Mandeville's Travels
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, commonly known as Mandeville's Travels, is a book written between 1357 and 1371 that purports to be the travelogue of an Englishman named Sir John Mandeville across the Near East as far as India and China. The earliest-surviving text is in French, followed by translations into many other languages; the work acquired extraordinary popularity. Despite the extremely unreliable and often fantastical nature of the travels it describes, it was used as a work of reference: Christopher Columbus, for example, was heavily influenced by both this work and Marco Polo's earlier Travels.
According to the book, John de Mandeville crossed the sea in 1322. He traversed by way of Turkey, Tartary, Persia, Armenia, the Holy Land, Syria, Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Abyssinia, Chaldea, the land of the Amazons, India, China and many countries in the region. He had often been to Jerusalem, and had written in Romance languages as they were generally more widely understood than Latin.
It is fairly clear that "Sir John Mandeville" was an invented author, and various suggestions have been put forward as to the real one. Most of these are figures from France or the Low Countries who had not travelled as widely as the author; none have achieved general acceptance. The book very largely depends on other travel books, sometimes embroidered with legendary or fantastical elements. Mandeville's Travels may contain facts and knowledge acquired by actual travels and residents in the East, at least in the sections focused on the Holy Land, Egypt, the Levant and the means of getting there. The prologue points almost exclusively to the Holy Land as the subject of the work. The mention of more distant regions comes in only towards the end of this prologue and as an afterthought. However, this is commensurate with Mandeville's emphasis on 'curiositas'—wandering—rather than Christian 'scientia'.
Odoric of Pordenone
The greater part of these more distant travels, extending from Trebizond to Hormuz, India, the Malay Archipelago and China, and back to western Asia, has been appropriated from the narrative of Friar Odoric. These passages are almost always swollen with interpolated particulars, usually of an extravagant kind. However, in a number of cases the writer has failed to understand those passages which he adopts from Odoric and professes to give as his own experiences. Thus, where Odoric has given a most curious and veracious account of the Chinese custom of employing tame cormorants to catch fish, the cormorants are converted by Mandeville into "little beasts called loyres which are taught to go into the water".At a very early date the coincidence of Mandeville's stories with those of Odoric was recognized, insomuch that a manuscript of Odoric which is or was in the chapter library at Mainz begins with the words: "Incipit Itinerarius fidelis fratris Odorici socii Militis Mendavil per Indian; licet hic ille prius et alter posterius peregrinationem suam descripsit". At a later day Sir Thomas Herbert calls Odoric "travelling companion of our Sir John" Mandeville and anticipates criticism, in at least one passage, by suggesting the probability of his having travelled with Odoric.
Hetoum
Much of Mandeville's matter, particularly in Asiatic geography and history, is taken from the La Flor des Estoires d'Orient of Hetoum, an Armenian of princely family, who became a monk of the Praemonstrant or Premonstratensian order, and in 1307 dictated this work on the East, in the French tongue at Poitiers, out of his own extraordinary acquaintance with Asia and its history in his own time. A story of the fortress at Corycus, or the Castle Sparrowhawk, appears in Mandeville's Book.Marco Polo
No passage in Mandeville can be plausibly traced to Marco Polo, with one exception. This is where he states that at Hormuz the people during the great heat lie in water—a circumstance mentioned by Polo, though not by Odoric. It is most likely that this fact had been interpolated in the copy of Odoric used by Mandeville, for if he had borrowed it directly from Polo he could have borrowed more.Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and Vincent de Beauvais
A good deal about the manners and customs of the Tatars is demonstrably derived from the work of the Franciscan Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, who went as the pope's ambassador to the Tatars in 1245–1247; but Dr. Warner considers that the immediate source for Mandeville was the Speculum historiale of Vincent de Beauvais. Though the passages in question are all to be found in Carpine more or less exactly, the expression is condensed and the order changed. For examples compare Mandeville, p. 250, on the tasks done by Tatar women, with Carpine, p. 643; Mandeville. p. 250, on Tatar habits of eating, with Carpine, pp. 639–640; Mandeville, p. 231, on the titles borne on the seals of the Great Khan, with Carpine, p. 715, etc.The account of Prester John is taken from the famous Epistle of that imaginary, which was widely diffused in the 13th century. Many fabulous stories, again, of monsters, such as Cyclopes, sciapodes, hippopodes, anthropophagi, monoscelides, and men whose heads did grow beneath their shoulders; of the phoenix and the weeping crocodile, such as Pliny has collected, are introduced here and there, derived no doubt from him, Solinus, the bestiaries, or the Speculum naturale of Vincent de Beauvais. And interspersed, especially in the chapters about the Levant, are the stories and legends that were retailed to every pilgrim, such as the legend of Seth and the grains of paradise from which grew the wood of the cross, that of the shooting of old Cain by Lamech, that of the castle of the sparrow-hawk, those of the origin of the balsam plants at Masariya, of the dragon of Cos, of the river Sambation, etc.
Authorship
In the preface, the compiler calls himself a knight, and states that he was born and bred in England, in the town of St Albans. Although the book is real, it is widely believed that "Sir John Mandeville" himself was not. Common theories point to a Frenchman by the name of Jehan à la Barbe. Other possibilities are discussed below.Some more recent scholars have suggested that Mandeville's Travels was most likely written by, a Fleming who wrote in Latin under the name Johannes Longus. Jan de Langhe was born in Ypres early in the 1300s and by 1334 had become a Benedictine monk at the abbey of Saint-Bertin in Saint-Omer, which was about 20 miles from Calais. After studying law at the University of Paris, Langhe returned to the abbey and was elected abbot in 1365. He was a prolific writer and avid collector of travelogues, right up to his death in 1383.
Contemporary corroboration
At least part of Mandeville's Travels and the life of John Mandeville is mere invention. No contemporary corroboration of the existence of such a Jehan de Mandeville is known. Some French manuscripts, not contemporary, give a Latin letter of presentation from him to Edward III of England, but so vague that it might have been penned by any writer on any subject.Compilation is thought, in large part, to have come from a Liège physician known as Johains à le Barbe or Jehan à la Barbe, otherwise Jehan de Bourgogne. Evidence for this comes from a modernized extract quoted by the Liège herald, Louis Abry, from the lost fourth book of the Myreur des Hystors of Johans des Preis, styled d'Oultremouse. In this, "Jean de Bourgogne, dit a la Barbe" is said to have revealed himself on his deathbed to d'Oultremouse, whom he made his executor, and to have described himself in his will as "messire Jean de Mandeville, chevalier, comte de Montfort en Angleterre et seigneur de l'isle de Campdi et du château Pérouse ".
It is added that, having had the misfortune to kill an unnamed count in his own country, he engaged himself to travel through the three parts of the world, arrived at Liège in 1343, was a great naturalist, profound philosopher and astrologer, and had a remarkable knowledge of physics. The identification is confirmed by the fact that in the now destroyed church of the Guillemins was a tombstone of Mandeville, with a Latin inscription stating that he was otherwise named "ad Barbam", was a professor of medicine, and died at Liège on 17 November 1372: this inscription is quoted as far back as 1462.
Even before his death, the Liège physician seems to have confessed to a share in the circulation of, and additions to, the work. In the common Latin abridged version of it, at the end of c. vii., the author says that when stopping in the sultan's court at Cairo he met a venerable and expert physician of "our" parts, but that they rarely came into conversation because their duties were of a different kind, but that long afterwards at Liège he composed this treatise at the exhortation and with the help of the same venerable man, as he will narrate at the end of it.
And in the last chapter, he says that in 1355, on returning home, he came to Liège, and being laid up with old age and arthritic gout in the street called Bassesavenyr, i.e. Basse-Sauvenière, consulted the physicians. That one came in who was more venerable than the others by reason of his age and white hairs, was evidently expert in his art, and was commonly called Magister Iohannes ad Barbam. That a chance remark of the latter caused the renewal of their old Cairo acquaintance, and that Ad Barbam, after showing his medical skill on Mandeville, urgently begged him to write his travels; "and so at length, by his advice and help, monitu et adiutorio, was composed this treatise, of which I had certainly proposed to write nothing until at least I had reached my own parts in England". He goes on to speak of himself as being now lodged in Liège, "which is only two days distant from the sea of England"; and it is stated in the colophon that the book was first published in French by Mandeville, its author, in 1355, at Liège, and soon after in the same city translated into "said" Latin form. Moreover, a manuscript of the French text extant at Liège about 1860 contained a similar statement, and added that the author lodged at a hostel called "al hoste Henkin Levo": this manuscript gave the physician's name as "Johains de Bourgogne dit ale barbe", which doubtless conveys its local form.