by Giles Milton
Prester John, by the Grace of God, most powerful king over all Christian kings, greetings to the Emperor of Rome and the King of France, our friends:
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We wish you to learn about us, our position, the government of our land, and our people and our beasts . . . We let you know that we worship and believe in Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three persons in one Deity and one true God only [and] that we have the highest crown on earth as well as gold, silver, precious stones and strong fortresses, cities, towns, castles and boroughs. We have under our sway forty-two kings who are all good and mighty Christians . . . know also we have promised and sworn in our good faith to conquer the Sepulchre of Our Lord and the whole Promised Land . . .
The letter goes on to recount the natural abundance of the land and the incredible animals that live there; it speaks of the palaces and monuments that adorn the country, and records how the empire is ruled as a Utopian state, before finishing with the words: "If Thou canst count the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea, judge the vastness of our realm and our power."
This was not the first time that news of Prester John had been brought to the attentions of Europe. Some thirty years earlier a bishop from Asia Minor had visited the Pope in order to argue the case for a new crusade, and while staying at the papal palace, this bishop had been introduced to a German historian called Otto of Freising, to whom he recounted a similar story about a mighty Christian emperor of India.
Otto was fascinated by what he heard, and when he wrote his famous history of the Middle Ages, he included all the details about Prester John. He described the emperor as a Nestorian Christian who was descended from one of the three kings, and recorded how Prester John had defeated the huge Persian army but was forced to abandon his march on Jerusalem because the River Tigris didn't freeze and couldn't be crossed by his thousands of troops.
Several decades before Prester John's famous letter even reached the papal court, this mysterious Indian emperor had already entered the history books and been accepted as a real person. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that when a letter from him did finally arrive. Pope Alexander wasn't unduly surprised. It merely confirmed everything he had already been told.
But why had such a story, which was pure fiction, been so readily
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accepted by the west? And how did the person who hoaxed the letter manage to make it so beHevable that everyone—from the Pope and the monarchs of Europe to Mandeville and the world's great explorers— fell for it hook, line and sinker?
From the earliest times, the word "India" had an important resonance for Christians. India was where the Apostle Thomas was believed to have preached and was said to have converted thousands of Hindus before being killed there, a martyr to his faith. Sir John would have known the story of St. Thomas: how he refused to go to India because of his failing health; how Christ appeared before him and told him to pretend he was a carpenter; how he was eventually stabbed to death for daring to criticize the king.
With only sketchy knowledge of India, the Church, and the crowned heads of medieval Europe, all assumed that St. Thomas had laid the foundations for the powerful Christian state now ruled by Prester John. Even before his famous letter turned up in Italy, there were many stories about this exemplary king circulating around Europe—stories which became more and more exaggerated as they were passed orally from country to country. One such tale was written down at about the time of the letter and was clearly known to Sir John; he includes snippets of it in his Travels. It is a far-fetched tale which describes how Prester John had one day travelled to Rome to tell the Pope about a strange mountain that stood outside his capital. This mountain had a church dedicated to St. Thomas on its peak—a church which contained a huge silver vessel holding the uncorrupted body of the saint himself. At this point the story becomes very strange indeed; every feast day the Patriarch would lift this body out of the vessel and place it in an armchair beside a large bowl of consecrated bread. The ghostly white apostle would slowly sit up, take a piece of bread in his own hand, and distribute it to the pilgrims. If any non-believer was there, he would die on the spot.
Sir John reports this story and even claims to have seen the relics of St. Thomas in the city of Mailapur, but he changes it slightly in order to make it more believable: "His hand . . . lies in a reliquary and men of that country judge who is right by that hand. For if there be a quarrel between two parties and each affirms right is on his side, they cause the case of each party to be written in a scroll and put these scrolls in the
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hand of Saint Thomas; quickly the hand casts away the scroll that contains the false case, and keeps the other."
Many similar stories about the reUcs of St. Thomas circulated throughout medieval Europe, and there is every possibihty that there was indeed a church in Persia or India that contained some sort of miracle-working rehc. If so, tales of its amazing properties would only have fuelled speculation about a Christian kingdom ruled by Prester John.
But there is also a remote possibility that Prester John really did exist: not a Christian king ruling a Christian empire, but a powerful despot who commanded a considerable army. Historical records show that the Mongol ruler Yeh-lu Ta-shih defeated the Persian Sultan San-jar in a pitched battle in 1141, and that the title of this Mongol king was Gur-khan. Change this phonetically into Hebrew and it becomes Yohanan, in Syriac it is Yuhanan, and in Latin Johannes—or John. And while Gur-khan—or John—was a Buddhist, many of his subjects and soldiers were Nestorian Christians. As the story of this battle was passed from merchant to merchant and as the language changed with the geography, it is not hard to see how Europe could eventually come to hear about, and believe in, the mighty ruler named Prester John. So that when an anonymous scholar decided to set down on paper a letter from Prester John to the Pope, it required no leap of the imagination for people to beUeve it.
Why the hoaxer wrote this letter remains a mystery. Perhaps he was intending to deceive? Perhaps he wanted to record everything he had heard about this king? Whatever the truth, one thing is certain: when a copy of this letter fell into the hands of Sir John Mandeville, he, like the Pope, believed every word it contained. And once he set down the story of Prester John in his Travels —a book that was translated into every European language—it fooled a whole new generation of people. Many of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers who set out for India in search of the riches of Prester John did so because they had read about him in Sir John's book.
Mandeville's description of China is also skilfully adapted from the information at his disposal. Once again he borrows heavily from Friar Odoric and John of Piano Carpini, but he also lifts from other books as well. He certainly consulted Haiton's Flcur des Histoires d'Orient —
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from which he had taken details about the Egyptian Sultans—as well as copying from Vincent of Beauvais's encyclopedic Speculum Mundi, itself a compendium of dozens of books.
It is Sir John's skill as a writer that explains why his book was so much more popular than those of his contemporaries. Where Haiton merely records that he met a group of Chinese astrologers, Mandeville records his conversation with them and thereby gives the meeting an air of truth: "I busied myself greatly to know and understand by what means these things I mentioned were done; but the chief craftsman told me that he was so bound by a vow to his god that he could show the method to no man except his eldest son."
He does the same with stories borrowed from Friar Odoric. Odoric really did visit the imperial court, and his descriptions of the pomp and ceremony surrounding an appearance of the emperor are based on his own experiences. But where Odoric's writing is clumsy and flat, Sir John's is vividly alive, especially when he describes the smells, the colours of fabrics, and the glimmer of candlelight on gold. At one point he even mocks Odoric, suggesting that the Franciscan teamed up with him for a particularly dangerous p
art of his voyage.
One of the finest passages, which Sir John adapted from Odoric's Itinerarius, is of an imperial banquet in China:
Beside the Emperor's table sit many philosophers and men learned in different branches of knowledge ... At certain moments, when they see the right time, they say to men who stand near them, "Let everyone be silent!" and one of those men says to all the hall, with a loud voice, "Be silent!" Then says another of the philosophers, "Let every man do obeisance and bow to the Emperor, who is God's son and Lord of the world, for this is the right moment." Then every man bows his head to the earth . . . And at another instant another philosopher says, "Every man put his little finger in his ear!" and they do so. Again, another philosopher says, "Every man put his hand before his mouth!" and they do so . . .
Mandeville's book convinced his contemporaries because it is both witty and plausible—it is hard not to believe that he really has visited
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the places he describes. Yet a simple error proves that he didn't visit China: his claim that the emperor of the time was Guyak is impossible, for Guyak vs^as khan w^hen John of Piano Carpini visited China. He died in 1248, seventy-four years before Sir John claims to have left England.
For centuries, monks, critics, and curious readers have v^ondered what was in Sir John's mind when he came to describe the savages, cannibals, and ghoulish creatures in the second half of his book. Had he simply included them for entertainment value, or did such tales hold clues to a secret message that lay buried within the book's pages?
Even Mandeville's most ardent admirers were confused by the apparently uncomfortable way in which the two halves of The Travels sit together and found it difficult to reconcile the pilgrimage to Jerusalem—the first part of the book—with tales of savages and monsters in the second. The only obvious link was Sir John himself, the traveller and amateur philosopher with a keen eye for the marvellous.
Some dismissed the monsters as an irrelevance and claimed that Mandeville's aim, first and foremost, was to write a guidebook for pilgrims intending to visit the Holy Land. Others said he had written his book in order to preach the need for a new crusade. Many eighteenth-century readers disputed the worth of the first half of the book, saying that it was the monsters that gave The Travels its appeal. But whatever theories were put forward to explain Sir John's purpose in writing his book, no one managed to solve the riddle of why he had split The Travels into two separate parts.
Few clues can be found in the biblical stories and parables scattered throughout both halves, for although Mandeville quotes tales from the Old Testament and parables from the New, no single theme links them all together. It is a similar story with the fables he recounts: in every case they appear to have been selected more for their entertainment value than for any obvious theme. Even the autobiographical passages about Sir John—one at the beginning and one at the end—shed no light on his possible motive for dividing his book in two.
1 had spent months accompanying Sir John on his journey and knew he was a shrewd man—far too clever to present a random jumble
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of unconnected ideas. But it wasn t until I imagined myself as one of his medieval readers that it dawned on me that Mandeville had used his book's structure to play an elaborate game on the reader. The Travels was indeed a riddle—an allegorical attack on western Christendom—and the meaning of the whole lay in the relationship between its two halves.
For his riddle to work, it relies on the reader's identifying himself totally with the pious pilgrim of the first half. He must travel hand in hand with Mandeville—praying at shrines, worshipping in churches, and slowly visiting the holiest sites in Christendom. Having undertaken the pilgrimage to Jerusalem—and armed with a new religiosity—the reader confronts the grotesque savages and pagans of the east with all the certitude of faith. And it is at exactly this point that Sir John reverses all the roles and throws the spotlight back on the reader. He describes these savages as far more pious than any Christian pilgrim could ever be, forcing the reader to see his own life as an ugly reflection of theirs.
The clearest example of Mandeville's method comes in his description of the burial rituals in Tibet. First he tells readers of the simple devotion of these Tibetans, and then—in a horrific passage—describes their burial rites as a gruesome parody of Christian communion. The priest swipes off the dead man's head and places it on a silver platter. Then he chops the corpse into tiny cubes of meat and feeds the bits to the vultures and ravens that are wheehng around overhead: "And then," writes Sir John, "just as the priests in our country sing for the souls of the dead Subuenite, sancti Dei, so those priests there sing with a loud voice in their language . . . the son boils his father's head, and the flesh from it he distributes among his special friends, giving each one a little bit, as a dainty. And from the cranium of the head he has a cup made, and he drinks from it all his lifetime in remembrance of his father."
This last line would have set the alarm bells ringing in the mind of many a medieval reader, for every Sunday he would hear the priest repeating Christ's injunction to "do this in remembrance of Me" before taking Holy Communion. Yet Mandeville doesn't once criticize the practice. Instead, he describes it as a touching and loving act, and hints
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that, although these Tibetans are most certainly not Christians, they perform their actions with a piety and tenderness that should shame even the most devout of Christian pilgrims.
He uses the same method when he describes his audience with the Sultan of Egypt. Having portrayed the Muslims as devout, humble, and pious—sentiments that would have been shocking to Christian Europe—he records without criticism the Sultan's blistering attack on the lifestyles of these Christians. The reader finds his own life reflected in the Sultan's mirror—a Muslim mirror—and slowly becomes aware that his own behaviour is substantially less pious than that of his traditional enemy, the infidel. For a medieval reader, such a realization must have been frightening indeed.
Sir John uses this same device time and again throughout The Travels, challenging in the second half of the book everything that the reader has learned in the first. The message of The Travels is a truly Christian one—one of tolerance and love—and what set it apart from all other travelogues of the Middle Ages is that Mandeville says this love should be extended not merely to fellow Christians but to Muslims and pagans as well.
So many centuries have passed since Sir John wrote his book that it is almost impossible to fathom his wilder claims. After two years of sifting through the surviving evidence, I felt sure that his travels in India and China were a work of fiction, while his tales from Java and Sumatra came straight from the legends of the ancients. For although his contemporaries had believed his every word, there was little that was original in his account of the Far East except for the sparkling brilliance of his prose.
But even if the second part of the book was fiction, that still left the first half of The Travels. Was this true, or had Mandeville invented his journey to Jerusalem as well?
Before I slotted together all the facts I had unearthed while following his route through the Holy Land, I still had one last piece of evidence to check: the coat of arms I had found at St. Catherine's monastery. There was just a chance that this would prove once and for all that Mandeville had travelled, at least as far as Egypt.
The College of Arms in London houses the largest collection of
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heraldic records in the country, and I hoped that somewhere among its genealogical charts and tables I would find a record of the carving from Sinai. But when I met the College's medieval expert, a man who liked to be known as Bluemantle Pursuivant, he warned me that identifying a random coat of arms could take years of research.
"I'm sorry to be so negative," he said as he examined my drawing, "but medieval heraldry is notoriously unreliable. It only takes one person to have altered their arms
slightly for a search to become almost impossible."
He suggested that we try a different approach and look through all the records of the Mandeville family instead. I already knew what Geoffrey de Mandeville's coat of arms looked like, and had unearthed a considerable number of documents about Sir John's life. There was just a possibility we would be able to identify the St. Catherine's carving from these pieces of evidence.
It didn't take long to discover several heraldic coats belonging to John Mandevilles, but none of them looked remotely like the one I had found. One Mandeville seemed to fit the bill, and was even described as living in a village near St. Albans where he "hked to hunt with his own dogs the hare, fox, badger and cat in Essex forest." But when I checked the dates, I found he had died in 1275, more than fifty years before Sir John claims to have left England. Perhaps he was Sir John's grandfather?
It was a lucky find in an eighteenth-century document that set us onto a more probable trail. This document recorded that a Halifax surgeon called William Alexander was granted a coat of arms in the mid-eighteenth century—an honour that inspired him to research his family history. As well as tracing his father's line, he also investigated his mother's and grandmother's families, for his overriding concern was to link himself to noble blood. Any ancestor that sounded vaguely aristocratic came under his scrutiny, and in such a way he eventually managed to link himself to the de Bohun family. The link was tenuous in the extreme, but it contained one important piece of information. At some point during the Middle Ages, a distant relative of Alexander's had married into the Mandevilles, and I suddenly found myself with a whole new set of Mandeville coats of arms. But as soon as Bluemantle looked at these new coats of arms, he frowned and shook his head.