BOOK: "The Book of John Mandeville"

The Book of John Mandeville, with related texts. Edited and translated, with an introduction, by Iain Macleod Higgins. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011. 9780872209350. xxviii + 292 pp.

I have no idea where and when I first heard of Mandeville and his travel book, except that I have been vaguely aware of him for a long time as a late medieval traveller, something along the lines of Marco Polo, only with more exaggerated and fictional elements. E-text editions of his book have been floating on the web since fairly early on (e.g. the Project Gutenberg version appeared in 1997), in more or less heavily antiquated English, which I therefore assumed to be the original thing.

So I was quite interested to learn, after reading the present volume, how mistaken I was about much of that. It turns out that Mandeville originally wrote in French, which I guess shouldn't surprise me since he lived in the 14th century, when England still controlled a considerable chunk of French territory and when its upper class was still at least partly French-speaking. It was a very popular work in its day, and as is common for books which circulated in manuscript form, several different versions of it exist. The French text itself appears in an “Insular” (i.e. British) and a “Continental” (i.e. French) version, and then there is a third version where someone took the Continental text and changed it so as to attribute Mandeville's experiences to Ogier the Dane, one of the fictional paladins of Charlemagne from medieval romances :)) (p. 192). There are some five English translations from 1400 or shortly afterwards (p. 199), i.e. in fairly late Middle English, which becomes reasonably intelligible as long as you modernize the spelling a little, and that's what most later reprints or e-text versions were based on. There were also two translations into German (pp. 203, 205) and five into Latin (four from the Insular version and one from the Continental one; p. 206). The present volume is a new translation from the French, with a very interesting appendix with some additional material from other versions where they differ from the two main French ones. I was surprised and somewhat saddened to learn how much work remains to be done in investigating these things; for example, no critical edition exists of the Continental French version (extant in some 30 manuscripts; p. 187), or of Otto von Diemeringen's German translation (extant in some 45 manuscripts; p. 205), or of the most common Latin version (p. 206).

Moreover, what was also new to me is that Mandeville's book hardly seems to be based on a real journey at all. It's not at all like Marco Polo, who was a real person that had really been to China, even if he exaggerates a little here and there in his book. Mandeville claims to be an Anglo-French knight who spent some thirty years travelling abroad, partly on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, partly in the service of such potentates as the Sultan of Egypt and the Great Khan of Mongolia; but later researchers found that nearly everything in his book was borrowed and reworked from one or two dozen earlier works (p. 219), the most important of which are the writings of two 14th-century travellers, William of Boldensele (a German knight and pilgrim who travelled in the Near East) and Odoric of Pordenone (a Franciscan friar who travelled in India and China). Thus there is no obvious reason why Sir John Mandeville should even be a real person rather than the invention of an otherwise anonymous writer. Efforts to either find the real John Mandeville in archival sources, or to discover the identity of the author if Mandeville is a fiction, don't seem to have been particularly successful so far (p. xviii). Thus the present edition prefers to refer to him as “the Mandeville author” rather than simply as “Mandeville”. There are many interesting footnotes pointing out parallels between Mandeville's text and his sources, as well as an appendix with selected passages from some of those sources so that it is easy for any reader to see how closely Mandeville followed them.

So I certainly have to commend the translator of the present edition for the wealth of interesting information in his introduction, appendices and notes; but as for Mandeville's account itself, I found it more boring than I had expected, though it was tolerable enough in small doses. For one thing, travel books of the last few centuries usually focus on what the traveller himself has seen, done and experienced; but Mandeville (and TBH Marco Polo is no different) mostly just describes the countries he has (supposedly) travelled through and the peoples that inhabit them, while saying relatively little about his own actions and experiences. Nevertheless, since the countries he travelled through were very exotic from the perspective of Mandeville and his western European readership, many things there are strange and bizarre, which means that the book contains plenty of curious factoids that are interesting to read, even if the work as a whole is a bit dry.

The book may be divided approximately into two parts. The first half is about travels in the Near East, to locations that would have been of interest to pilgrims and that would have been familiar to christian readers from the bible. This part is therefore a bit more realistic and was not as interesting to me; there's only so many times you can read about this or that location in Egypt or Palestine etc. that happens to be the site of this or that biblical story before it gets boring. The second half or so of the book is about the Far East (approximately India and everything east of it), about which much less was known and where Mandeville is much more free to mix fact and fantasy. Some of his information may be coming from the handful of Franciscans who travelled to Mongolia or China in the 13th and 14th century, but he is happy to combine it with pure fantasy from medieval romances about Alexander the Great, rumours of Prester John and his kingdom, vaguely recorded scraps of information from ancient times when the Greeks were briefly in contact with India in the wake of Alexander's conquests; there's countless islands populated by various kinds of more or less monstrous-looking humanoids, and at one point he even comes close to Earthly Paradise (the one that Adam and Eve had been expelled from). If nothing else, then, this second half of the book is more varied and contains more bizarre details, and on the whole made for more interesting reading.

Miscellaneous

Constantinople boasts a curious set of relics from the crucifixion of Jesus: not only the cross itself, but a robe worn by Jesus, the sponge with which he was given vinegar to drink, and one of the nails with which he was nailed to the cross (p. 8) :)) Mandeville mentions that Jesus was “fixed to the cross lying on the ground and then was raised with the cross, and thus in its raising He suffered more pain” (p. 10); the translator's note 12 refers oddly to “[t]his sadistic mode of crucifixion”, as if any form of crucifixion could be non-sadistic :S

Speaking of bizarre relics: “Charlemagne was in this Temple [in Jerusalem] when the angel brought him Our Lord Jesus Christ's foreskin from the Circumcision, and he took it to Aix-la-Chapelle” (p. 50). Needless to say, Charlemagne never even went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

A dubious contribution to physics from the translator's note 24, p. 13: “High-mountain air is thin because of diminished gravity; it therefore holds less water”. But surely, if the Earth has a radius of approx. 6378 km, and if gravity falls with the square of the distance, then going e.g. 10 km above the ground means that gravity there is (6378/6388)² = approx. 99.7% of the gravity on the ground. This tiny decrease of gravity can't account for the fact that the air is so much thinner there. Surely the air at higher altitudes is thinner because the higher you go, the less air there is above that altitude and the pressure is therefore lower; and this is because the total amount of air is so limited, not because the gravity would get so much lower so soon.

The pyramids of Egypt are “Joseph's Granaries, which he had made to store the wheat for hard times. [. . .] Some say that they are tombs of the great lords of antiquity, but that is not true, for the common word through the whole country near and far is that they are Joseph's Granaries, and they have it written thus in their chronicles.” (P. 32.) [Incidentally, William of Boldensele, Mandeville's principal source here, is more skeptical: “this cannot be true at all, for no place for putting in the wheat can be found there, and there is inside these columns no empty space where anything can be placed” (p. 231).]

In Bethlehem there is a church “where Our Lady rested after having given birth; and because she had too much milk in her breasts and because they were sore, she squirted some [milk] there on the red marble stones such that the white spots are still there on the stones.” (P. 43.) I guess we can consider ourselves lucky that they didn't attribute the white spots to something else :P

At one point Mandeville mentions Caesar's reform of the calendar: “Caius Caesar, who was emperor of Rome, had two months added” etc. (p. 47). The translator adds this very odd remark (n. 140): “The Roman calendar was reformed by Julius Caesar, not Gaius, as some copyists, including E, correctly note.” But Julius Caesar's first name *was* Gaius, so what is he complaining about?...

When Titus suppressed the Jewish revolt, he took many prisoners and “said that they had sold Jesus Christ for thirty pennies and he would make a better bargain of them: he would offer them at thirty a penny.” :))) (P. 51.) I can't help but be reminded of that old poem about the butcher from Glasgow who sold his wife as mincemeat: “[. . .] For what kind of man is it slaughters his wife/ And sells her a shilling a pun/ [. . .] You widnae object but you widnae expect/ He wid sell the poor woman so cheap” :]

Extreme claims about the Dead Sea: “No living man or animal could die in this sea [. . .] people are thrown in who have deserved death and they have remained three or four days, but they could not die [. . .] Whoever puts iron in it, it swims on top, and whoever puts a feather in, it goes to the bottom” (p. 61).

For the ‘honi soit qui mal y pense’ collection: “Our Lord sent Saint Peter and Saint James to fetch the she-ass on Palm Sunday, and He mounted the she-ass there.” (P. 58.)

“Our Lady gave birth in her fifteenth year” (p. 70). The pedophilia hebephilia jokes practically make themselves :]

“In this country of Libya the sea is indeed higher than the land, and it seems that it should cover the land, and nevertheless it does not pass it bounds. [. . .] In this sea of Libya there are no fish, [. . .] for the water is always boiling because of the great heat.” (Pp. 90–1.)

In the land of Chaldea: “The women are very ugly and badly dressed, [. . .] quite dark, ugly, and hideous, and they are certainly not at all beautiful, but they lack graciousness.” (P. 96.) I can only assume that some Chaldean woman rejected his advances :P

“There is a people [in Ethiopia] that have only one foot [. . .] so large that it shades the whole body from the sun when they are lying down.” (P. 98.)

Of an island somewhere beyond India: “it is so hot on this island that, because of the heat's great force, men's hangers, videlicet testiculi, come out of their bodies halfway down the leg, because of the body's great dissipation.” (P. 101.) On another island: “the rats of this island are as big as dogs here, and they are caught with large mastiffs, for the cats cannot catch them.” (P. 104.) Later he mentions two islands inhabited by giants, one also by “sheep as big as oxen [. . .], and they have very thick wool to match” (p. 169). On a slightly more realistic note, another island has “hedgehogs as big as wild pigs are here; we call them porcupines” (p. 172). Another island has “large mountains of gold that the ants guard carefully [. . .] and the ants are as big as dogs, such that the people dare not approach these mountains” (p. 178).

Dubious customs in India: “the women drink wine and the men do not, and also the women shave their beards and the men do not” (p. 107). But some of the Indian customs he mentions are real: the burning of widows (p. 107), or religious fanatics throwing themselves under the juggernaut (p. 109). Other real customs he mentions later are sky burial in Tibet (i.e. exposing a corpse to be eaten by carrion-birds; “whoever has the greatest number of birds is the most honored”, p. 182) and foot-binding in China (p. 183).

He also mentions an island of what I can only describe as communist cannibals: “all the women of the country are thus common and refuse no man; [. . .] And when the women have children, they give them to those they like who have had sexual relations with them. The land is also common [. . .] and also all the goods of the country are common [. . .] But they have an evil custom, for they more willingly eat human flesh than any other flesh. [. . .] The merchants go there and take children with them for sale to the inhabitants [. . .] if they are lean, they fatten them, and they say that this is the best and sweetest meat in the world.” (P. 111.) :))

Some of the trees on Java “bear poison against which there is only one medicine: that is, to take some of one's own feces and stir with water* and then drink this” (p. 117) :))))) Also on Java, there are “large snails that are so large that several people could dwell inside the shell” (p. 119).

[*The Latin version of Mandeville's book apparently says “to drink one's own dung dissolved in pure water” (p. 216) — because obviously to dissolve your shit in *dirty* water would be just disgusting... :)]

More merry tales of cannibals. Of the island of Dondia, “possibly one of the Andaman Isles” (n. 123): “On this island are people of diverse natures, such that the father eats the son, and the son the father, and the husband the wife, and the wife her husband.” (P. 123.)

Interesting: Mandeville (and other authors of that period) makes a distinction between Manzi, or southern China, and Cathay, or northern China, describing them as two separate countries (pp. 125, 129). The Franciscans actually made some converts in China in the 14th century: “In 1313 John of Monte Corvino was invested as Archbishop of Khanbaliq (Beijing) and set up six Cathayan bishoprics (none outlasted the mid-fourteenth century).” (Translator's note 434, p. 127.)

We would refer to a Mongol emperor as a Khan, but Mandeville spells it Chan and says it is related to the Biblical Cham (i.e. Ham), one of Noah's sons (p. 134). He also claims that Möngke Khan and his better-known brother Kublai Khan were christians (pp. 138–9; they weren't).

At one of the great festivals of the Mongol khans, the Mongols “perform a kind of circumcision” (p. 140). Translator's note 470 adds: “Perhaps an error for ‘coronation’: the Mongols did not practice circumcision.” What an unfortunate error :] By the time you explain the difference to a Mongol, your foreskin is already gone :)))

Hot incest action amongst the Mongols: “they take their kin as wives except their mothers, their daughters, and their sisters on their mother's side, but they can take their sisters on their father's side by another wife, and their brothers' wives after their [brothers'] death, and their stepmoters as well.” (P. 146.) And on an Indian island: “In this country they take their daughters and sisters as wives, and their other relatives, and if there are ten or twelve or more men in a house, the wife of each will be common to all those of the household” (p. 171).

More on Mongol customs: “the greatest sin is to piss in their houses where they dwell [i.e. yurts — he described them on the previous page], and whoever should piss will certainly be killed.” :)) (P. 148.) “They eat dogs, lions, foxes, mares, foals, asses, rats, and mice, and all other animals, large and small, except pigs and animals that were prohibited in the Old Testament” (pp. 148–9).

About cotton: “In this land there are trees that bear wool just like sheep from which one makes clothes to wear.” (P. 159.) This reminded me of the fact that several languages actually call cotton ‘tree wool’ (German Baumwolle, Swedish bomull). But I'm still surprised that anyone would look at cotton plants and think ‘hey, trees’...

Mandeville has a couple of chapters about the legendary kingdom of Prester John, “the great emperor of India, and his kingdom is called the island of Pentoxoire” (p. 160). It is a large and rich country, but not as much as that of the Great Chan. “The Emperor Prester John always takes the Great Chan's daughter as his wife, and the Great Chan [takes] Prester John's daughter as well.” (P. 161. As we can see from this last quote, “Prester John” is actually meant to be a title and not the name of an individual ruler.) “The frame of his bed is of fine sapphires trimmed with gold to make him sleep better and to restrain his lust, for he will sleep with his wives only four times a year” (p. 163).

On another Indian island, men hire someone to take their wife's virginity on their wedding night, because “a long time ago some men had died taking the virginity of their wives, who had snakes in their body; therefore they keep this custom and they always have someone else try out the passage before they endanger themselves.” (P. 170.) For some reason, I absolutely love the phrasing of ‘try out the passage’ :)))

Michel Velser, the late-15th-century German translator of Mandeville, reports that “I have seen in the city of Pavia a dog that was born from an egg, [. . .] it was as large as a greyhound.” (P. 203.) The “bird from which the dog came [. . .] is a little larger than a goose [. . .] It is called frakkales [francolin]. [. . .] It lays three eggs: two become birds and the one, a dog, as I told you before. And this is certainly true” (p. 204). How could you doubt it when he puts it that way? :) Or maybe you could, since we know from the Archpoet's confession that Pavia was a rumbustious party town for college students, so you should probably disregard any wild stories coming from there :))

William of Boldensele (one of Mandeville's sources) writes: “I saw in Cairo three entirely live elephants.” (P. 229.) I can't help but be intrigued by the idea of a *partially* live elephant...

According to Odoric of Pordenone (Mandeville's other major source), the people in the province of Minibar (= Malabar) in India “worship an ox for god. [. . .] His master collects his urine in a silver basin and his dung in a gold one as well, and they present them to the country's ruler. From these the ruler washes his face and hands with the urine, and then his brow and his chest with the dung, most reverently.” (P. 246. Mandeville elaborates on this story a bit on pp. 106–7.) Yule says that this “is little, if at all, exaggerated” :S

A peculiar detail: after giving an account of some country and its people, Mandeville likes to give its “alphabet” (e.g.: Greek, p. 15; Egyptian, p. 33, with pictures; Hebrew, p. 67, with pictures). This is invariably just a list of names of letters, more or less fictional but obviously inspired by the Greek alphabet. Unfortunately the pictures of the letters are not always included in this book, though they seem to have been present in the manuscripts.