The Riddle and the Knight

by Giles Milton

  The Riddle and the Knight

  None of these could be genuine, he said, for the pointed star that adorned them—known to experts as an escarbuncle—was unknown in medieval heraldry. The Halifax surgeon had either invented the shield or copied it from a faulty manuscript.

  Bluemantle had other bad news as well. He had been delving into numerous records of foreign heraldry and had become increasingly suspicious of the St. Catherine's arms: 'T have to admit that I'm not convinced by these either/' he said as he slipped another book back on to a shelf. "The shield you have drawn shows a curved line bending into one corner. We call that a bend sinister bowed towards the base of the first, but such a form appears to be extremely rare in English heraldry, particularly in the medieval period. The more I look at it, the more I have to conclude—I'm afraid—that this coat of arms was drawn by a knight of Continental origin."

  My last door had closed, and my last avenue proved to be a cul-de-sac, for the St. Catherine's coat of arms did not belong to Sir John Mandeville, the author of The Travels. But ten months of unearthing documents about his life had left me with a mountain of papers and a file of details. Although many riddles remained unresolved, I was at last in a position to construct a tentative portrait of him and his travels.

  According to his own account, he returned to England in 1356 "a man worn out by age and travel and the feebleness of my body." This statement was almost certainly true, for if Sir John had left England in 1322, as he says, he would have been a very old man by the time he returned home.

  Although I had been unable to find any documents that recorded his birth, I had picked up a number of clues as to when he might have been born. If Sir John had indeed been one of the envoys sent by King Edward II to negotiate with Robert Bruce, he must have been at least twenty years old at the time. Since the expedition left London in 1312, this would put the year of his birth at no later than 1292.

  But could a man born in 1292 still be alive in 1356? It is certainly possible, for even in the Middle Ages, some people lived to a very great age. Sir John would have been sixty-four by the time he finished his book—a similar age to Chaucer when he died, and several years

  Onward to China

  younger than John of Marignolh, who survived a long and arduous overland journey to China.

  This early date also fitted neatly with the John Mandeville named in the document pardoning the conspirators who killed Piers Gaveston, as well as with the information I had unearthed about the Mandevilles of Black Notley. For Sir Thomas Mandeville, the head of this Black Notley household, appears to have spent at least part of his married life at his bride's family home near St. Albans. If this was indeed the case, there is every likelihood that the young John Mandeville was educated at the abbey school in the town.

  Having followed Mandeville on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, I felt sure that he really had travelled through the Holy Land, and the more I weighed up the evidence, the more the balance swung in his favour. His book is littered with clues which I had checked and verified at every opportunity. In Constantinople he was correct in both his account of the jousting and his description of the statue of Justinian, and was even right in his claim that the globe was missing from the statue's hand. It had fallen out in 1317 and wasn't mended until 1325.

  On arriving in Cyprus, Sir John provided scant descriptions of the island's cities and towns, but his details about people's leisure pursuits (the wine; the hunting; their eating habits) are all borne out by later travellers. His account of the Syrian monastery of Saidenaya was also accurate down to the last detail, and while it is possible that he had picked up information about Saidenaya from other travellers, this in no way proves that he had invented his visit.

  Most convincing of all was his description of St. Catherine's monastery, which reads like an eyewitness account. Six hundred years after he wrote his Travels, I stood in front of the same buildings and relics that Mandeville himself had seen. Virtually nothing had changed.

  There was one other factor in his favour: if he really had invented the first part of his voyage, it is almost certain he would have made an accidental slip or error, for it is extremely difficult to sustain the deceit of having travelled. Yet despite putting his every phrase under the microscope, I found scarcely a single mistake in his account of the route to Sinai.

  The Riddle and the Knight

  It was not just these clues that convinced me that Sir John really had travelled: the very meaning of his book depends on the reader's believing that Mandeville really had gone on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Without travelling with Mandeville in the first half of The Travels, without becoming a pilgrim like him, the second part of the book loses its meaning.

  But even if Sir John did indeed spend a few years travelling through the Holy Land, it still leaves the question of how he filled the rest of the thirty-four years he claims to have been away. Unfortunately, this is a secret that he took with him to the grave. The most likely explanation—given the records of a Mandeville studying at the university in Paris—is that he spent at least part of this time living in France.

  Mandeville dates his return to England as 1356, and all the surviving evidence suggests that he was telling the truth. For when Humphrey de Bohun—Earl of Essex and holder of the Mandeville honour— died at his home in 1361, he left a twelve-page will detailing who he wished to inherit his possessions. Most went to his close relatives, but he didn't forget his retainers and kinsmen, either. Halfway down the hst is "Johan Maundeville, XX Marcs."

  Is this our man? Again, it is impossible to say. But if he really had been out of the country for years, the natural place for him to look for patronage when he finally returned would be at the home of his overlords, the earls of Essex. Perhaps he lived out his declining years in their manor house at Pleshy, hastily compiling his Travels before arthritis robbed him of the ability to write. Such a hypothesis is well within the bounds of plausibility: the de Bohuns certainly possessed a copy of The Travels within a few years of Sir John's death, and perhaps during his lifetime, for a second family will records all the books in the de Bohun library, including a rouge livre appellez Maundevylle.

  After Sir John's death, there is a silence of some two hundred years before his name once again resurfaces. A handful of historians and antiquarians, intrigued by this knight from St. Albans, tried to discover the truth about his life, but virtually all of them fell for the fabrications of Jean d'Outremeuse, and Mandeville's reputation went into steep decline. Yet as soon as he had a brief surge of popularity in the eighteenth century, people began claiming descent from him once again—even

  Onward to China

  though his branch of the family seems to have died out hundreds of years earher. One copy of The Travels —sold in 1746 by a certain William Thompson of Queen's College, Oxford—has a note scrawled into the first blank page of the volume: "NB: I had this book from a descendant by my mother's side, from Sir John Mandeville." Can we believe this? Probably not, for by the eighteenth century. Sir John's family history was already shrouded in mystery.

  Today there is just one Mandeville family listed in the St. Albans telephone directory. I telephoned them just in case they had any knowledge of Sir John that I might have overlooked. But although Mrs. Mandeville thought she might have heard of him, she seemed unaware of the illustrious pedigree that her name almost certainly entitles her to.

  lEptloguF

  Copies of [Mandeville's] Travels were multiplied till they almost equalled in number those of the Scriptures; now we may smile at the "mervayles" of the fourteenth century, and of Mandeville, but it was the spirit of these intrepid and credulous minds which has marched us through the universe. To these children of the imagination perhaps we owe the circumnavigation of the globe and the universal intercourse of nations.

  Amenities of Literature, Isaac D'Israeli, 1841

  ^♦^ hile Mandeville's tales of monsters and devils appealed to the ^ J ] ordinary man, and his message of tolerance and pi
ety must ^^1^ * have appealed to those churchmen w^ho understood it, the book's importance in the first two centuries after it was written lay in its contribution to geography and exploration. This seems strange, for despite all Mandeville's claims, his Travels actually added very little to the world's storehouse of knowledge. Many men had travelled to the Holy Land—or at least heard tales from other travellers—and educated men could certainly have found books about Africa, Asia, India, and China. Sir John, it is true, was claiming to have gone much farther afield. But Marco Polo had also been to the uttermost ends of the earth, and described the Far East in far greater detail.

  The importance of Mandeville's book to medieval explorers, however, lay not so much in its description of India and China as in the 175 lines in which Sir John explains why he believes it is possible to circumnavigate the world.

  These lines provided an answer to the great geographical debate of his age. By the time Sir John wrote his book, the concept of a flat earth had long been disproved, and most geographers accepted that the world

  Epilogue

  was a globe hanging in the firmament. But three questions remained unanswered. Was there land in the southern hemisphere? If so, was it habitable? And most important of all, could it be visited?

  The vast majority of people, supported by the Church's teaching, believed that sailing around the world was impossible, and more than a century after Mandeville wrote his book, Columbus's crew had a very real fear that their ship was going to topple over the edge when they crossed the Equator. Few people would countenance the idea of there being land in the southern hemisphere—arguing that because land was heavier than water it would obviously fall off the world—and even well-travelled and educated men did not believe in the possibility of circumnavigating the globe. The devout John of Marignolli had voyaged thousands of miles across Asia yet mocked the idea that it was possible to travel around the world, while the few who argued that there was habitable land on the underside of the earth were held up for public ridicule. Sceptics joked about men living upside down and rain falling upwards towards the earth.

  Such ideas stemmed from the cloistered world of the Church, which dismissed any theories that didn't conform with the biblical view of the world. As far as the Church was concerned, all mankind descended from Noah, and if Noah had never been "beneath" the earth, then how and where did people in the southern hemisphere spring from? This was not the only objection: since the offer of salvation had been promised to the whole of mankind, how could an entire section of the world be cut off from this message? For if the apostles didn't go to the antipodes, that must surely mean that the antipodes could not exist. An inhabited southern hemisphere simply didn't fit in with Christian teaching, and for this fact alone, St. Augustine considered belief in the existence of the antipodes to be not only wrong but heretical as well.

  Sir John's Travels dismisses centuries of the Church's teachings in a characteristically down-to-earth anecdote and "proves" the world is circumnavigable by telling a strange story of a man who inadvertently sailed around it:

  I have often thought of a story I have heard, when I was young of a worthy man of our country who went once upon a time to see the world. He passed India and many isles beyond India,

  Epilogue

  where there are more than five thousand isles, and travelled so far by land and sea, girdling the globe, that he found an isle where he heard his own language being spoken ... He marvelled greatly, for he did not understand how this could be. But I conjecture that he had travelled so far over land and sea, circumnavigating the earth, that he had come to his own borders; if he had gone a bit further, he would have come to his own district . . .

  This story of a man who had accidentally traversed the globe seems to have struck a chord with Columbus, for when he heard that two Oriental sailors had been washed up from a shipwreck on the coast of Ireland, he scribbled into the margin of one of his books: "Men have come eastward from Cathay. We have seen many a remarkable thing, and particularly in Galway, in Ireland, two persons hanging on to two wreck planks, a man and a woman."

  Such a story is not Mandeville's only proof. He includes calculations based on readings from the stars to demonstrate that the world is a globe, and suggests that he himself would have continued around the world if he had found the necessary ships. But most important of all is the theological proof that he offers to support his theory. For while trav-elUng in India he stumbles across a tribe of pagans who, like Job in the Old Testament, have absolutely no knowledge of Christianity yet worship God in a pure and simple way. For Mandeville, this is proof enough that God's law operates on every part of the globe. And if God is everywhere, it necessarily follows that man is able to travel everywhere, and that the only difficulties are practical ones. "So I say truly," he concludes, "that a man could go all round the world, above and below, and return to his own country, provided he had his health, good company, and a ship. And all the way he would find men, lands, islands, cities and towns."

  It is difficult to know where Mandeville might have formulated his theory of circumnavigation, but there is every likelihood that the medieval records indicating a John of Sancto Albano studying at the University of Paris do indeed refer to him. If so, he would certainly have come into contact with John Buridan, who was central to these debates about the globe and had just put the finishing touches to his important treatise on whether the whole world was habitable.

  Epilogue

  Sir John was not the first to hold views about the possibihties of circumnavigation. But the writing by his contemporaries, in complex Latin, is technical academic, and extremely dull. John Buridan's treatise, too, is weighty stuff. The work of his fellow academics is so obscure as to be largely incomprehensible. What Sir John does is make it all sound plausible, arguing his point in a way that was accessible to the layman.

  Sir John's assertion that it was possible to circumnavigate the globe, and the proof that he offered, had a particularly profound effect on the young Christopher Columbus. Columbus had long held the view that there was a quicker route to the riches of the east than the long and dangerous overland journey. A devoutly religious man who sincerely believed that "the Lord would show him where gold is born," he delved into obscure and apocryphal biblical texts looking for support for his theory that it was possible to reach the riches of the east by sailing west.

  Columbus wanted to put such theories to the test, but he had enormous difficulties getting anyone to support his project. The King of Portugal rejected his proposal out of hand, and when he turned to the Spanish nobility, it refused to back him as well. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain were more interested and listened politely to his promise to return with gold, but they found Columbus's demands for a down payment ludicrously high. He insisted on being knighted and appointed grand admiral, he asked to be made viceroy of all the lands he discovered, and he demanded that his family hold this title in perpetuity. Not only this, he wanted ten per cent of all the transactions within the admiralty. The king and queen couldn't afford such proposals, and Columbus was dismissed empty-handed.

  But when he returned to the court some months later, he found the king and queen in a more pliant frame of mind, and by the time his audience was over, they had agreed to back his voyage. It is impossible to know what finally persuaded them to change their minds, but in the official documents of the Spanish Admiralty recording Columbus's expedition, a new reason crops up. A book had come to light, perhaps brought to the court by Columbus himself, which was causing something of a sensation. It was taken far more seriously than the apoc-

  Epilogue

  ryphal biblical texts, it was far more recent than the classical geographer Ptolemy, and more importantly, it claimed to prove once and for all that the east coast of China could be reached by sailing westwards across the Atlantic.

  It was a slim volume with no title, but it was said to be by an Englishman and was generally known as The Travels of Sir John Mande-ville.


  The chronicler of the famous 1492 expedition, Andres Bernaldez, had no doubts about the debt Columbus owed to Mandeville. Of the mariner's great voyage he writes: "Columbus navigated . . . towards that which he desired, which was to seek the province and city of Catayo [China], which is under the dominion of the Great Khan, saying that he could reach it by this route. Of it is read, as John Mandeville says, that it is the richest province in the world and the most abounding in gold and silver." After explaining in detail how the riches of the east can be reached by sailing west, Bernaldez adds, "Anyone who wishes to know the truth of this may read it in Mandeville's book."

  Columbus wanted honour and riches, and his appetite had been whetted by Mandeville's Travels. The more he read the book, the more he lapped up Sir John's tales of the fabulous wealth of India and the glittering prizes of China, and by the time he set sail, he was so convinced of success that he filled his ship with cheap trinkets with which he planned to reheve the eastern natives of their stocks of gold. He also took with him a learned man who spoke many languages in case he met the Great Khan of China.

  Columbus never found the gold he so hungered for, nor did he reach China, although when his ship finally touched land in 1492, he was convinced he had proved Mandeville to be right after all, recording that he was among "the islands which are set down in the maps at the end of the Orient."

  He wasn't. What Columbus never realized, to his dying day, was that Mandeville's Travels had led him to discover America.

  It was not just Columbus who turned to The Travels. Many other Renaissance geographers and explorers read Mandeville for practical information about remote areas of the world. Sir Walter Ralegh admits