in 1325. After three years he returned via a land route across the center of the Asian continent, intending to visit Pope John XXII at Avignon to request more missionaries, but fell ill at Pisa and returned to die in his home monastery of Udine. The Relatio avows that his motives were those of a missionary—“I crossed the sea and visited the countries of the unbelievers in order to win some harvest of souls”—but that detail is thought to have been added by Odoric’s posthumous promoters, and his book is unlike those of other missionaries in important respects.71 For one, Odoric did not write it himself. A version was apparently dictated to a fellow friar, William di Solagna, in 1330 and reworked by various subsequent scribes. It appears to have been influenced in part by Marco Polo’s book. For another, it enjoyed significant popularity in its day. The other missionary works exist in only one or two manuscripts, while Odoric’s book survives in around 117 manuscripts (ten of which postdate c. 1500) in Latin (approximately sixty), Italian, French, and German copies.72 “Sir John Mandeville” plundered the book for his fictional travels.
The process of the book’s production remains mysterious. No doubt it was truly informed by Odoric’s own experiences, but its mélange of eyewitness impressions, ethnography, hagiography, biblical geography, and oriental mirabilia produce a shifting and uncertain narrative. The Latin authors responsible for its earliest manifestations, who were probably involved in ultimately unsuccessful efforts to see Odoric canonized, are among a large number of copyists and later translators who adapted and transformed the text according to reader interest. The existence of vernacular versions indicates a significant lay as well as ecclesiastical readership, but this may have varied from one location to another. Marianne O’Doherty argues on the basis of manuscript comparisons that English copies are mostly in Latin and their readers mostly educated scholarly and/or monastic men, whereas Italian copies are more often vernacular, often part of miscellanies, and aimed at lay audiences. If manuscript survival rates are an accurate guide, English readers treated the book, along with others such as Carpini’s Historia, Polo’s’s Divisament, and The Letter of Prester John with which it was sometimes bound, as a serious work for scholars interested in the geography, ethnography, religions, and natural history of the Indies, while Italian readers were often more dubious about its authority but entertained by its accounts of diverse lands and mirabilia.73
To turn away from missionaries and double back a little in time, we come to Hetoum of Armenia’s La flor des estoires de la terre d’Orient (1307).74 Dictated first in French to scribe Nicholas Falcon during Hetoum’s stay at the papal court in Poitiers in 1307, Falcon himself produced a Latin version later that year at the request of Clement V. It survives in around sixty manuscript copies mostly in Latin and French and became widely popular in the early era of the printing press.75 Hetoum (Hayton, Haiton, or Hethoum, before 1245–c. 1310/14) was an Armenian monk, probably a canon regular of the Premonstratensian order, though previously married and a father.76 Hetoum’s visit to Clement V at Poitiers was prompted by desire to see a joint crusade mounted for the reconquest of Jerusalem. Although in part a work of crusade propaganda, La flor surveys geography and peoples from Cathay to Syria and is valued by modern scholars particularly for its third book, a history and description of Mongol peoples. Glenn Burger believes Falcon had little input into Hetoum’s text, given the text’s accuracy on dates and claims about Mongol history and culture,77 but the involvement of an amanuensis should be taken into account. Moreover, it is unlikely that Hetoum undertook any eastern travel, although his uncle, King Hetoum I, had traveled on a diplomatic mission to Karakorum in 1254–55 and an account was produced.78 We must therefore acknowledge the secondhand nature of much of his material and its propagandistic purpose. Hetoum’s relatively positive account of the Mongols, for example, should be read with the understanding that he hoped to persuade the French pope to form a crusading alliance with them.
While missionaries maintained their hopes for eastern converts, Italian merchants kept up their small but steady flow to India and China. Francesco Balducci Pegolotti’s guidebook for merchants, Libro di Divisamenti di Paesi (Book of the Descriptions of Countries), named La Pratica della Mercatura by its eighteenth-century editor, was produced sometime between 1335 and 1343 and survives in a single manuscript. Pegolotti was not a traveler but worked for the Bardi Company, and his book is a thoroughly practical work of advice and information on long-distance trade.79 It is valued by travel historians for its information for merchants wishing to make the journey to Cathay: grow one’s beard; obtain a Turkish translator, some good male servants, and perhaps “a woman” at Tana to assist on the journey; and obtain a certain amount of provisions. Although lacking in ethnographical information on the peoples of the East, the book indicates that trade and travel between Italian merchants and Asia were not uncommon at the time. Indeed, Pegolotti claims the road from Tana to Cathay is “perfectly safe” (sicurissimo) by day or night.80
Niccolò dei Conti (c. 1395–1469) was a Venetian trader whose observations on India and southeast Asia are preserved in book 4 of Poggio’s De varietate fortunae (1448).81 The genesis of the book was unusual. Niccolò returned to Venice in 1439 after around twenty years of travel across the Indian Ocean to India, Burma, the islands of southeast Asia, and possibly Champa (southern and central Vietnam). Following a confession to the pope that he had been obliged to adopt a false Muslim identity and dress for his personal safety while abroad, he was required as penance to dictate an account of his travels to the papal secretary, humanist scholar Poggio Bracciolini, which he did in Florence. De varietate fortunae, true to its name, is a study of the vicissitudes of fortune, beginning with a description of the ruins of ancient Rome and a meditation on Rome’s passage over time from greatness to decay (book 1). Books 2 and 3 deal with the turbulence of more recent history, before Poggio turns in book 4 to the more pleasing topic of Niccolò’s travels, hoping “it may serve for relaxation and at the same time turn the minds of the readers from the severity of fortune to a gentler fate, so to speak, and to the pleasant vicissitudes of things.”82 Joan-Pau Rubiés nonetheless emphasizes the serious and scholarly intention of the work and locates it within Poggio’s broader humanist endeavors to found a new era of secular scholarship and the quest for objective information about the world.83 The book was quite popular: Merisalo lists thirty-one extant manuscripts of the full work or first two books and a further twenty-three containing fragments of the first or fourth book.84 Niccolò’s account garnered special attention and was soon detached from the remainder of Poggio’s work and circulated independently as a work of travel literature, India Recognita (1492), and subsequently translated from Latin into Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and English.85 A shorter independent discussion of Niccolò and his travels appears in the travelogue of Spanish nobleman Pero Tafur, who says he met the Venetian with his “Indian” wife and their children in Egypt on Niccolò’s homeward journey in 1437.86 Niccolò’s experiences, then, come to us only via Poggio and Tafur. The version in Poggio’s book is presented in Latin rather than in the Venetian or other vernacular in which it was presumably dictated and no doubt involved Poggio’s selection and reorganization. The book must be seen as a collaborative work, with Poggio’s own authorial intentions and inclinations brought to the fore. These were both to provide the reader with useful and interesting information and to give pleasure.87
Four other accounts from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries will merit brief mention. Ruy González de Clavijo (d. 1412) was a Castilian nobleman who traveled to the court of Temür in 1403–4 as ambassador for Henry III of Castile.88 His testimony is valuable chiefly as witness to the new Turkic-Mongol regime of the early fourteenth century and the splendid court at Samarkand. Johann (“Hans”) Schiltberger (c. 1381–1430) is a hazy figure, by his own account a Bavarian soldier captured by Turks at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 and subsequently enslaved by Temür and various of his kin and vassals. If we are to believe him, Schiltberger spent around thirty years in servitude to these eastern potentates before finally escaping while on campaign near the Black Sea and returning to Germany in 1428. The circumstances of his book’s composition are unknown. Though it is written in a Bavarian dialect, it may have been dictated. Four fifteenth-century copies survive
