The World of Mandeville's Travels
Author(s): Donald R. Howard
Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 1, (1971), pp. 1-17
Published by: Maney Publishing on behalf of Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3507049
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THE WORLD OF MANDEVILLE'S TRAVELS
I
Everyone knows that Mandeville's Travelsis a pastiche of fact and lore drawn from
various sources, that its author probably never travelled east at all, that his name
may be a pseudonym and the man himself not, as he claimed, an Englishman.
Whether this makes him a fraud or an artist, he created, from a shelf of books, a
world of his own devising, a world conceivable enough to have been taken seriously
by Christopher Columbus, Sir Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, and readers over
Europe well into the nineteenth century.' This world is the product of a thoughtful
mind; the author reveals himself as curious, tentative, sceptical, prepared to entertain strange ideas or customs and question familiar ones. Like many thoughtful
books, the Travelsdoes not come to a conclusion or have an 'idea' which a critic
can report straight out. But the author knew, I believe, what kind of book he was
writing: by his time there were many prose accounts of the Jerusalem pilgrimage
and several of travels into the Orient,2 and he set out to combine these two genres,
imitating some features of them and rejecting others.
Recently, in a movement to revive the book, several critics have urged it
upon readers as a piece of prose fiction, of 'popular' literature - a romance of
travel, in Professor Bennett's phrase.3 Against such a literary estimate of Mandeville's work one must allow that its contents would have seemed more probable
then than now. While men still argued about antipodes and circumnavigating the
globe, while they knew little about the Orient and nothing about a fourth continent
or 'New World', anything was possible. Their attitude was comparable to that with
which men of our time read eye-witness reports of flying saucers - but with an
important difference: when a medieval writer transmitted without acknowledgement the words and contents of another author, he was not judged, as Mandeville
had been, a fraud. A pilgrim-author like Ludolf von Suchem, who went to Jerusalem in I336-41, did not hesitate to include what he had from 'ancient books of
history' or 'the lips of truthful men', even though he was on guard against 'ignorant
cavillers and scoffers'.4
From this viewpoint Mandeville was an encyclopadist, a scholar. The virtues of
his work are 'humanistic' ones, those of the library and the study. He mastered an
imposing amount of written matter, organized it in an original form, and presented
it in an interesting and thoughtful way. He adopts an impersonal, factual tone:
'Now, after that men have visited those holy places, then will they turn toward
Jerusalem . .', 'In that valley is a field, where men draw out of the earth a thing
1 Josephine Waters Bennett, The Rediscoveryof Sir John Mandeville(New York, 1954), pp. 219-60.
2 Of these
analogous works prior to Mandeville's time there is no convenient account. On his
sources, see Bennett, pp. 15-25; Malcolm Letts, Sir John Mandeville: The Man and His Book (I949),
and the notes in M. C. Seymour's edition (Oxford, 1967). On medieval travel and
pp. 29-100;
travellers' tales, see Traveland Travellersof the Middle Ages, edited by Arthur Percival Newton (New
York, 1926), especially pp. 159-94. A list of written accounts may be found in R. Rbhricht, Bibliotheca
GeographicaPalaestinae (Berlin, I890). The chief accounts may be found in Peregrinatoresmedii aevi
quatuor,edited by J. C. M. Laurent (Lipsiae, I864); Early Travels in Palestine, edited by Thomas
Wright (I848); and in the Library of the Palestine Pilgrims Text Society, 14 vols (1887-97).
3 Bennett,
pp. I-86; Seymour, pp. xvii-xx.
4 Ludolf von
Suchem, Travels, translated and edited by A. Stewart, Library of the Palestine
Pilgrims Text Society (I895).
The Worldof Mandeville'sTravels
2
that men clepe cambile . . .' (Chapter 9).1 Almost everything is presented in this
general, authoritative voice; it is the flat statement customary in medieval prose
and much medieval poetry. The 'I' in such writing is an impersonal Everyman who
arranges and records truths: 'I have told you now of the way by which men go
farrest and longest to Jerusalem, . . . Now will I tell you the rightest way and the
shortest...'
(Chapter I4). In its most rhetorical form, this style is devotional and
exhortatory, as in the opening passage of the work:
For as much as the land beyond the sea, that is to say the Holy Land, that men call the
Land of Promission or of Behest, passing all other lands, is the most worthy land, most
excellent, and lady and sovereign of all other lands, and is blessed and hallowed of the precious body and blood of our Lord Jesu Christ .. right so, he that was former of all the
world, would suffer for us at Jerusalem, that is the midst of the world; to that end and intent,
that his passion and his death, that was published there, might be known evenly to all parts
of the world.
See now, how dear he bought man, that he made after his own image, and how dear he
again-bought us, for the great love that he had to us, and we never deserved it to him.
In its more relaxed form it is factual and expository, the style appropriate to a
compendium or summa - objective, authoritative, and direct:
Also in that country and in others also, men find long apples to sell, in their season, and men
clepe them apples of Paradise; and they be right sweet and of good savour. And though ye
cut them in never so many gobbets or parts, overthwart or endlong,2 evermore ye shall find
in the midst the figure of the Holy Cross of our LordJesu. But they will rot within eight days,
and for that cause men may not carry of those apples to no far countries; of them men find
the mountance of a hundred in a basket, and they have great leaves of a foot and a half of
length, and they be convenably large . . . (Chapter 7).
Mandeville was trying to write a new kind of work, a summa of travel lore which
(a) combined the authority of learned books and guidebooks with the eyewitness
manner of pilgrim and travel writers; (b) combined the pilgrimage to the Holy
Land with the missionary or mercantile voyage into the Orient; and (c) combined
the curious and vicarious intentions of some such works with the thoughtful and
devotional intentions of others. He tells us in the Prologue that he writes for the
reader's 'solace and comfort', adding in Chapter 3 that 'many men have great
liking, to hear speak of strange things of diverse countries'; in the last chapter he
reminds us that 'new things and new tidings be pleasant to hear'. It is a vicarious
journey, written, he says, 'for as much as it is long time passed, that there was no
general passage ne voyage over the sea'; yet it is a guide as well, intended 'specially
for them, that will and are in purpose for to visit the Holy City of Jerusalem and
the holy places that are thereabout' (Prologue). He addresses the reader directly
as 'you', inviting him into the work as a participant and promising at the end to
those readers who will pray for him to 'make them partners, and grant them part
of all the good pilgrimages and of all the good deeds that I have done'. The work is
meant to delight, and its popularity shows it succeeded in this; but it is meant to
1
Quotations are from the edition of A. W. Pollard (900oo, reprinted I964); citations in the text
are to chapters.
2 An
interestingdetail; 'apples of paradise'(bananas)are describedin a number of pilgrim's
accounts- Mandevilleprobablyhad the detailfromBoldensele,who makesthe commonobservation
that when cut the banana shows a crossor crucifix.Mandevilleappearsto embroideron this by
saying 'overthwartor endlong'(crosswiseor lengthwise),which suggestshe had not reallycut up a
banana.
DONALD
R.
HOWARD
3
teach as well - not just facts about foreign lands but a frame of mind which
Mandeville himself possessed and meant, by implication, to recommend.
The author who plans such a combination must sacrifice some features of his
models or produce a monster. Mandeville made three such sacrifices:
(a) He sacrificed bookishness: rather than cite authors to substantiate his own
authority, he chose to maintain the stance, largely and perhaps wholly a fiction,
of an eye-witness who reports from memory. This insistence that seeing is believing,
this emphasis on experience at the expense of authority, is what we now perceive
as fictional and literary. He creates within the work a 'persona' who claims eyewitness knowledge of what is reported. We do not know how much this persona was
like the author; that the figure is a stock knight-errant makes one dubious, for few
such knights possessed his scholarship.' His story, discreetly parcelled out, is the
stuffof romance. He is, he tells us in his prologue, a knight ('albeit I be not worthy')
who was born in England at St Albans and went to sea on the day of St Michael,
1322. He travelled through many lands, and proposes to report them as best he
can remember. In passing he mentions having served as a soldier to the Soldan at
Babylon in his wars against the Bedouins- 'And he would have married me full
highly 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'
(Chapter 6). He served the Great Chan for fifteen months against the king of
Mancy, just to find out if his nobility, estate, and governance 'were such as we
heard say that it was'; he adds that it was 'more noble and more excellent' and
that he and his companions would never have believed it if they had not seen it
(Chapter 23). He claims that he still possesses a thorn from our Lord's crown of
thorns ('that seemeth like a white thorn; and that was given to me for great
specialty', Chapter 2). He claims he saw more among the Saracens than others
had seen because he had 'letters of the Soldan with his great seal, and commonly
other men have but his signet', which commanded men 'to let me see all the
places, and to inform me pleinly all the mysteries of every place' (Chapter I I).
He tells of an awesome encounter he had with devils in the Valley Perilous (Chapter
3I).2 At the end, reminding us of all the lands he has seen, he says he has been 'at
many a fair deed of arms (albeit that I did none myself, for mine unable insuffisance)' -an
amusing touch. 'Now', he concludes, 'I am come home, maugre
to
for gouts artetykes that me distrain' (Chapter 34).
rest,
myself,
Only at the end do we get this picture of the ageing knight with his arthritic
gouts 'recording the time passed'. Until then, he has seemed a robust soldiertraveller, observant, open-minded, accurate, and discreet. He promises at the
outset to tell 'some part of things that there be, when time shall be, after it may
best come to my mind'. He makes no great claims for his memory and so grants
playfully, it may be - a chance of inaccuracy:
1 Bennett, p. 192, thinks his learning suggests he was the younger son of a noble family. On his
identity and nationality see Bennett, pp. I8I-204 and passim; on his persona in the work, p. 5. One
should note that he does not represent himself in the work as being bookish in the least.
2 This is a
dressed-up version of a tale in Odoric (see Bennett, pp. 46-7 and Letts, pp. 88-91).
Of the events in which the author claims direct participation, this seems the most fantastical. But
the reader should compare Benvenuto Cellini's encounter with devils in the Coliseum under the
auspices of a gifted necromancer, in his Autobiography,
Chapter 64; Cellini appears to believe he saw
devils and anticipates no scepticism on the reader's part.
4
The Worldof Mandeville'sTravels
But lords and knights and other noble and worthy men that con Latin but little, and have
been beyond the sea, know and understand, if I say truth or no, and if I err in devising, for
forgetting or else, that they may redress it and amend it. For things passed out of long time
from a man's mind or from his sight, turn soon into forgetting; because that mind of man
ne may not be comprehended ne withholden, for the frailty of mankind. (Prologue)
His work supports this last, ambiguous statement:1 unable to resist a good story, he
lets his tale spill over all the time into the fabulous and at the end informs us that
he had seen much more than he has told, but 'it were too long thing to devise you
the manner'.
(b) He sacrificed quotidian realism: rather than give day-to-day details of his
own journey, real or imagined, he chose to play the objective observer, distinguishing fact from hearsay and the reasonable from the improbable. Jerusalem
pilgrims did sometimes stay on to travel in the Near East, but it was a stroke of
literary imagination on Mandeville's part to combine a tale of a pilgrimage
(mostly Boldensele's) with one of an oriental expedition (mostly Odoric's). This
arrangement proceeds from the near to the far, from familiar things to strange
ones. Everyone knew about the Holy Land because it was the locus of the Bible
and the Crusades. But the Orient was a fabled place. Stories about it, even true
ones, were hard to believe: so Marco Polo earned the reputation of a liar. To
proceed from the Holy Land to the Orient meant leaving the world of established
authority and books and pilgrims' lore for a world of stories, an insubstantial world
preserved in men's minds and memories. No one doubted it was there, or that it
was inhabited, or that some had travelled to it; but the quality of this reality was
different -- one could find Herod in Scripture, but not Ghengis Khan. Mandeville willingly accepts this circumstance: he tells us he travelled through the Orient
as far as the land of PresterJohn, but he makes little effort to convince us. He gives
no circumstantial details of his day-to-day activities in travel, does not mention
who he travelled with or relate any personal anecdotes; the farthest he goes is to
give distances between places or spans of time, to mention now and then his service
as a soldier, to report his encounter with devils, and to relate conversations.
This last is the most important. He recorded what others said judiciously; we
now know that he was doing this all the time with a stack of books. He was well
aware that what he found in Boldensele or Odoric or Vincent of Beauvais was,
whether fact or fiction, preserved by men's imperfect memories. He comes therefore directly to the point in his Prologue when he reminds us that things which
happened long ago 'turn soon into forgetting' and that the mind of man can not be
'comprehended ne withholden'. Thus he remains calmly sceptical, plucking
falsehood diligently from truth. He rejects out of hand the story that half the
Cross is at Cyprus: 'it is not so. For that cross that is in Cyprus, is the cross, in the
which Dismas the good thief was hanged on' (Chapter 2). He dismisses those who
claim they have touched Noah's ark: 'But they that say such words, say their will'
(Chapter 16). He qualifies and explains: 'That sea is not more red than another
sea; but in some place thereof is the gravel red, and therefore men clepen it the
1
'Comprehended' could mean 'understood' or 'contained' (as in a summary or treatise). 'Withholden' could mean 'kept in use' or 'restrained'. The phrase may hint at an overactive imagination.
If, as Professor Bennett thinks, Mandeville was English and made the English version himself, the
greater subtlety of the English diction is perhaps significant. The French, in Warner's edition
(Roxburghe Club, I889), p. 3, reads 'qar choses de long temps passez par le veue tornent en obly, et
memorie de homme ne peut mye tot retiner ne comprendre'.
DONALD R. HOWARD
5
Red Sea' (Chapter 8). Even when he claims first-hand experience, as of the Well
of Youth, he is cautious: 'I have drunken thereof three or four sithes, and yet,
methinketh, I fare the better' (Chapter 18). He makes a great show of his reliability:
'I wot never, but God knoweth' (Chapter 12), 'I have not been in that country ...
wherefore I may not well tell you the manner' (Chapter 14), 'I was not there, but
it was told us' (Chapter 32). About the terrestrialParadise he is especially circumspect: 'Of Paradise ne can I not speak properly. For I was not there. It is far
beyond. And that forthinketh me. And also I was not worthy. But as I have heard
say of wise men beyond, I shall tell with good will.' 'Of that place,' he concludes,
'I can say you no more; and therefore, I shall hold me still, and return to that,
that I have seen' (Chapter 33). So, at the end: 'There be many other divers countries
and many other marvels beyond, that I have not seen. Wherefore, of them I
cannot speak properly to tell you the manner of them' (Chapter 34).
Such caution is rather the virtue of the scholar than of the traveller, but it was a
standard attitude among the pilgrim-authors, who were learned men. None wanted
to be called a liar; if they included the reports of others, what doubts they cast on
less credible tales made the ones they vouched for seem the more authentic.'
Mandeville establishes his claim to authority with such a display of candour. As
we move into distant lands we encounter exotic fruits and animals, alien customs,
and races of men unlike ourselves - giants with one eye, men without heads whose
eyes are in their shoulders, men with horses' hoofs. They are all reported in the flat
language of fact, and we are seduced into believing them because he implies he
saw them and betrays no doubts. Anything is possible, he makes us feel. In the most
famous passage of the work he urges upon us the circumnavigation of the globe
(Chapter 20) -'The which thing I prove thus after that I have seen'. In evidence
he gives astronomical observations, a computation of the earth's circumference, an
empirical observation (in Jerusalem a spear stuck in the earth at noon when it is
equinox makes no shadow!), a passage from the Psalms ('Deus operatus est salutem in medio terrae'), and a tale of a man who sailed until he arrived at a land
where he heard his own language spoken - and then turned around and went
back. It is reasonable and possible, and that is all he claims. He keeps a balance
between his own credulity and the seeming fantasy of his subject matter, matching
the reader's scepticism with his own. Still, as Professor Bennett has shown (pp.
26-53) he enhanced what he found in his sources with specific details artfully
designed to lend authenticity. And certainly he did not balk at including marvels.
(c) He sacrificed practical advice: rather than give, as guide-books did, tips
about prices, contracts with ships' captains, food, transportation, and the like, he
chose to provide a vicarious experience which calls forth a frame of mind. This is
1 So, for example, with the accounts of Saewulf (who made the pilgrimage in I 102-3), Theoderich
(I1172), and Ludolf von Suchem (1336-41); they admit to including details from reliable histories
or the lips of truthful men. Others, like Burchardus [Brocardus] of Mt Sion (ca. 1232-80) and Odoricus
de Foro Julii (1330) claim they mention nothing they have not seen with their own eyes. Boldensele
(1336), Mandeville's principal source for the pilgrimage, does not appear to raise the point; Odoric
(ca. 1320), his principal source for the oriental voyage, claims to report things he saw and those he
heard which he can vouch for. Marco Polo and his collaborator, in their prologue, are very explicit:
'Our book will relate [wonders and curiosities] to you plainly in due order, as they were related by
Messer Marco Polo, a wise and noble citizen of Venice, who has seen them with his own eyes. There
is also much here that he has not seen but has heard from men of credit and veracity. We will set
down things seen as seen, things heard as heard, so that our book may be an accurate record, free
from any sort of fabrication' (translated by Ronald Latham (Baltimore, 1958) ).
6
The Worldof Mandeville'sTravels
by far his most important intention, and it will take the rest of this essay to
describe it. He went about executing it, I believe, chiefly on instinct. He had a
penchant for understatement and anticlimax. He had a habit of pairing and
juxtaposing which produced in his work a series of contrasts and contradictions.
These havesan effect not unlike the irony we admire in utopias and satiric travel
books, but it would be going too far to make him out an ironist or satirist, at least
in any modern sense. His intention, or his inclination, was to think and question,
and he invites the reader to join him in this intellectual aspect of his journey.
Mandeville's art is one of vivid, precise detail and forthright statement, but more
than that one of selection and arrangement. The most notable feature of his style
is his habit of pairing things in a complementary relationship. Polarities, oppositions, and 'tensions' are inescapable in human experience, and surely the Middle
Ages had its share of them1 - heaven and hell, Christ and Satan, God and man,
charity and cupidity, ecclesiaand mundus.Mandeville, though, saw things in pairs
more than other medieval writers did. The first two stories in the book are an
example. In Chapter 4 he tells the tale of Ypocras's daughter, transformed into a
dragon; every knight who looked upon her would die, but if one dared to kiss her
she would be turned back to her right form and he would be lord of her kingdom.
In the next chapter he tells of a damsel who died suddenly and whose lover lay
with her in the tomb; from this necrophiliac union is born an adder who flies
about the city, making it 'sink down'. Whether one interprets these two tales as
folkloristic, Jungian, or 'allegorical', they are neatly juxtaposed - both involve a
damsel, a knight, and a fabulous creature; one is about the possible and hopeful,
the other about the forbidden and dreadful; in one death may be overcome, in the
other death is hideously reproduced. It would not be impossible to see in them a
suggestionof salvation and damnation, spiritual life and spiritualdeath. At the end of
the book, two tales are similarly paired. In Chapter 30 is the tale of Gatholonabes's
false earthly paradise; immediately following in the next chapter that of the
Valley Perilous. In the one instance a man-made heaven on earth lures some but
brings others to destroy it; in the other a spot of authentic hell on earth ensnares
some but leaves others, including the narrator, untempted and unharmed.
Such paired tales would be of little interest if Mandeville had not constructed
the whole work on the same principle. The first fifteen chapters are an account of
'the Holy Land and of that country about' (Chapter i6); the remainder, an
account of a voyage into 'those countries beyond'. The whole seems a linear,
episodic narrative, combining two pre-existing genres of travel literature, with
details pilfered from many sources. In fact the book, for all its digressive qualities,
is remarkably structured; its two parts are set against each other so as to reveal a
common truth from different perspectives.
II
The Jerusalem pilgrimage (Chapters I-I5) proceeds from the familiar to the
exotic. We go from Constantinople through Greece, Egypt, and the Holy Land, to
Damascus. What people believe is a major interest of Mandeville's, as it had been
1 See R. E. Kaske's discussion of D. W. Robertson's notions in ELH: A
Journal of English Literary
History, 30 (1963), 187-8.
DONALD
R.
HOWARD
7
of other pilgrim-authors.1 The practice of Christianity becomes steadily more
exotic; at the end is an account of Saracen beliefs. His objectivity and tolerance,
even to infidels, remain exemplary. Far from excoriating their errors, he seems
altogether optimistic about their closeness to the truth. Perhaps he hoped for the
conversion of the Mohammedans more than for their conquest; but he evidently
believed, because he said so, that western Christians should look to their own
waywardness before they aspired to take the East. The call for a conquest of the
Holy Land was a clichd of pilgrims' accounts2 and Mandeville gently calls the
notion into question by suggesting that a holy war is to be fought by holy men.
Mandeville's plan 'to shew you a part of customs and manners, and diversities
of countries' (Chapter 3) thus takes on a moral tone which reflects the reforming
spirit of his age. As the lands and customs become more exotic, the contrast with
Catholic Europe becomes greater; whatever good we find in outlandish men,
whatever truth we find in their false doctrines, must give us pause. There cannot
be a doubt that this intention was in his mind. In the Prologue, he poses the
matter precisely with respect to the dream of a united crusade of nations, of lords
and commons, to regain the Holy Land:
And if we be right children of Christ, we ought for to challenge the heritage, that our Father
left us, and do it out of heathen men's hands. But now pride, covetise, and envy have so
inflamed the hearts of lords of the world, that they are more busy for to dis-herit their
neighbours, more than for to challenge or to conquer their right heritage before-said.
Mandeville ends the pilgrimage with this same point, made in the Soldan's
stinging speech in Chapter 15, which concludes,
... And that know we well by our prophecies, that Christian men shall win again this land
out of our hands, when they serve God more devoutly; but as long as they be of foul and of
unclean living (as they be now) we have no dread of them in no kind, for their God will not
help them in no wise.
To this Mandeville adds:
Alas! that it is great slander to our faith and to our law, when folk that be without law shall
reprove us and undernim us of our sins, and they that should be converted to Christ and to
the law ofJesu by our good ensamples and by our acceptable life to God, and so converted
to the law ofJesu Christ, be, through our wickedness and evil living, far from us and strangers
from the holy and very belief, shall thus appeal us and hold us for wicked livers and cursed.
He diagnoses Mohammed's visions as attacks of the falling sickness, and explains
away his prohibition against wine by telling how he was duped into believing he
had murdered a man while drunk. But he goes only this far in rejecting Mohammedanism as a false doctrine; on the whole he presents it as having much in common with Christianity and accepting many Christian ideas. Hence he is optimistic:
'because that they go so nigh our faith, they be lightly converted to Christian law.'
The Soldan's long catalogue of Christians' sins thus stands out as a rebuke to
Western Christendom.
Mandeville takes great pains to lead up to this conclusion. The pilgrimage, like
all such accounts, is an itinerary, its organization dictated by geography and
1 Most notable in Ricoldus de Monte Crucis (d. I309), Liberperegrinationis
(in Laurent,
pp. 103-41), whereheterodoxbeliefsare the author'schief preoccupation;but the beliefsof infidels
in
most
accounts.
figure
2 See Aziz S. Atiya, The Crusadein the Later Middle Ages (I938), Chapter 8, especiallypp. I61-5.
2
8
The Worldof Mandeville'sTravels
chronology. But he imposes on this linear narrative several motifs which give it a
sense of progression. For example, as he examines the shrines of the Holy Land,
episodes of the Gospels naturally come into play, and he arranges these so that they
endue the high point of the pilgrimage with an undertone of redemptive history.
In Chapter 9, at Bethlehem, the birth of Christ hovers in the background; in
Chapter 1, the Crucifixion; in Chapter I2, at the river Jordan, John the Baptist
and the Baptism of Jesus, which suggests conversion and salvation; in Chapter 13,
at Galilee where Antichrist will be born, the Day of Judgement. This background
of Christian history implies the great moral lessons of Christian historiography.
But Chapter I4 is a digression on geography which describes four routes to Jerusalem (one through Tartary); it concludes with some remarks on the Septentrion,
so far north as to touch the uninhabited zone of cold which matches that of heat in
the south, and the effect of this passage is to remind us of Jerusalem's place at the
centre of the earth. But the final statement about Christianity comes from a
Saracen, in an impartial account of Saracen beliefs.
A similar effect is attained by the alphabets which Mandeville dispersed through
the account of the pilgrimage: they become, like the lands which use them, progressively more exotic. In Chapter 3 the Greek alphabet, in 7 the 'Egyptian'
(Coptic, very garbled), in I2 the Hebrew, in 15 the Arabic. Each comes at the
end of a chapter, and so the last comes at the tail end of the pilgrimage: Mandeville,
commenting that the Arabic has four letters which other alphabets do not have,
adds that 'we in England' have two that they do not have, thornand yogh. The
detail, placed strategically last, suggests that 'our' alphabet would seem as strange
to them as theirs to us.1 The pilgrimage to the Holy Land, then, ends in an anticlimax and reversal. We expect to hear familiar devotional formulas, to be indulged
in comfortable platitudes about the true faith. Instead we get a favourable account
of Saracen beliefs, a rebuke to Christians, and a reminder to look to ourselves.
At the shrines in the Holy Land there is fervent devotion, of course, and the
author makes things seem familiar and credible by constant reference to the Bible.
Yet the account is interspersedwith exotic touches - the priests of India who use a
simple liturgy without 'the additions that many Popes have made; but they sing
with good devotion' (Chapter Io); the Saracen custom of removing the shoes in a
'temple', which the author's fellows and he followed to show as much devotion
'as any of the misbelieving men should' (Chapter I I); the beliefs of the Samaritans
(Chapter I2), of the Jacobites who reject auricular confession, the Syrians,
Georgians, and Nestorians (Chapter 13), and finally of the Saracens (Chapter 15).
The venture into the Holy Land thus becomes a mirror in which the 'true' Christian of the West sees himself reflected: different in beliefs and customs, with the
advantage of the true faith and true church, but not better in practising this
faith. Professor Bloomfield finds in this feature of Mandeville's book a sense of
history and of cultural diversity.2 From scholastic philosophy medieval men had
learned of a 'natural religion' implanted in all men's reason. Some came to believe
1 Mandeville's
capacity for seeing into and beyond the limitations of one's own customs and ideas
is best treated by Christian K. Zacher, Curiositasand the Impulsesfor Pilgrimagein Fourteenth-century
English Literature(University of California dissertation, 1969), pp. I69-213.
2 Morton W. Bloomfield, 'Chaucer's Sense of
History', J.E.G.P., 51 (1952), 30I-I3,
reprinted in
Essays and Explorations:Studiesin Ideas, Language,and Literature(Cambridge, Massachusetts, I970),
especially pp. 23-4.
DONALD
R.
HOWARD
9
it was possible for all men to know the truth in some murky way, and the idea
made them more tolerant and more curious toward infidels and schismatics. This
sense of cultural diversity spurred the spirit of reform. Few medieval men, however
curious about strange lands, doubted that the Church of Rome was the true church
and its dogmas the true faith; there is not a scrap of evidence that Mandeville
entertained such doubts, though an earlier editor, Hamelius, advanced elaborate
arguments to that effect. But men's failure to live up to the advantages of the
true church distressed earnest Christians of the West, and some contemplated in
their imaginations the simple and good intentions of the misguided in the East.
One way Mandeville makes this point is in his treatment of relics. Relics have been
called the true religion of the late Middle Ages, which was perhaps so at the
popular level; but they were still a scandal. Erasmus's famous spoof had a long
tradition behind it, the Pardoner's 'pigges bones' being one example. In spite of
abuses, however, the Canterbury pilgrimage existed because the saint's body lay in
the Cathedral, the Jerusalem pilgrimage because that was the soil the Lord had
walked upon. Mandeville is very respectful of true relics, and eager to inform the
reader which are authentic. Of the Templum Domini in Jerusalem he says, 'in
this temple was Charlemagne when that the angel brought him the prepuce of our
Lord Jesus Christ of his circumcision; and after, King Charles let bring it to Paris
into his chapel, and after that he let bring it to Peyteres, and after that to Chartres'
(Chapter I ). In Chapter I2 he gives a detailed account of the head of St John
the Baptist: its hinder part is at Constantinople, the forepart to the chin at Rome,
the jaws at Genoa. But then he comes to the point: 'And some men say that the
head of Saint John is at Amiens in Picardy; and other men say that it is the head of
Saint John the Bishop. I wot never, but God knoweth; but in what wise that men
worship it, the blessed Saint John holds him a-paid.' By heaping up a charnelhouse of specific details, Mandeville shows that the relics are dispersed all over
Europe and in their wake a thousand rival claims; behind them, he suggests, is a
spiritual and historical reality - Saints who walked the earth as men, whose lives
are preserved in the story of the Christian faith, and who, from Heaven, see into
our hearts.
The Holy Land is presented as a relic of sorts. The long list of places and shrines
there is disjunctive and unstructured. Each site takes its meaning from its part in the
Old or New Testament, in the Christian story. The reader's familiarity with this
story is taken for granted. The way places now look is not glossed over, and the
distance between the present and the biblical past is emphasized:
Aftergo men by the hill besidethe plainsof Galileeunto Nazareth,wherewaswont to be a
great city and a fair; but now thereis not but a little village,and housesabroadhere and
there.And it is not walled.And it sits in a little valley, and therebe hills all about. There
was our Lady born. (Chapter13)
The style of these passages (Chapters 9-I4), with its paratactic sentence structure,
its 'and's' and jumble of details, is especially appropriate. We see, as one would on
pilgrimage, towns and shrines all helter-skelter, learn odd bits of information and
glimpse curiosities as we pass. The disjunctive reality of things seen and reported
is like scales before our eyes which we must remove to see their meaning. All
tangible, visible things pertinent to the faith take their meaning from the Bible
and from the faith of individual Christians. At the end (Chapter 15), we learn to
our discomfort, the Saracens say that Christian men 'be cursed also... for they
IO
The Worldof Mandeville'sTravels
keep not the commandments and the precepts of the gospel that Jesu Christ
taught them'.
Mandeville's art in leading the reader behind a cultural institution to moral and
spiritual essentials makes him seem a social critic or a satirist. It is possible - some
have done it - to take such a view too far, to make him a More or Swift with
specific axes to grind. Yet his work is more like other such accounts of his time than
like a later utopia or satire. If his book is ironic it is because travel itself is ironic:
things are other than what we expect at home, and the contrast turns us back upon
ourselves. Mandeville grasped this instructive feature of travelling better than
previous authors. Perhaps because he saw from afar, through a world of books, he
saw more thoughtfully. Professor Zacher styles him a curiosus,an intellectual, an
observer and reader whose keenness led him to contemplate distant lands and the
circumnavigation of the globe and the wonder and promise of creation.' But at the
key moments of his narrative he turns his eyes within, for he is no less curious
about the essentials of man's life than about the corners of the globe.
III
The second part of the Travels,from Chapter i6, is an exploration of'those countries
beyond' which are divided by the four rivers 'that come from paradise terrestrial'.
Seven chapters (i6-22) are devoted to the lands from Albania to Dondun, seven
(23-9) to the Great Chan and the lands on either side of Cathay, and five (30-34)
to the land of PresterJohn and adjacent isles. What holds the two parts together
is Mandeville's treatment of time. Though he is often viewed as an early
geographer, his interest in distant lands has little to do with space.2 He finds
significance rather in peoples, customs, and history. He starts out a young knight
from St Albans and returns an old man with arthritic gouts, 'recording the time
passed'. The account of his experiences which he pieces together in the teeth of
forgetfulness creates not a memoir of his journey but an image of antiquity. Relics
are dispersed and disputed, and the sites and shrines to visit are memorials - often
decrepit, ill cared for, and in Saracens' hands; behind them lie meaningful stories
of the past.
In the second part, the voyage into the Orient, the sweep of time reaches as much
farther into the past as the voyage itself reaches across the earth. He turns from the
Judaeo-Christian story to the story of all peoples. At the end of his journey, just
beyond his reach outside the land of PresterJohn, lies 'Paradise terrestrial, where
that Adam, our formest father, and Eve were put, that dwelled there but little
while: and that is toward the east at the beginning of the earth' (Chapter 33).
1 Zacher, especially pp. 184-205, develops the point, with more subtlety than can be reported in a
footnote, that Mandeville's 'curiosity' is historically akin to the intellectual pursuits and exploratory
voyages of Renaissance men. He sees in the plan of the work an embodiment of this historical movement from medieval pilgrimage to Renaissance voyage, and finds in Mandeville an inclination like
Petrarch's 'to make many brief visits with maps, and books, and imagination'.
2 The pilgrimage inscribes a half-circle from Constantinople south through Greece and Egypt
and north to the Holy Land and Damascus, but with many digressions and alternate routes. The
second journey is a separate one, not a continuation of the first, which inscribes a larger half-circle
from Albania through Libya and Ethiopia, across the Sea of India, south to Java and north to
Cathay, with digressions for surrounding lands. How this 'looked' in Mandeville's mind is impossible
to say; it is as good a guess as any that he had no map, real or imagined, but pieced together his
geography from books. Zacher suggests that he had a kind of fixation on roundness, which is probably
true; but there is no cyclical movement in his voyages, no return voyage or return to a starting-point.
DONALD R. HOWARD
II
From this paradise, described in the next to last chapter, flow the four rivers which
divide the 'countries beyond'. As these rivers of Paradise embrace the eastern
terrain, the conception of lost paradise and the early history of man hovers over the
entire account. At the outset, we learn of Noah's ship on Mount Ararat (Chapter
I6). We learn later how Noah's sons Cham, Shem, and Japhet, took the three
continents, Asia, Africa, and Europe, and so gave birth to the Asiatics, the Saracens,
and the people of Israel. In the time of Nimrod, 'the fiends of hell came many times
and lay with the women of his generation and engendered on them diverse folk,
as monsters and folk disfigured, some without heads, some with great ears, some
with one eye, some giants, some with horses' feet, and many other diverse shape
against kind. And of that generation of Cham be come the Paynims and divers
folk that be in isles of the sea by all Ind' (Chapter 24). We learn that the
round earth itself is wasted: 'And there as mountains and hills be and valleys, that
is not but only of Noah's flood, that wasted the soft ground and the tender, and fell
down into valleys, and the hard earth and the rocks abide mountains, when the
soft earth and tender waxed nesh through the water, and fell and became valleys'
(Chapter 33). There is a lake at Silha where Adam and Eve wept a hundred years
(21), the land ofJob, and Babylon 'where that all the languages were first changed'
(I7).
In the distant past lies the dispersal of individuals, peoples, and languages;
at the root of all, the explusion from Paradise.
The multiplicity of living things which he records, all sports of nature, strange
animals, and misshapen creatures, reflect the decline of created nature from its
primeval state.1 It is as if, in selecting these stories, he wished to show humanity
all out of shape, bloated, shrunken, coming apart at the seams, infinitely multiplied
and diverse. No sooner does he report dispassionately the blackness of the Ethiopians (Chapter I7) than he gives us people 'of evil colour, green and yellow' (18).
There are men who have one foot so large it can shade them from the sun (I7),
men whose 'ballocks' hang to their knees because of the heat (I8), men with hounds'
heads, giants with one eye, men without heads whose eyes are in their shoulders,
flat-faced men without noses or mouths, men with gigantic upper lips and dwarves
with no mouth save a little hole, men whose ears hang to their knees, or who have
horses' hooves, or who go on all fours, hermaphrodites, men who walk on their
knees and have eight toes to a foot, pigmies who scorn and enslave men 'of our
stature' (Chapters
I2-2),
dwarves who live by the smell of wild apples (32),
bestial giants (3I). These are mixed helter-skelter with oddments of the animal
kingdom - elephants, crocodiles who eat men weeping (3I), plus serpents,
dragons, giant snails and worms, geese with two heads, white lions the size of
oxen, fish who annually offer themselves to death 'against kinde'
(21),
griffins (29);
1 This cluster of medieval beliefs, much studied in recent
years, involves (I) an earthly paradise
in a distant place, (2) a golden age at the beginning of time, (3) a normative concept of nature
against which corruption and decline are measured, (4) the decline and senescence of the world,
(5) the vanity of arts and sciences, (6) the possible 'nobility' of the savage, the preference for wilderness over civilization and simplicity over diversity or complexity. Against this 'soft' primitivism, often
associated with the prelapsarian state, one can distinguish a 'hard' primitivism in which human
skills and civilized virtues can repair the ruins of the fall. See George Boas, Essays on Primitivismand
RelatedIdeas in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, 1948); A. Bartlett Giamatti, The EarthlyParadiseand the
RenaissanceEpic (Princeton, 1966), pp. 3-93; George H. Williams, Wildernessand Paradisein Christian
Thought(New York, I962), pp. 28-64; Charles S. Singleton, Journeyto Beatrice(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1958), pp. I41-58. The relationship of these ideas to the medieval feeling for the multiple,
the 'unnatural', and the grotesque deserves study.
I2
The Worldof Mandeville'sTravels
and in the vegetable world, trees that will not burn or rot, trees that grow out of
and return into the earth each day, trees that bear meal, honey, venom, wine,
a 'little beast', and wool (Chapters 21, 29-31).
Against this tapestry of grotesques, Mandeville depicts the kingdoms of the East
in a high state of civilization, having many wonders and riches, even a 'natural'
religion of merit. He suggests an inherent goodness in created nature, an inherent
rightness in man's reason. He has hope for, and a lively interest in, civilization
and the world. He believes the globe can be circumnavigated, and advances evidence to support his claim; but he offers no motive for undertaking such a journey
beyond curiosity. He thinks all parts of the earth are inhabited including the
antipodes (Chapter 20), as far as the uninhabitable
zones (I4), and he pieces
together a compendium of its varieties because 'new things and new tidings be
pleasant to hear'. Behind this conception lies what Professor Lovejoy called the
principle of plenitude - the conviction that God created all beings for which there
was a place in the hierarchical order of things, that all potentialities have been
fulfilled.' Nature thus created became corrupt after the Fall, so that its plenitude
was felt to be grotesque, malformed, gone awry. The command to go forth and
multiply was itself a result of the Fall. Mandeville's treatment of nature in this way
expresses contrary ideas and ambivalent feelings - wonder at the fullness of God's
creation, horror at its corruptness; admiration for the order of things, distress at a
loss of control in that order; a notion of a golden age from which the world has
declined, yet a faith in man's capacity to improve the world.
Mandeville envisages in the Far East a state of nature marked by such contrarieties.2 The men in this state are capable of reason and civilized virtues, but
are like animals. On the Isle of Lamary (Chapter 20), the people go naked, arguing
that 'God made Adam and Eve all naked' and are not ashamed of their nakedness
'for nothing is foul that is of kindly nature'. They believe in God 'that formed the
world, and that made Adam and Eve and all other things'. They practise free
communal sexuality (arguing that God commanded us to multiply and fill the
earth) and communism of lands and goods (reporting that one man there is as
rich as another). With a Swiftian touch, Mandeville saves till last the news that
they are cannibals:
But in that countrythereis a cursedcustom,for they eat moregladlyman'sfleshthan any
otherflesh;and yet is that countryabundantof flesh,of fish,of corns,of gold and silver,and
of all othergoods.Thithergo merchantsand bringwith themchildrento sell to them of the
country,and theybuy them.And if theybe fat they eat them anon.And if theybe lean they
feed themtill they be fat, and then they eat them.And they say, that it is the bestfleshand
the sweetestof all the world.
This motif of cannibalism recurs several times after- on the Isle of Milke men
drink other men's blood ('which they clepe Dieu'), and on the Isle of Nacumera
the men with hounds' heads, though 'full reasonable and of good understanding',
eat their captives (Chapter 21). In the land of Prester John are beast-like giants
who 'eat more gladly Man's flesh than any other flesh' (3 ). What is most shocking
1 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The GreatChainof
Being (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1936, reprinted New
York, 1960), pp. 45-55.
2 On this combination of two kinds of
'primitivism', see Erwin Panofsky, Studiesin Iconology(New
York, 1939, reprinted I962), pp. 33-67.
DONALD R. HOWARD
I3
about this cannibalism is that the men are not reduced to itl but come by it naturally, believe in it, have doctrines about it. For example, there are men who teach
dogs to strangle sick friends and who then 'eat their flesh instead of venison'.
They suppose this an act of kindness to the sick: 'For they will not that they die of
kindly death. For they say, that they should suffer too great pain if they abide to
die by themselves, as nature would' (Chapter 21).
Mandeville does not hesitate to judge this cannibalism, but he reports beliefs
and ideas about it with an unremitting tolerance. At the lowest extreme, he gives
us peoples too close to animals to have beliefs- dog-headed men (Chapter 2I),
men with horses' hooves (22), creatures who are half man and half horse (29),
the men of Tracoda who eat snakes, hiss instead of talk, and covet nothing but one
precious stone (21), wild men that have horns and grunt like pigs (30), hairy
amphibious men, dwarfs that 'be not full reasonable, but they be simple and
beastial' (32). And what people think and believe is as various as what they are and
do. Some worship an ox or practise cremation; some practise polygamy ( 8, 21);
some sacrifice to idols (22). At the highest extreme, he gives us two long chapters
on the history, governance, law, and customs of the Great Chan (Chapters 25-6),
'the most mighty emperor of the world and the greatest lord under the firmament'
(24), who is worshipped as 'God's Son and sovereign lord of all the world' but who
tolerates Christiansin his empire and permits conversions to Christianity among his
subjects, 'for he defendeth no man to hold no law other than him liketh' (25).
We learn the same of the Tartars: although they mean to put all lands under their
subjection, they know from their prophecies that they will be conquered 'but
they know not of what nation ne of what law they shall be of, that shall overcome
them. And therefore they suffer that folk of all laws may peaceably dwell amongst
them' (Chapter 26). Subsequently Mandeville reminds us, 'ne were not cursedness
and sin of Christian men, they should be lords of all the world' (28).
Mandeville prepares us throughout the exploration of the East to view this
state of nature, this land of men living under natural law, which may be contrasted
with Christian civilization under grace. It is foreshadowed in the description of the
Isle of Lamary (Chapter 20), whose inhabitants go naked and follow a pristine
communistic life, but are cannibals; it is presented at the end, in the description of
the Isle of Bragman (Chapter 32).
Both these descriptions are preceded by passages in which the customs and beliefs
of exotic peoples parody Christianity. It is another instance of Mandeville's tendency to use contraries for their suggestive power. Just before the description of
Lamary, in Chapter I9, we are told about the idolatrous people of Calamye,
where St Thomas the Apostle was martyred. The people go on a pilgrimage to an
idol, 'the god of false Christians that have reneyed their faith... as commonly
and with as great devotion as Christian men go to Saint James, or other holy
pilgrimages'. The pilgrims gash themselves with sharp knives as they go, for 'they
say, that he is blessed and holy, that dieth so for love of his god'. They even sacrifice
their children to the idol. They take incense and 'cense the idol, as we would do
here God's precious body'. When on feast days the idol is brought through the
streets on a car,
1
As in Pope Innocent III's De Miseria HumanaeConditionis,I, 29, from Josephus, De Bello Judaico,
VI, 3-4.
I4
The Worldof Mandeville'sTravels
... some of them fall down under the wheels of the car, and let the car go over them, so
that they be dead anon. And some have their arms or their limbs all to-broken, and some the
sides. And all this do they for love of their god, in great devotion. And them thinketh that
the more pain, and the more tribulation that they suffer for love of their god, the more joy
they shall have in another world. And, shortly to say you, they suffer so great pains, and so
hard martyrdoms for love of their idol, that a Christian man, I trow, durst not take upon
him the tenth part the pain for love of our LordJesu Christ.
Those who slay themselves before the idol, Mandeville adds, are called saints:
And as men here devoutly would write holy saints' lives and their miracles, and sue for their
canonizations, right so do they there for them that slay themselves wilfully for love of their
idol, and say, that they be glorious martyrs and saints, and put them in their writings and
in their litanies, and avaunt them greatly, one to another, of their holy kinsmen that so
become saints, and say, I have more holy saints in my kindred, than thou in thine!
When these 'saints' sacrifice themselves to the idol, their friends present their
bodies to the idol crying 'He hath forsaken his wife and his children and his riches,
and all the goods of the world and his own life for the love of thee', a passage which
echoes Matthew XIX, 21. And when they have burned his body they each take
some ashes 'and keep them instead of relics'.
Before the description of Bragman, in Chapter 31, there is a similar but shorter
passage. We are told of an isle where the women 'make great sorrow' when their
children are born, but feast and make joy over a man's death. Women who love
their husbands cast themselves with their children upon the flames which burn his
corpse, expecting the fire to 'cleanse them of all filths and of all vices' so that they
will go pure into another world with their husbands. Mandeville adds:
And the cause why that they weep, when their children be born is this; for when they come
into this world, they come to labour,sorrowand heaviness.And why they makejoy and
gladnessat their dying is becausethat, as they say, then they go to Paradisewhere the
riversrun milk and honey, where that men see them in joy and in abundanceof goods,
withoutsorrowand labour.
Both these passages permit the Christian reader to see in the customs of Orientals
grotesque reflections of themselves, exaggerated parodies of the pessimistic, the
death-loving side of Christianity, with its emphasis on self-abnegation, 'mortification', and martyrdom, its cult of martyrsand relics, its preoccupation with 'contempt
of the world', 'the misery of the human condition', 'the art of dying'. The most
extreme form of this pessimism and world-renunciation, the Catharist heresy,
stunned Christendom in the twelfth century and inspired a number of countermeasures - the Franciscan and Dominican orders among them, the Albigensian
Crusade, and the Inquisition. What was shocking about the Cathars was their
hatred of matter (which made them reject, for example, the Incarnation and the
sacraments), their conviction that childbirth was sinful because it imprisoned a
soul in a material body, and their practice of ritual suicide by starvation. In spite
of this heresy, however, Christianity retained its dolorous aspect, which from the
twelfth century became more violent in expression. The classic work, Pope Innocent III's De MiseriaHumanaeConditionis,
may have been written in part to express
a Christian pessimismwhich did not verge into heresy.' Such workswere immensely
1 See Lothario dei Segni (Pope Innocent III), On the Misery of the HumanCondition,translated by
M. M. Dietz, edited by Donald R. Howard (Indianapolis and New York, i969), pp. xviii-xx.
DONALD
R.
HOWARD
I5
the more
popular, and the gloomy tendency had other manifestations -in
exuberant monastic reforms, the 'dance of death', the 'memento mori', perhaps in
the 'children's crusade' or in the flagellantes.Mandeville in both passages neatly
pinpoints the essential difficulty in this frame of mind: its extremes were, at least
in spirit, suicidal. But in both instances he follows the grotesque exaggeration with a
description of a 'state of nature'. In the first instance, the state of nature, with its
cannibalism, turns out no more endearing as a style of life than the suicidal devotion
in the description which precedes it, and a Christian reader with his wits about him
would have seen that Christianity, rightly practised, steered a mean course between
such extremes, forbidding self-destruction and the destruction of others.
The Isle of Bragman (Chapter 32) is different. It is called the Land of Faith.
Being in the empire of PresterJohn, it is open to Christian influence. We learn first
that its inhabitants, 'albeit that they be not christened, ne have no perfect law, yet,
natheles, of kindly law they be full of all virtue, and they eschew all vices and all
malices and all sins'. They follow the Golden Rule: 'Ne they do to any man otherwise than they would that other men did to them, and in this point they fulfil the
ten commandments of God, and give no charge of avoir, ne of riches.' They do not
lie, steal, murder, beg, or practise prostitution, and are so chaste and lead such good
lives 'as that they were religious men, and they fast all days'. By consequence they
suffer no tempests, pestilence, war, or hunger- 'Wherefore, it seemeth well, that
God loveth them and is pleased with their creaunce for their good deeds. They
believe well in God, that made all things, and him they worship.' In this description, which comes from the Alexander Romances, we learn that when Alexander
proposed to conquer them they persuaded him that the simplicity of their lives left
nothing he could take from them except their peace. Mandeville leads up to the
description artfully. He precedes it in Chapters 30 and 31 with the accounts of
Gathonolabes's false paradise and of the Valley Perilous, of giants, evil-eyed
women, men who fear taking a woman's maidenhead, and the people who bemoan
birth and celebrate death. By contrast, Bragman seems utopian.
Whereas in the Holy Land, at the heart of Christendom, we found Saracens, here
at the earth's end we find a simplified, primeval Christianity. PresterJohn, we know,
'is Christian, and a great part of his country also. But yet, they have not all the
articles of our faith as we have. They believe well in the Father, in the Son, and in
the Holy Ghost. And they be full devout and right true one to another. And
they set not by no barretts, ne by cautels, nor of no deceits' (Chapter 30). They
sing Mass as the Apostles did, 'as our Lord taught them' (Chapter 32), without
later additions. Their faith is archaic and uncomplicated. Mandeville does not
say that this makes it better than western Christianity, but he concludes that
'God loveth always them that love him, and serve him meekly in truth, and namely
them that despise the vain glory of this world, as this folk do and as Job did also'
(Chapter 32). Like the relics and shrines of the Holy Land or the peoples and
creatures of the East, all things to be seen in the world bespeak a past age from
which the world has declined. In the land of Prester John we discover a 'good
faith natural', and are told that God has other servants than those under Christian
law. In the next chapter we get a description of a region of darkness stretching
'from this coast unto Paradise terrestrial, where that Adam, our formest father,
and Eve were put, that dwelled there but little while: and that is towards the east
at the beginning of the earth'. But no mortal man may approach it.
i6
The Worldof Mandeville'sTravels
The last chapter, though it appears an anticlimax of the kind Mandeville liked,
contains a startling turnabout. On the Isle of Rybothe, the 'Lobassy' ('the pope
of their law') gives benefices, 'and all those that hold anything of their churches,
religious and other, obey to him, as men do here to the Pope of Rome'. This
religion, made pointedly like that of western Christendom,1 involves a fantastic
cannibal rite which seems a nightmare version of the Christian mass. When a man
dies, his son has the body decapitated and cut into tiny pieces which are fed to the
birds. Mandeville adds details to the barebones account he had from Odoric:
'And after that, as priests amongst us sing for the dead, SubveniteSanctiDei, etc.,
right so the priests sing with high voice in their language; Behold how so worthy
a man and how good a man this was, that the angels of God come for to seek him
and for to bring him into Paradise.' He who is eaten by the largest number of birds
is most worshipped. The son gives a feast at which the flesh of his father's head is
served to his most special friends. The skull is then made into a cup, 'and thereof
drinketh he and his other friends also, with great devotion, in remembrance of the
holy man, that the angels of God have eaten. And that cup the son shall keep to
drink of all his lifetime in remembrance of his father.' This passage, which sounds
from one point of view like an acerb parody of Christian beliefs and practices,
reintroduces the theme of cannibalism; but here it is shorn of any destructive or
aggressive motive, impregnated with filial piety, with tenderness, with dignified
family love, and redolent of the Holy Communion even down to the echo of
Christ's injunction 'do this in remembrance of Me'.2 It is one of the most startling
passages in English literature, a turning-about of accustomed values which mocks
nothing but questions everything. It asks us to behold a cannibalism not savage or
repugnant but tender, dignified, and pious. It subtly reminds us of the Christian
rites at which the Body and Blood of the Lord are consumed, but throws attention
upon the spirit in which men perform such rites. Mandeville expresses no repugnance whatever at this curious anti-sacrament (Odoric called it, and made it seem,
'vile and abominable'). Like other passages it makes the customs of the East a
distorted reflection of the West, forcing a comparison of the two. Mandeville
concludes by emphasizing the diversity of beliefs and their common denominator
of truth:
And ye shall understand, that of all these countries, and of all these isles, and all the diverse
folk, that I have spoken of before, and of diverse laws, and of diverse beliefs that they have,
yet is there none of them all but that they have some reason within them and understanding,
but if it be the fewer, and that have certain articles of our faith and some good points of our
belief, and that they believe in God, that formed all things and made the world, and clepe
him God of Nature; after that the prophet saith . .. 'All folk shall serve him.'
They know of the Bible, he reports, 'and namely of Genesis, of the prophet's saws
and of the books of Moses'. They know of God but not of the Trinity. They worship
creatures not as gods but 'for the virtue that is in them, that may not be but only
by the grace of God'. They have idols, but argue that so do all people, including
1 Mandeville
developed a hint in Friar Odoric, Chapter 15, who refers to 'their Pope'. Professor
Bennett (p. 47, n. 25), identifies the supposedly Tibetan funeral service as a Zoroastrian custom.
2
Odoric says it is done in remembrance of his dead and devoured father; Mandeville substitutes
for the reminder that he has been devoured a reminder that he is reckoned holy, and repeats 'in
remembrance of his father' at the end of the account.
DONALD R. HOWARD
I7
Christian men, 'as of our Lady and of other saints that we worship', and that such
images and paintings are useful to teach the 'lewd folk' to worship, as books teach
clerks to do so.
Mandeville's ideas were respectable ideas of his time, and his spirit was large
enough to encompass them in their full complexity. He would have western
Christians conquer the Holy Land and convert the East but not without examining
and reforming their own lives - and they could learn to do so even from heathens.
On one side, his idea of reform tends to a brand of primitivism which supposes a
pristine faith and simple virtues among 'natural' men. On the other side, though
he sees the corrupted world in decline from its first age, he rejects extremes of selfabnegation and self-destruction, placing value upon civilization, government,
learning. He is an enthusiast of travel who would have men of the future sail about
the earth; but the fragmented curiosities, the relics and ruins which the voyager
observes, have their meaning from the past, and the past is known to us from books.
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
DONALD R. HOWARD