids to somehow see off both Mongol and crusader threats? Or perhaps best first to clarify: what was a mamluk?
The mamluks were non-muslims enslaved for military or administrative service. They were men that had generally been taken as children and then trained and educated, many of them shaped into members of formidable cavalry force and over time often given rank, power, and freedom. They were not to be taken from among Egyptian or Syrian Muslims. They were Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Circassians and others that could become anything from military leaders to personal attendants, administrators, or governors. The system carried the potential of raising them to these great heights, but it was still one that relied on separating boys from their families, shipping them off great distances, and forcing them into training and service, not an easy life.
While up until the early 13th century the other end of that system had seen boys brought across from Central Asia and the Caucasus, Ilkhanid dominance of the land routes had become a problem, a problem for some but an opportunity for others and one that the merchants of Genoa would seize upon. Working under arrangements with the Golden Horde Mongols, they brought enslaved men by ship from Crimea across the Black Sea, through the Bosphorus, and via the Mediterranean to Egypt. Then, just about the time of Mandeville’s quote/unquote visit to Egypt this sea route faded in importance with new realities on the ground: the defeat of the crusader threat, the fading of an Ilkhanid one, the reopening of the old land-routes. The paths shifted, and still, the enslaved came to Egypt.
In the Egyptian context, the Mamluks made up the forces that the Ayyubid sultans had increasingly relied on. The founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, Salah ad-Din, did not place many in positions of great power - looking at fifteen of his more prominent emirs only one of them was one of his Mamluks - but in the dynasty that followed him, a dynasty that I raced through in the concluding episode to my Salah ad-Din series, their importance increased. Their prestige and power grew, but though their loyalty is often noted, it was not always transferable loyalty. The sultan’s son did not always get the favour of his father’s troops and their commanders, and, to be fair, those sons often didn’t do much to earn it. Quite the opposite, for they wanted their own people in places of power. And that’s understandable in itself, but maybe if they’d looked more to win over their forebears’ men, to make them into their own people, maybe things would have been different.
You also, and this is something I touched on in that previous episode, you also had a situation in which the mamluks had little reason for larger Ayyubid familial loyalties. That just wasn’t baked into the Ayyubid bread. These people had often been fighting against the rulers’ family members with some regularity. Why, when he died, would we expect them to feel much love for his kin.
By the time Mandeville comes along, the Mamluk leadership have been intimately involved in the infighting-laden decline of the Ayyubids. They’ve been caught up in killing one or two and struggling in factions against one another for power and influence. The end of the Ayyubids is not a tidy thing - there’s the slaying of the unfit Sultan Turan Shah, the fairly brief rule of his mother Shajar ad-Durr, and a time of co-sultanhood, if in name only, for the young Al-Ashraf Musa, but by the mid-13th century, the Mamluks had established themselves as their own distinct sultanate. Or maybe we should say two sultanates. You’ll see it divided sometimes between a Bahri Dynasty of Kipchak Turks and then a Burji one of sultans drawn from Crimea and the Caucasus, with the year 1382 often provided as a neatly dividing date, though there’s some suggestion that the matter was not so clear cut as that in terms of origins.
Mandeville’s stated date of departure, 1332 for whatever it’s worth, would put his arrival in Egypt squarely in the third reign of an-Nasir Muhammad, the son of a man often referred to as al-Alfi, the thousander, for the price an Ayyubid ruler was said to have paid for him. An-Nasir had first been sultan at 9 years old before being pushed aside; then again at 14 years old, before removing himself from Cairo at the age of 24 to gather strength against the powers behind his throne; and then finally, less than a year later, took and wielded true and lasting power during a 3 decade reign. Eight of an-Nasir’s sons and four of his grandsons would sit as Sultan in Egypt, and that does sound very impressive at first but then doesn’t really speak well to the staying power of any of the eight sons as successful rulers. It’s never really a good sign if you can cram eight members of the same generation onto a throne, but as for An-Nasir himself, he presided over a golden age for Cairo, one in which the city’s population reached half a million, making it one of the world’s largest.
So that’s maybe who we could think of when we read this section of Mandeville, a name and face to keep in mind. I say “could” though because of course we can’t really take that date of departure at anything like face value. We’d need to first consider the sources which the Mandeville author used in writing the section, look to Jacques de Vitry’s 1218 Historia, the writings of the Dominican William of Tripoli, active in Acre in the 1270s, to William of Boldensele’s early 1330s travels in Egypt, and Hayton the Armenian’s circa 1300 Flower of the Histories of the East. Then there’s that 1332 date to think about and also the thought that the text was likely written around 1350. You add it all up, and you think, when is Mandeville?
Whoever was sultan of Mandeville’s Egypt, their territories would have encompassed all that we touched on last episode around the holy sites of the holy land, and down south along both coasts of the Red Sea. Or, as the text puts it:
“... the sultan rules over five kingdoms, which he has conquered and gained by force; these are: Egypt; the kingdom of Jerusalem, of which David and Solomon were kings; the kingdom of Syria, of which the city of Damascus was the capital; the kingdom of Aleppo in the land of Damietta; and the kingdom of Arabia, of which one of the three kings who presented a gift to our newborn Lord was king.”
Let’s go now to Egypt, a land with the Red Sea on the one side, the heat of Libya on the other, great deserts to the north into Syria, and to the south Ethiopia. So, the text tells us, “the country is formidable on every side,” leaving out any mention of what makes Ethiopia so, or indeed any acknowledgement of the busy Mediterranean ports. Still, it maintains, the place is formidable; it requires “only a few castles because the country is strong enough by itself.”
Let’s make the journey as the text suggests, from Gaza “overland to Babylon, where the Sultan lives.” We know that we’ll need his permission, his promise of safe passage. We know that we’ll leave Syria and enter into the desert, where the route, and this will shock you, “becomes [very] sandy.” It's eight days, but - and again the text is very helpful - “one finds all one needs to survive.”
On leaving this desert, we enter Egypt, called by some “Canopat,” the text says, and in another language “Misrin,” the former actually a town on the coast of the Ancient Egyptian Nile Delta, the latter close to Mizraim, the Hebrew name for Egypt itself.
We arrive in Babylon, but this is not, as the text takes pains to note, “the Great Babylon where the confusion of tongues was made, when the Tower of Babel existed, the walls of which were sixty-four furlongs high.” Great Babylon was 40 days journey over the desert from our Babylon here in Egypt, but nobody went there anymore.
Nobody dared, the text tells us, for once, that place and all its fine buildings had sat upon a pleasant plain on the banks of the Euphrates, protected by walls 200 hundred cubits high and 50 thick. But then King Cyrus had split the river 340 different ways, cutting it off from Great Babylon and destroying the city and its surroundings. In this story, the city is effectively ended with its independence; it is not allowed to carry on after Cyrus conquers it, to be taken by Alexander and linger on after that.
Now, Mandeville tells us, nobody would dare visit that ruined and wretched place, for “it is now desolate and absolutely full of dragons and snakes and other venomous beasts.” Fortunately for us, we are not going there.
We arrive in the other city that the text calls Babylon, Fustat we might say, now a part of modern, sprawling Cairo, but then still in its historic role as capital. Home to a beautiful church of Our Lady, it tells us, and to the body of St. Barbara. It tells of Joseph and Nebuchadnezzar, of Ramses and the book of Genesis, and of a “long but narrow” land, largely uninhabited in its deserts and clustered along its life-giving river system, between the Nile and Arabia on the one side and between the Nile and Ethiopia on the other. For lack of rain, the flooding of the river is absolutely essential, though then for lack of that rain and turbulence in the air, “the air is always fine and clear, without clouds, and so the best astronomers in the world [are] customarily found there.”
“There are places where the land bears fruit eight times per year,” where can be found “Adam’s apples” that appear to bear teeth-marks on the side as if already bitten, trees that produce “Pharaoh figs,” and, in season, “paradise apples.” These quote/unquote “long apples,” that we would likely recognize as something from the banana or plantain family, reveal the sign of the cross in the centre when you slice them open in the right way, but as they rot so quickly, they cannot be shipped abroad.
This is a land where emeralds more beautiful than anywhere else in the world are found in the ground in abundance, and thus are cheaper than anywhere else, where, though it may sound somewhat less exciting, the egg incubators worked extremely well.
The Mandeville text describes a building in Cairo “full of hollows like hens’ nests, [where] the local women bring eggs - of hen, goose, or duck - and place them in.” There were m employees caring for the eggs, covering them with warm horse-dung, and without the heat of the laying birds, the eggs would hatch and the hatchlings be taken away by the women. “In this way,” we read, “the whole country replenishes its stock of birds, and they do this in winter as well as summer.” And the Mandeville author was not the only one to be impressed by this Egyptian feat of organization and ingenuity.
There’s actually a long history of admiration for the Cairo hatcheries, and when I say long I mean back to mentions in Aristotle and in Pliny the Elder. This practice, which may seem fairly unremarkable to us, was thought well worth mentioning by one writer after another, all the way up to Mandeville. Around the same time as our text, we find Simon Semeonis, AKA Simon Fitzsimmons, also choosing to allot no small proportion of his Egypt material to this small question of hatching eggs! The Irish friar was amazed, if slightly misled, to see eggs produced without the aid of roosters or hens, and in such great amounts too. He saw thousands of the birds in the street, feeding off the grain that scattered from the passing camels between Cairo and Fustat, and he wondered at the sight of it.
Clearly, that which we think is amazing will not always correspond across other times or cultural contexts. It can be hard to put yourself in the place of an ancient Greek or a 14th century Irish friar when you’ve got factory farms and refrigerated aisles that never go out of stock, but as you can see, the Mandeville author was not alone in lingering over the eggs.
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that eggs were all that Egypt had to offer, nor all that our guide has to tell us of this land. There was, more much more. There’s a surprisingly robust section on balsam, for example, on the field near Cairo where it grew, where “Christ liked to play with other children.” And this too had a history.
After this quick break, we’ll get to that.
...
And we’re back. We’re back to Egypt, and we’re back to balsam. It’s referenced as highly valuable in everything from, again, Pliny the Elder all the way through to early 16th century Egyptian chronicler Ibn Iyas. It’s established as to its medicinal properties in the 1st-century work of Dioscorides, a Greek physician translated and influential in both Arabic and Latin.
Balsam was said to have been an ingredient in King Mithridates’ daily theriac against poisoning, 14th-century Egyptian historian al-’Umari reported its distribution by the Mamluk sultan “to the castles of Syria, and to hospitals for those suffering from illnesses of cold,” and you find it in the recipes of Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, and other scholars, everywhere called upon to curb or cure a tremendous variety of ailments.
From eye ulcers, colic, and coughs to bladder stones, back pains, fevers, infections, and more, there was scarcely a health problem that balsam was not prescribed for, often in compound recipes such as a Syriac one for dimness of sight. Needing a mixture of wolf’s gall, opopanax, peppercorns, olive oil, balsam oil, aniseed tincture, cadmin, and honey, that concoction was to be smeared not - I’m pleased to read - into the eyeball itself but over the eyelid.
Balsam was used in the Coptic Church’s consecration oil as well as in other eastern churches. It was used in embalming. It was used in anointing European royalty. It was a pretty powerful substance.
The stuff in the Mandeville text is that of the gardens of Matariyyah, located about five miles north of Cairo and set aside as something special in the medieval sources first for the top-grade crop itself and second for its connection to the holy family. There are legends of Joseph’s staff, broken by Christ and its pieces planted in the ground to produce its trees, of Christ’s footprints being the source of its seven wells.
When it came time to gather the balsam sap, iron was to be avoided. A special instrument was required for the special benefits of the plant not to be corrupted, and a Christian apparently needed to wield it, or else “the trees would not bear fruit.” Though you could fairly easily find your way inside the garden’s walls, at harvest time they were more rigorously guarded, more closely protected. And these trees could not simply be grown elsewhere, by plant or by graft; they could not be made to fruit, not unless they were there in that garden north of Cairo. We read that it may also have been possible “in the deserts of Upper India, there where the Trees of the Sun and Moon spoke to Alexander the Great” and prophesied his death, but our guide admitted he hadn’t seen that place for himself, couldn’t say if the stories about it were true. The routes there were just too dangerous.
What Mandeville could do was offer advice for anyone looking to procure the product, and with it a warning. There were some deceitful traders who’d sell you turpentine perfumed with just a little balm, or the oil of some other tree. There were some unscrupulous merchants, some underhanded apothecaries, who’d “distil cloves, valerian, and other sweet-smelling spices and they’d sell the sap distilled from them instead of balm.” They’d trick commoners and aristocrats alike, but then Mandeville knew the tests. He knew just what to look for, how the real balsam burnt, how it curdled goat’s milk, and how it didn’t render clear water cloudy. If you were buying Balsam, he had the facts.
Mandeville shows us what he calls “Joseph’s barns … beyond the Nile, towards the desert between Egypt and Africa,” and “made for storing corn during the seven barren years which were signified by the seven dead ears of corn which King Pharaoh dreamt of, as described in the first book of the Bible.” Interesting to note that there have always been people insisting that the pyramids were built to hold grain, or if not always, at least since the 6th century and Gregory of Tours.
There are snakes within these “splendidly hewn stones,” and “inscriptions in different languages.” Some people, Mandeville acknowledges, “say that these are the graves of great people of olden times,” but Mandeville, in contradiction of one of his main sources here, William of Baldensele, remains unconvinced by the idea of such grand tombs. He concludes that “it is not likely that they are tombs in as much as they are empty inside and they have porches and gates in front of them, and also tombs should not, rationally, be so high.”
Not a believer in tall tombs then, our author, nor in graverobbing apparently. And while we’re on that topic, I do just want to share a short anecdote I came across in the source I’m using for today’s Patreon bonus. Al-Baghdadi writes of hearing this from a trustworthy man, a man who’d been part of a group seeking treasure among the pyramids. They’d found a sealed container and opened it but found no gold within, only honey. So they’d dipped in and started eating, as one does when finding mysterious, possibly ancient, containers of honey. Anyways, one of them had noticed his hand catching on something, on hair. He had tugged upwards, and he’d brought a still well-preserved corpse up out of the honey.
So that’s probably the worst possible version of finding a hair in your food, and now that I’ve shared it with you, back to the Mandeville.
Our guide tells us a story of a holy hermit, and how, “Once upon a time, in the Egyptian desert, [he] met a deformed beast, for it had the form of a human from the navel down and from there upwards that of a goat, with two horns standing on the head. The hermit asked him what in God’s name he was, and the beast answered, saying, ‘I am a mortal creature as God created me and I live in this desert and seek out my sustenance. Therefore I beg of you, hermit, that you will pray to God for me, that He who came from Heaven to Earth for the salvation of man’s soul and was born of a Virgin and suffered His painful Passion through which we all live, and move, and have existence, that He will have mercy on me.’”
The story concludes that “the head of that beast with the horns is still kept and looked after at Alexandria, as a miracle,” so perhaps that hermit’s intervention on his behalf was not so very effective, not in this world at least.
Our guide tells of “the city of the sun,” Heliopolis, the ancient cult centre for worship of Atum, a god of the sun and of creation, and there’s something of those beginnings in the details in our text, in the circular temple in which the priest keeps a book full of dates “relating to a bird called the phoenix.” There was only one such bird, one that lived for 500 years before coming back to that temple and burning itself to ash. The priests knew when to expect it, when to lay the altar with spices, sulfur, and juniper wood, when to look the next day for a type of worm, on the day after that to see it transformed a bird, and on the next to see it fly, reborn, to where it lived.
It was sometimes seen in flight, when the weather was good, local people giving witness to the peacock’s crest on its head, the yellow on its neck, its back of indigo, its striped tail and its wings of red. The bird, he says, “is a token of … Jesus Christ,” not a reading unique to this source by any means, but it’s not hard to see those themes of creation and the sun here to, and indeed the association of Heliopolis with the phoenix is an old one, found all the way back in Herodotus for example.
But let’s return to Mandeville’s time, where he tells us of the sultan.
The sultan lives there in Egypt, “in a handsome, strong castle, well placed in the rock.” Protecting it and providing all he and his court could wish for are 8,000 men, and the Sultan can lead more than 20,000 soldiers out of Egypt and more than 50,000 from Syria, Turkey, and his other realms, each one paid 120 florins a year and required to maintain three horses and a camel. And how does our guide know all of this? He knows this, he says, because he served there as a mercenary in the sultan’s wars against the Bedouins. He even had the opportunity to marry into a local family of some importance and remain, but for that he would have needed to convert to Islam and so he had refused.
And what does he give us, this expert witness, this perfectly positioned tour guide. Well, he does offer something of the sultan, that no foreigner may appear before the ruler without the appropriate dress of gold, tars, or camlet, that when they do so, the sultan’s people stand ready, swords drawn in one hand and the other held ready to slap them down lest they offend, and that anyone who sees the person of the sultan, whether framed at the opening of a window or glimpsed between columns, must drop to their knees immediately and kiss the ground. He also traces the history by which that sultan came to power, a quick-moving history that really barrels along through one sultan after another and with plenty of action along the way.
We read that the first sultan of Egypt was Yaracon, the father of Salah ad-Din - presumably actually his uncle Shirkuh - that after Salah ad-Din came his son, and then his nephew. The text tells us that following the nephew, in the time when Louis IX came from France and was defeated and captured, the Egyptians saw that they had been excessively in awe of their ruler, saw that they the people were many, and selected one of their own in his place. And that does not sound entirely likely, and indeed that’s not quite what happened, depending on how you read “the Egyptians.” This was not a time of taking to the street and putting some local labourer from among their number onto the throne. This was the transition to Mamluk rule, and in our text here, it’s a tumblingly messy transition from one sultan to the next, and to the next.
Quote
“This same sultan was later slain by his own servants and another was chosen in his place, who was called Tympieman. ... . Afterwards, a commoner called Cothas killed Tympieman and was made sultan in his place, and he called himself Melechomethos, who soon afterwards was murdered by another commoner, named Benodochdaer. … This same sultan was poisoned at Damascus, and died there.”
End quote.
I should mention here that these names are not, by the way, the ones you should look for if you’re interested in learning more about these sultans. This “Tympieman” of the text for example, is al-Muazzam Turanshah, who did indeed suffer a dramatic death, quite possibly at the hands of future sultan Baibars. But the story continues.
Next, the poisoned sultan’s son would have taken up the throne, but he’s driven out by a man named Elphy who sweeps him out of the way and establishes himself as sultan before being poisoned by another who desired the sultanate for himself. That man is then in turn murdered, and Elphy’s son in turn becomes sultan, but he dies, poisoning of course, “and his brother reign[s] in his place and [is] called Melechinasser.”
Melechinasser is unseated and imprisoned, the usurper ruling until he is driven into exile. The man who had driven the usurper off takes power for himself, but one day, while he is playing chess with his unsheathed sword sitting next to him, he’ll get into an argument with his opponent and be slain with his own sword, the deadly weapon far too easily at hand in the moment of board game disagreement. And then, when the time comes for a new sultan to be selected, everyone remembers Melechinasser. They bring him out, dust him off, and place him on the throne. He’ll reign for a time, then his son, and then a second son who’ll have the first one murdered. That’s how we get to Melechimandabron. That, the text tells us, is who ruled as sultan when “Mandeville,” whoever we now imagine that to be, left Egypt.
So. That was the sultan. But who was Melechimandabron?
Well, he’s identified as al-Ashraf Khalil, the 8th Mamluk sultan, and a man whose rule began in late 1290. So I suppose he is who we should have in mind here, the vigorous campaigner who’d put an end to crusader rule in Acre. His 300 drums had signalled the final assaults on that city in May of 1291, its demise known in Damascus by carrier pigeon that same day. He’d entered Damascus in glory upon a satin path, his prisoners paraded before him. He’d achieved what so many Muslim commanders had tried to do before him, following Acre with Sidon, Beirut, Tyre, and Haifa, but he was less than two years from death. He'd begun his reign by killing or abusing a number of his father’s more prominent emirs. He'd end it after humiliating and insulting the wrong emir at the wrong time, his actions provoking an en-masse assassination on the part of a group of them in December of 1293.
But that was for the future, if the very near future. In the fuzzy un-time in which the Mandeville text is set, al-Ashraf still rules, and he is who we should apparently think of when we come to the most fully developed scene in the Egyptian portion of the text, a moment of out and out dialogue between Mamluk Sultan al-Ashraf and the most esteemed knight of England, mercenary, and world traveller, Sir John Mandeville. It goes like this.
It’s in the sultan’s private room. No one of the court is there. The sultan wanted to speak to him in private, our author says, not so subtly establishing himself as not just your average foreign mercenary but someone of some value and importance. Then, he says, the sultan asks him about the governance of his Christian lords.
“How do they rule?” the sultan asks.
And Mandeville replies, “They govern well, thank God.”
At this, the sultan scoffs. Do they? Surely not, he says. Even your priests care not for service of God. They should be providing a good example to their people, but instead they provide a wicked one. No wonder then that when people ought to be at church on holy days, they’re instead at the tavern, drinking like beasts and eating like gluttons with no idea of when they’ve had enough. You Christians seem ever compelled to fight one another or cheat and claw to get what you can at the other’s expense, and so proud that you can’t even decide how to dress, “now in long clothes, then short, now wide, then straight, and cut in all sorts of other ways.”
He maybe waves his hand in a dismissive way and then continues.
“You should be simple, meek, and steadfast, and charitable like Christ, in whom you believe.” Instead, Christians “are so covetous that they will sell their daughters or sisters … no one is faithful to each other. … they disregard and transgress the [very] law which Jesus gave to them for their salvation.”
And then, having used him to critique the Latin Christians for everything from their absence from church to their changeable sense of fashion, the Mandeville author has the sultan introduce a familiar theme.
“Therefore,” the sultan says, “it is for your sins that you have lost all this land that we hold: because of your vile way of life and your sinfulness God has placed all this land into our hands. We didn’t gain this land through our own strength but because of your sins.”
It is, again, a familiar idea, the one by which Christian writers sought to explain the failure of Christian armies to take and hold the Holy Land, and in a moment, Mandeville has the Mamluk sultan present the other side of the equation.
“We know full well,” the sultan says, “that whenever you come to serve your God properly then He will help you so nobody will be against you. And we also know, by our own prophecies, that Christians shall regain this land when they serve their own God properly. But while they live as disgustingly as they do, we’re not afraid of them, because their God won’t help them.”
But how did he know all this, Mandeville asks, how did he know so much of the Christian states? And the sultan replies that his scouts and spies had been sent all through those countries, “pretending to be merchants with precious gems,” and learning the ways and customs of nobles and commoners alike. To demonstrate the point, men of the court are called in and they speak at length of Mandeville’s own country and in his own language too.
Mandeville goes away astounded, it says, “truly astounded by this egregious slander of our faith,” but that feels very much like a performative protest, for he continues to note that “it’s no wonder that they call us wicked. Yet the Saracens are faithful: they uphold the commandments of their Qur’an, which God sent to them through His messenger Muhammad, to whom they say the angel St Gabriel spoke many times and told him about God’s will.”
What follows is a bit of the story of Muhammad, one that seems not entirely unsympathetic, that is until it connect his visions with epilepsy and says his wife even began to regret marrying someone with such a condition, a detail traceable to 8th century Byzantine chronicler Theophanes and one which would really have legs on into the future.
The key part here though is arguably neither this version of Muhammad’s story nor the commonly-read explanation of Christian sin for Christian failure, the cause being their own weakness rather than the other’s strength. It’s not even the issue of shirt length. It is perhaps instead the notes on conversion, that, quote, “they who should be converted by our good example of the faith of Jesus Christ were being drawn away by our evil manner of living.” “Sometimes,” he later says, Christians even “become Saracens either because of poverty, or out of stupidity, or out of their own wickedness.”
Sometimes, the implication is clear, it could go the other way, and this connects to the concern throughout this book for the varied peoples of a widened world and their standing in relation to a Christian god.
This is a book with a world vision, one that includes Christians of a variety of different beliefs, that includes Muslims and Jews. It travels through India, through the realms of the Mongol khan and Prester John, through lands where there are men with horns on their heads, giants, and women with gems in their eyes.
And we’ll go to those realms, those places, see those fantastic beings, and explore that world vision as we go east in the next episode.