While some readers sought epic elements, others involved in European-Asian trade may have been drawn to the book’s lists of places, natural resources, and commodities such as salt, silk, and spices. Others looked for geographic and chorographic information to aid them in placing Asia within a Christian cosmology, especially once Friar Pipino’s Latin translation gave the book greater authority for Christian intellectuals. The Divisament’s attention to certain kinds of Asian marvels appealed to medieval audiences’ persistent, if fading, sense of wonder. Its accounts of abundant foods, splendid cities, and freedom from Christian monogamy and sexual restraint were among the elements that made the book a miscellany of earthly pleasures. Marco Polo’s Orient, but particularly his Mongol-ruled China, was a place of sophistication and sensual delights. Indeed, such readings were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Benedetto, Dutschke, and Larner cite the testimony of humanist Domenico di Bandino, who gave the book ample space in his thirty-five-volume encyclopedia around the turn of the fifteenth century, taking it to be instructive in the way that the geographical statements of Pliny, Isidore of Seville, and Brunetto Latini were, while also describing it as “delightful” (delectabilem).55 As the longest and most detailed of the travel narratives studied here, it exemplifies the argument that medieval readers sought variously information, edification, wonder, and pleasure in contemporary travelers’ tales of the Orient.
In the wake of diplomatic envoys and merchants came a wave of missionaries. Ricold of Monte Croce’s Liber peregrinacionis, also called his Itinerarius, was produced after his return to Italy from Baghdad in 1301 following thirteen years of voyaging in the Middle East.56 Ricold (1242–1320) was a Dominican missionary from Florence who embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1288 and continued through Turkey and Persia to Baghdad in 1289, remaining for twelve years. He learned Arabic and gained a relatively high level of knowledge about Islam—though viewing it as Christian heresy—and though his written work, notably the Contra legem sarracenorum, denigrated the Muslim faith, he was more generous in describing Muslim peoples. His Liber peregrinacionis reserves its most negative ethnological assessments for Turks, Kurds, and Mongols. In its original Latin the work was not very widely transmitted. Seven manuscripts survive, three of which are fragmentary. There are also six extant manuscripts of John le Long’s 1351 French translation and three late medieval copies of Italian translations, two fragmentary.57 For the present work, Ricold’s text is valuable primarily for its account of Mongols. Persia was under Mongol control during his stay in Baghdad so some of his observances could be drawn from witness. On the other hand, his account includes historical and mythological material that may be taken from Persian associates, their Mongol leaders, or both.
A number of Franciscan missionaries journeyed to Khanbaliq and Zaiton in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Three wrote letters to the leaders and brothers of their orders, the originals of which do not survive but were copied into a Franciscan chronicle c. 1335–36: John of Monte Corvino (letters dated 1305 and 1306), Peregrine of Castello (letter dated 1318), and Andrew of Perugia (letter dated 1326).58 Unfortunately they wrote relatively little about the countries and cultures of the East in these brief epistles, telling mainly of successes or failures in conversion of local populations. The same is true of the letter or letters of Jordan Catala of Sévérac, a Dominican writing from India around 1321.59 Jordan traveled to the Indian subcontinent with a group of Franciscan missionaries in 1320, returning to Avignon by 1329. His Franciscan companions were killed in Thana near Bombay (Mumbai) in 1321, and it appears that in 1324 he handed their remains to Odoric of Pordenone, who took them to the Catholic archdiocese in Khanbaliq. The Spanish Franciscan Pascal of Vittoria also wrote briefly from Almaliq about his experiences among the Saracens in 1338.60 A related letter from “Friar Menentillus” claims to relate views of a Franciscan missionary who had traveled to India with the Dominican Nicholas of Pistoia.61 Yule and Wyngaert deduced that this traveler, named “Friar John the Cordelier” (i.e., the Franciscan) by Pietro of Abano, must have been John of Monte Corvino, writing from his time in India, c. 1292–93.62 However, given its unclear provenance and its difference in content and tone from Monte Corvino’s two signed letters, this attribution is not certain. The letter reads less as a firsthand account of personal experience in the East than as a general description of eastern regions and peoples.
Although the missionary epistles survive only as copies and were subjected to revision by their earliest scribes, they seem to have circulated among Franciscan and curial circles in the early to mid-fourteenth century.63 Jordan Catala of Sévérac’s Mirabilia descripta was read in similar contexts but survives in only one manuscript.64 More an account of natural wonders than an ethnography, its occasionally breathless tone is quite different from the author’s mournful letters. “Mirabile” is his frequent refrain: “Everything indeed is a marvel in this India,” he says of India the Greater, which to him is all of south and southeast Asia.65 A work called “Le livre de l’estat du grant caan” (The Book of the Estate of the Great Caan [Khân]), composed in the late 1320s or early 1330s, had apparently wider impact. It celebrates achievements of Franciscan missionaries in Cathay, naming John of Monte Corvino, Andrew of Perugia, and Peter of Florence, and offers a highly favorable account of Cathay and the potential for the whole population’s conversion to Roman Christianity. A Latin version (“De statu, conditione ac regimine magni canis”), copied in 1346, has only recently been discovered and edited; previously only six manuscript copies of John le Long’s 1351 French translation were known.66 Christine Gadrat, who discovered the Latin manuscript, shows the traditional ascription to the “Archbishop of Soltaniah” (Sultaniyeh in Persia) is based on a mistranscription of Saltensis, from which historians derived Soltaniensis. Rather, it was presented by the Archbishop of Salerno (Salernitanum) by the command of Pope John XXII, and the Latin text of the 1346 copy, possibly made in German lands, is probably translated from an Italian Franciscan original. The traditional attribution to the Dominican John de Cora, who took up the see of Sultaniyeh early in 1330, is therefore discounted. The work was probably not a traveler’s account but instead composed in Europe from written sources. It shows influences from the Divisament, Odoric of Pordenone’s Relatio, Jordan’s Mirabilia, and the letters of Franciscan missionaries to China. Gadrat suggests that the work began to circulate rapidly, especially within circles connected to the curia at a time when the Avignonese papacy was renewing interest in the oriental missions.67
A late contribution to this wave of missionary accounts comes in unusual form from John of Marignolli (c. 1290–after 1362), a Florentine Franciscan intellectual sent as part of a papal delegation of more than thirty people into east and south Asia (1338–53) to investigate the state of oriental Christianity and consider prospects for future missions. He spent perhaps three or four years in Khanbaliq (c. 1342–47), then journeyed to Zaiton from where he embarked for India and Ceylon en route to Europe. While compiling a world history (c. 1356) Marignolli took the opportunity—prompted by speaking of Creation and Eden—to record scattered observations on the East.68 Henry Yule, in a felicitous phrase, describes these as “like unexpected fossils in a mud-bank,” buried as they are in the Bohemian chronicle surviving in one full and one partial manuscript, unedited until 1768.69 This is not a work, then, that had a significant audience or influence upon later texts; however, it is interesting as a distinctive, sometimes fanciful account of eastern places. Marignolli’s reminiscences lose their narrative thread and become rambling and anecdotal as he goes on. He mentions the Terrestrial Paradise, “Adam’s garden,” and the dress and food of Adam and Eve along with other Old Testament allusions. The biblical past and the exotic East are thus intertwined for Marignolli, in a way not uncommon for medieval authors but not usually found in the works of genuine travelers. On the other hand, he demonstrates scrupulous rationality in discussing monstrous peoples.
By far the most important work on the distant East to derive from missionary experience is Odoric of Pordenone’s Relatio.70 Odoric (c. 1286–1331), also a Franciscan, had already spent around twenty years doing missionary work in Russia, Turkey, and Persia when with James of Ireland he took the seaward route to China via India and southeast Asia around 1318, collecting the
