the Christian embrace, this by no means meant that the Mongols were universally regarded as particularly good candidates for conversion. On the contrary, the following description of the Mongols from Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora (c. 1240) is probably closer to the consensus view: “The men are inhuman and of the nature of beasts, rather to be called monsters than men, thirsting after and drinking blood, and tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and human beings; they clothe themselves in the skins of bulls, and are armed with iron lances; they are short in stature and thickset … and of great strength; invincible in battle, indefatigable in labour; they drink the blood which flows from their flocks.… They have no human laws, know no mercy, are more cruel than lions or bears; they know no other country’s language except that of their own, and of this all other nations are ignorant.”26 Matthew Paris’s description, we will see, accords closely with the scholastic discourse of the barbarian. Missionaries to Mongolia such as Carpini and Rubruck were—indeed, needed to be—rather more generous in their attributions of Mongol humanity. How then was such “humanity” to be identified and distinguished according to the definitions of their day?
Given the place of Pliny’s monstrous races at the outermost edges of the known world on medieval mappaemundi, medieval thinkers in search of demarcating the human from the barbarous or monstrous might well turn first to the definitions of Pliny the Elder, made available to them through Pliny’s medieval encyclopedic abbreviators. The monstrous races of Pliny’s Natural History, whom he terms gentes monstri and homines or gentes silvestres, appear in book 7 immediately after Pliny considers the innumerable “ritus moresque”—customs and manners—of all the world’s gentes that he could not include in his cosmography. The relation between these monsters and the human becomes clear soon thereafter: the “monstrous” is that which stretches, twists, or turns inside out the norms of the human form, life cycle, and social habits of Pliny’s antique day. The Pandorean Indians, for instance, live two hundred years, while childbearing among the Macrobii, who live only to forty years, is restricted to a single occurrence, and the Antemidorus never get sick. Many of the Plinian monsters display physical anomalies from the human, including giants, dwarf-like Pygmies, dog-headed Cynocephales, and doubly sexed Androgyni. Still others partake in aberrant diet (cannibal Scythians and Anthropophages) and dwellings (cave-dwelling Pygmies), are speechless (Cynocephales), practice religious idolatry (the sun-worshipping Gymnosophists) and unusual marriage customs (the Wife-givers), go naked (Bragmanni), or display skillful hunting (Troglodytes).27
From this list of monstrous attributes, one might glean what factors compose the “measure of man,” to use John Block Friedman’s phrase,28 and distinguish the human from the monstrous: physical form; modes of diet; dwelling and habitat; sexual, marital, and childbearing practices; clothing; spiritual life; speech; and defense, Pliny suggests, are each constitutive of the “human.” Pliny’s ideas would have reached medieval readers through his ancient encyclopedic abbreviators, Solinus and Isidore of Seville, as well as the thirteenth-century encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais. Solinus’s Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium cites many of the most popular Plinian races, locating them in the farthest East or in Africa.29 Solinus describes the manners and customs of a number of peoples, including the Arabians, the silk-trading Seres, Indians abstaining from meat, the Tabrobanes and their method of king selection.30 He also offers a long ethnographic excursus on the Scythians, whom he describes in ways that will remind one of Matthew Paris’s Tartars: living in caves, Scythians drink out of the skull cups of their enemies, love fighting, suck the blood out of the wounds they inflict, and, of course, delight in drinking one another’s blood.31 Isidore lists the Plinian races under his consideration of “Portents,” where, he asserts, just as anomalous monstrous births take place among humans, so are there born whole monstrous races, including Cynocephali, Cyclopes, Blemmyas, Antipodes, Pygmies, and so forth.32
Isidore’s and Solinus’s treatment of the Plinian races may well have influenced the classifications of culture that John of Plano Carpini or William of Rubruck employed to describe the foreign Mongols before them, including their dwellings, food, clothing, laws, burial rites, marital rites, and religious beliefs—classifications that reinscribe much the same categories that serve as boundaries between the human and the nonhuman in Pliny, Solinus, and Isidore. But other cultural discourses were also available from which Carpini and Rubruck could derive those categories, including the widespread tradition of that internal other of medieval Europe, the wild man. This tradition was made available by way of the work of the great trio of thirteenth-century encyclopedists, Bartholomew Anglicus, Thomas of Cantimpré, and Vincent of Beauvais, as well as through older textual traditions such as the Alexander saga, the St. Jerome Bible, and the apocryphal Letter of Prester John (c. 1165).33 In a composite sketch of the tradition, an “ethnography of the medieval wild man”34 might look something like the following: the wild man is forest dwelling (thus a literal silvester homo) rather than a city dweller, giant or dwarflike Pygmy in size, hairy, hunting and gathering, eating the raw flesh of animals, without knowledge of agriculture or metallurgy, having great physical strength, warlike, given to sexual carnality, of meager intellect, lacking human speech, incapable of knowing God because irrational, and linked to the semidivine or the semisatanic. Such an ethnography indicates how readily one may treat the discourses of the medieval wild man and the monstrous races as coterminous, invoking as they do many of the same markers for “humanity”—habitat, diet, hunting, sexual practices, speech, religion—and each representing the projection of internal anxieties about the boundaries and norms of “human” behavior on an “other.”
Thirteenth-century intellectual production indicates still further examinations by humans of the contours of the human. Specifically in the schools, Aristotelian scholars like Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and numerous Aristotelian commentators were openly considering the same question of the boundaries of the human that popular discourses of “wild men” and “monsters” entertained in less conscious ways.35 Indeed we even find leakage of vocabulary between scholastic and popular treatments of the topic: the Pygmy plays a pivotal role in Albertus Magnus’s determination of what sets apart the human from the rest of the animal kingdom. In De Animalibus, a text whose main concern has rightly been identified as man himself, Albertus assigns the Pygmy and the ape intermediary positions between man and beast.36 As manlike creatures, or similitudines hominis,37 the ape and the Pygmy reached closest to the perfection of man in that they were capable of degrees of disciplinabilitas, “the control of mind over body that underlies every purposeful act,”38 and thereby learning. They lacked, however, a final level of disciplinabilitas reserved for humans alone: the power of reason with which to transform these sensory data and memories into universal principles. Without ratio and the ability to grasp universals, the ape and the Pygmy were deprived of civility and its distinguishing elements, enumerated by Albertus as: the experience of shame and the ability to know vice from virtue, the use of language including a facility with rhetorical devices, political systems and laws, and non-forest dwellings.39 In his inclusion of the forest habitat as a marker of incivility, Albertus Magnus participates in the popular ethnographic assumptions of his day. But Albertus Magnus distinguishes himself from other medieval thinkers in his anticipation of the evolutionary assumptions of modern anthropology through his offering of a measure by which the animal kingdom and man himself might be assigned a position on a hierarchical chain of being, and his posing of a theory of man’s kinship with apes.40
But what of degrees of humanity within humans themselves? Albertus Magnus’s treatments of the less than human in the De Animalibus closely echo his definitions of “the barbarian” elsewhere. In the Ethics, he writes: “Bestial men, however, are rare, since it is a rare man who has no spark of humanity. It does, however, occur, and usually from two causes: physical handicap and deprivation. For we call those who are not induced to be virtuous either by laws, by civility or by the regime of any kind of discipline ‘barbarous.’ Cicero, in the beginning of the De Inventione, calls them ‘wild men leading the life of animals with the wild beasts’.… Or, in the same way, bestial men eat raw flesh and drink blood, and are delighted to drink and
