Zone of the Marvellous

by Martin Edmond

  The existence of this lost source or sources is adduced partly from the work of a contemporary of Marco Polo’s, Rashid al-Din, whose world history Jami al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles) was published, probably in 1307, not long after Polo’s book was written but too soon to have been directly influenced by it. Rashid al-Din (1247–1318) was an apothecary’s son, a Jew from Hamadan who converted to Islam when he was about thirty years old. He became a physician in the service of the Persian khanate, living at Qazvin, now in northern Iran, where his book was made in two parallel versions, one in Persian, the other in Arabic. The Jami al-Tawarikh survives only in fragments; what has interested Polo scholars is that in some of those fragments Rashid makes identical errors to Polo/Rustichello, suggesting that the same lost source, or sources, lay behind both books.

  MARCO POLO’S NICKNAME among the Venetians, in use while he was still alive, was Il Milione, The Million, given from his habit of exaggeration. In his house everything – distances, armies, amounts of money – was spoken of in extravagant terms. His book was sometimes called by the same name; it was also known as Le Livre des Merveilles, the book of wonders. Yet when on his deathbed he was asked to recant he is alleged to have said that he had not told half of what he knew. Soon after his death a figure called Marco of the Millions made an appearance at the annual Venetian carnival and quickly became a stock character: The ruffian was dressed like a clown … his pranks consisted of gross exaggerations expressed by gestures and his only object was to amuse the crowds. In this he well succeeded …

  Meanwhile his book, which for the first 200 or so years of its existence was not printed but copied by hand, had taken on a vaudevillian life of its own. Scribes would add material from other sources as they copied it. An example is an account of a Manichean community in the southeastern Chinese city of Fuzhou, which appears only in a late manuscript held at Toledo in Spain. Attitudes to originality and to plagiarism were different in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, particularly where books of travel and exploration were concerned: any information, credible or not, from any source, might be added to a chronicle for purposes of completeness, or interest, or just on a wild surmise. On the other hand to leave out the standard recital of exotic wonders from a book about the East would have made it an object of suspicion. Marco Polo’s book might or might not be a genuine chronicle; it might be a mixture of first-hand observation and material from secondary sources; or it might be an artful confection with no basis in reality at all. These different possibilities are repeated, in fortissimo, in another book, slightly later than Polo’s and in its time even more popular: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. With an added mystery: nobody really knows who the author of this book was.

  TAKEN AS A WHOLE, an entry in the Museum of Hoaxes begins, medieval monks and clerics were probably the most prolific forgers of all time, and goes on to quote two exasperated seventeenth-century opinions: first, that all ancient deeds are forged and, second, that even the texts – and the coins – that purport to come down to us from Classical antiquity are fakes concocted by Benedictine monks. The Benedictine connection is not irrelevant: some scholars believe that the author of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville must have been a member of the order. And, as it happens, he may have been.

  There were two known memorials to John Mandeville, one at Liège in Belgium, the other at St Albans, north of London. He is said to be buried in both places which, unless his body was divided, as those of Christian saints often were, is impossible. It seems clear that both memorials cannot be genuine; but that doesn’t mean either of them is authentic – they could both be fake. Here, as in so much else of this curious story, there is no certainty. Unless, and this is a possibility that is recommended by its simplicity, the author was himself telling the truth. In his book he says that he was born at St Albans and left there on Michaelmas (29 September) in 1322 to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; and returned, old and tired and suffering from arthritis or gout, in 1356 when he wrote or perhaps completed his book.

  St Albans is an ancient town. There was a settlement of the Celtic Catuvellauni here; the second-largest Roman town in Britain, Verulamium, stood on the spot; and the medieval city grew up around the Benedictine abbey which was named after, and built over the site of the execution of, the first English martyr. Alban was a pagan soldier who gave shelter to a Christian priest and was converted by him; the Romans demanded he recant, he refused and was executed in extraordinary circumstances: the eyes of the axe-man who did the deed fell from his head immediately after the beheading. St Alban is often shown with his own head in his hands.

  The memorial to John Mandeville is inscribed on a pillar within the abbey: ten lines of verse, the first two in Latin, the rest in English, that suggest a statue of him once stood there and that his body, his ashes or perhaps his heart lies buried in an urn beneath the stone floor. The problem with the inscription is that it cannot be independently dated and may exist, not because Mandeville, or parts of him, was buried there but rather as a result of his own claim to have been born at, and to have returned to, St Albans. In other words the inscription might have been inspired by the book, not by the life and death of its author. There is no solution to this conundrum unless some independent record surfaces that incontrovertibly places John Mandeville in St Albans at the relevant time, or times. The difficulty here is that there are many John Mandevilles and no sure way of distinguishing between them.

  The memorial at Liège is almost certainly a forgery. It is a complicated and entertaining story involving another writer, a certain Jean d’Outremeuse, a prolific encyclopaedist who was prey to a number of obsessions, one of which was a compulsion to associate famous people with his home town. His version of the death of John Mandeville involved a man by the name of John of Burgundy, aka John of the Beard. This was a real person, a doctor who had written a well-known treatise on the plague and perhaps other works as well. He settled late in life at Liège, died there in 1372 and was buried at a church that was unfortunately demolished during the French Revolution – but not before many travellers had copied down the inscription on the good doctor’s grave. What Outremeuse did was suggest that the bearded John of Burgundy had confessed to him on his deathbed that he was really Mandeville, had made Mandeville’s travels and written Mandeville’s book. In this version he was English by birth and had assumed the name John of Burgundy after killing a man – perhaps a duke or an earl – and fleeing England, to which he could never, on pain of death, return.

  Having identified his Mandeville, Outremeuse spent some years assembling retrospective proofs of his existence, including ascribing other works to him – a treatise on gems, another on the properties of herbs – composing the memorial at Liège and elaborating further upon his activities as a doctor in Egypt. He also plagiarised him, reprinting sections of The Travels in his own Ly Myreur des Histors, a compendium of fables, legends and possible facts which was meant as yet another world history. His fiction was so successful that it was believed for more than 500 years and still appears in some books and encyclopaedias today.

  We owe the unravelling of Outremeuse’s inventions to one Josephine Bennett, whose 1954 book The Rediscovery of John Mandeville demonstrates beyond doubt that the patriot of Liège was a mischievous though engaging fantasist who had taken advantage of poor dead John of Burgundy by re-inventing him as the fabulous traveller and writer. The doctor appears never to have left northwest Europe; and his works, such as they are, were written, not in the probable Norman French of The Travels, but in Latin. His 1365 treatise De Pestilentia, respected and influential and translated into several other languages, constitutes a better memorial to him than Outremeuse’s meddlesome monument.

  Ms Bennett also turns her attention to the question of who the real John Mandeville might have been and comes up with a plausible, if ultimately speculative, possibility. There was a man of that name, perhaps born in the 1290s, who is mentioned in records dealing with the murder in 1312 of Edward II�
��s favourite, the notorious Gascon Piers Gaveston. His name is among a list of those pardoned for the murder in 1313; this John Mandeville was part of the entourage of Humphrey VIII de Bohun, the fourth Earl of Hereford, and may have been from a place in Essex called Black Notley. The same name, and hence possibly the same man, is mentioned in another list, this time of those who went in 1320 on a diplomatic mission to Robert the Bruce, then king of Scotland, on behalf of Edward II of England. Robert Bruce had lived in Essex; and there were marriages between the Black Notley Mandevilles and the Bruces. A Mandeville, perhaps John’s father, had been captured by the Scots in the Battle of Bannockburn (1314) and later freed after his ransom (94 pounds) was apparently paid by the Bruce himself.

  In this version Mandeville might have fled England after the Battle of Boroughbridge in March 1322, at which Edward’s army defeated rebel barons loyal to the Earl of Lancaster. One of these barons, the eighth Humphrey de Bohun, was atrociously killed during this battle after being pierced through the anus by a pikeman concealed beneath a bridge he was trying to defend. It has been claimed that the historical Robin Hood might also have fought, on the losing side, at Boroughbridge and that the defeat marked the beginning of his outlaw days. If John Mandeville was there as well it may be that afterwards he quickly disposed of property he owned around St Albans and left the country by Michaelmas. But where did he go?

  THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, like that of Marco Polo’s book, is lost; but Ms Bennett’s intricate textual analysis of those copies that remain suggests it was written in Norman French, perhaps in England but more likely by an Englishman living in Paris. In those days the kings of England spoke that northern form of the French language and so did the English nobility; French was also the literary language of choice in Europe as far away as Italy. But just as the French of Rustichello of Pisa was Italianate, so that of The Travels was heavily anglicised: those who have examined early copies have noted how typically English the syntax and word order is and how readily the entire book translates into good English; while, from the other point of view, French scholars are united in their view of the unforgivable barbarity of its use of la langue.

  The Travels itself falls naturally into two parts: the first is a description of the routes a pilgrim might take into the Holy Land, mixed up with bits of history, fables, miracles and what purport to be eye-witness accounts of some of the sights to be seen along the way in Constantinople, Cyprus, Egypt (called Babylon), the Sinai Desert, in and around Jerusalem itself, and north through Palestine and Lebanon to Damascus in Syria. Part two is more ambitious: Now I have told you about the Holy Land and the countries around … I shall pass on and speak of … many diverse kingdoms, countries and isles in the eastern part of the world … and many other marvellous things. It is another world history, roughly comparable with Polo’s, and with others that have been mentioned. Again like Marco Polo, John Mandeville alleges he has seen most, if not all, of what he describes – including, for example, the Fountain of Youth, the Valley Perilous and the kingdom of Prester John. Yet he does not claim universal knowledge: Of Paradise, he writes, I cannot speak properly, for I have not been there; and that I regret.

  It is possible that the John Mandeville who said he wrote this book had indeed been on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, as many of the devout and not so devout at that time had; but it is unlikely that he went anywhere further east. It’s more probable that his book was written in a library somewhere, because diligent scholars have found in it many pieces of large numbers of other books, some contemporary, some not, and have concluded that Mandeville assembled his account by transcribing and altering other texts: a literary method that was not proscribed in his day and one that has been common throughout the history of writing. In more recent times T. S. Eliot said that anything wholly original is likely to be wholly bad, though he did not say the contrary is also true.

  A modern editor of The Travels, Dr Charles Moseley, assembled a majestic list of Mandeville’s sources that includes, among much else, the forged letter of Prester John and the Li Livres dou Trésor written by Dante’s mentor, Brunetto Latini. Intriguingly, Marco Polo’s book does not appear on it, although that of another bona fide traveller into the east, the Franciscan papal ambassador Odoric of Pordenone, does; he died in 1331 so his account must have preceded that date. Mandeville used him extensively and even at one point claims, presumably in order to make the borrowing more plausible, to have travelled with him through the Valley Perilous. He also made free use of extant pilgrims’ manuals; and fragments of Classical sources, especially Pliny the Elder, also turn up in his book. The Classical sources are themselves indebted to the so-called Alexander Romance, collections of legends concerning the mythical exploits of Alexander the Great in the east. These collections outlasted antiquity and were still being read in Mandeville’s time – both in their Western and Eastern, or Islamic, forms.

  Dr Moseley has this to say about Mandeville’s method: the sources are used with quite remarkable assurance: there are certainly verbatim liftings … but the joins are pretty seamless – one is never conscious of leaving one source and moving to another. Mandeville moves backwards and forwards between sources with complete confidence. He gives us a picture, not so much of a forger or hoaxer, as of a consummate artist engaged in the making of a literary classic. In Moseley’s version we meet a John Mandeville who was making what we would call, these days, a novel. But even if it was assembled in a library, that does not necessarily mean its author thought of it as fiction: he may have believed his sources and considered it a kind of duty to hand on the fabulatory story. For it was not as a novel that his book was read. Or not at first.

  BOTH POLO’S AND MANDEVILLE’S were popular books in their time, translated into most European languages, including Erse and Walloon; but, if we go by the number of extant manuscripts, Mandeville was twice as read as Polo. There are about 300 copies of The Travels, while Il Milione survives in around half that number. Both were assumed to be telling the truth, or at least a version of it, about the fabulous lands that lay to the east, and both were read seriously by those who wished to go to those lands and acquire there those articles of trade that Europe lacked and desired: especially, but not only, gold, jewels, spices, silks and fine porcelain. Christopher Columbus owned and annotated copies of both books and believed, when he reached the West Indies, that he had arrived at Marco Polo’s Cipangu, or Japan. Martin Frobisher took The Travels of Sir John Mandeville with him when he went to look for the Northwest Passage. Henry the Navigator, whose researches and ambitions powered the first generation of Portuguese exploration down the west coast of Africa, had also studied his Mandeville. This is because there is something remarkable about Mandeville’s book that makes it a crucial contribution to the literature of exploration and, incidentally, may solve the problem of the place of its composition. For John Mandeville knew that the earth could be circumnavigated:

  So I say truly that a man could go all around the world, above and below, and return to his own country, provided he had his health, good company, and a ship … and all along the way he would find men, lands, islands, cities and towns … 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 places beyond India, 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 … I conjecture he had come so far over land and sea, circumnavigating the earth, that he had come to his own borders …

  It isn’t the case that the medieval world had entirely forgotten what the Greeks of Hellenic Egypt and the Levant had known and the Indians still knew: that the world is round. Dante’s location of Mount Purgatory in the antipodes clearly anticipates a globe rather than a flat earth and there were others who believed the same. Among them was philosopher Jean Buridan, twice rector at the University of Paris. Buridan
’s work, which consists mostly of commentaries upon Aristotle, anticipates and prefigures that of Copernicus and Galileo. And he believed that the fringes of the globe were habitable. He might also have been Mandeville’s teacher.

  A certain Johannes de Sancto Albano was enrolled at the University of Paris in 1329. Contemporary records also show a man by the name of John de Mandeville resident in Paris at this time. And so perhaps the bulk of the reading and writing that was to result in The Travels took place in libraries in Paris; perhaps, too, the return of John of St Albans to his place of birth might have an explanation: in 1356, the year that he said he came home, the French lost the Battle of Poitiers to the English and their king and those among their nobility who survived the slaughter were taken to London, where some of them stayed for quite a long time. Indeed, John II, the French king, liked it so much he returned there freely after having failed to raise his ransom in France; and died in England not long afterwards. There is one more piece of what may be documentary evidence: upon the death in 1361 of Humphrey IX de Bohun, the sixth Earl of Hereford and fifth of Essex, a John Mandeville was granted twenty marks.