who left a short tale of travel to the East Indies via the Coromandel Coast of India around 1499. He has been little regarded by modern scholars; consequently, not much can be said about the book’s composition or circulation.90 The Bolognese Ludovico de Varthema (c. 1470–1517) is the last of our authentic travelers, having made a voyage to India via Arabia in 1502–8.91 His Itinerario was printed in Italian in 1510, was soon translated into Latin, and remained popular through the sixteenth century with many vernacular translations. Significant doubts hang over the authenticity of parts of his narrative, and indeed it seems unlikely that he ventured beyond the Bay of Bengal to Burma and the eastern Spice Islands as he claims.92 Ludovico is interesting as a representative of a new breed of traveler in the sixteenth century—that is, of a practically motiveless traveler, who undertakes journeys for their own sake out of a thirst for novelty rather than for specific diplomatic, mercantile, or missionary purposes. His was also a work of travel writing produced for the age of print with the new sense of a potentially unlimited audience.93
To these reports by genuine travelers we must add fictive travelogues often regarded as true by medieval readers. One work stands above all others in this respect: the Book of “Sir John Mandeville.” With about 300 manuscripts surviving across Europe in around ten languages, it had far greater popularity than many of the other great works of medieval literature commonly studied in modern universities.94 No serious reader now believes the author undertook the voyage described, though he may at some point have traveled to the Holy Land, and many think his nom de plume is borrowed or invented. For a long time Jehan de Bourgogne (“Jehan le Barbe”), a Liège physician, was presented as a candidate for authorship, and there have been various alternative hypotheses.95 M. C. Seymour and John Larner favor Jean le Long (Jan de Langhe), abbot and historian at the Abbey of St. Bertin in St. Omer in northern France in the mid-fourteenth century, chiefly because he had benefit of access to a large monastic library that contained Mandeville’s identifiable sources and in 1351 had produced French translations of a number of these (Hetoum, Odoric, and William of Boldensele, as well as Ricold, “The Book of the Estate of the Great Caan” and some letters from the Khân to Pope Benedict XII). Odoric’s book, Vincent of Beauvais’s encyclopedia (notably Vincent’s excerpts from Carpini), Hetoum’s La flor, and The Letter of Prester John were the Mandeville author’s most important sources for the far eastern parts of his narrative, though some also believe he must have read Marco Polo’s book; Polo’s influence, alternatively, may have been filtered through Odoric.96 Jean le Long’s contemporary and disciple at St. Bertin, Thomas Diacre, completes the picture with a vivid description: “A man who was erudite, pious, who delighted in the study of history, and had such a large belly that he could hardly walk, nor could he sleep unless he were sitting.”97 However, Christiane Deluz and Michael Bennett are among those who have recently argued for English authorship.98
A book composed from so many fragments, by an author whose identity and motive remain uncertain, resists definitive summary of its purpose. Iain Macleod Higgins, one of the foremost recent authorities on Mandeville, offers an appealingly non-dogmatic assessment of the Book’s nature. It “represents a new kind of work that attempts to entertain, instruct, persuade, chastise, challenge, and console its imagined audience,” and its author is “an entertainer, teacher, moralist, and geographer, as well as a trickster and an artist.”99 Higgins recommends that readers embrace the heterogeneity of the Book and the diversity among its myriad versions rather than seeking a “best text” or trying to identify a single message among its “sometimes unsettling contradictions” and argues that it is more than a compilation of existing texts and its author no mere plagiarizer. In his view, the Mandeville author achieves a kind of originality in his collation, revision, and “sometimes inspired overwriting of its sources” and that one of its goals is to place the marvelous East as envisioned by previous authors “under the sign of Christian history.”100
Johannes Witte de Hese’s book provides a less well-known fictional travelogue. Scott Westrem, its editor and translator, explores how the author “combined reading, conversation and fantasy to construct a unique image of the world.”101 Next to nothing is known about Witte, whose name itself may be a fiction, except that he appears to have been Dutch and possibly a cleric. He claims to have traveled eastward on pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas via Jerusalem, Egypt, Sinai, and Ethiopia, then carried on to the Land of Prester John, India, China, the Earthly Paradise, Purgatory, and an island of extraordinary races and beasts. This all supposedly took place in the late 1300s, and the earliest manuscript of the book is datable to about 1424. Westrem, while taking the book’s fictional status as obvious, points out that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers “accepted it as a source of generally factual information” and it was not until the eighteenth century that its veracity was challenged.102 The Itineraries’s distinction lies in its effort to link widely diverse geographic and mythical locations within a Christian framework. Also, like Mandeville, the author seems to have done his work in a scriptorium, although he does not make his borrowings as obvious as his predecessor does.103 Westrem counts eight Latin and three Dutch manuscripts in current collections and numerous incunabule and sixteenth-century Latin and Dutch printed copies, but as three of the surviving manuscripts are merely handwritten copies of an early printed edition the work probably had a limited pre-1500 audience.104 Ethnographic or practical details are of no interest to the author; his East is a Christianized world of marvels.
The final item on our tour is The Letter of Prester John, chronologically the earliest of our chief sources as well as the most broadly influential. The Letter was a major source for both Mandeville and Witte and indeed in some ways a foundational text for all late medieval travel writing.105 It was produced probably around 1165, and though it purports authorship by a magnificent Indian priest-king, it was almost certainly written in Latin by a western European author. It contains very little that its author could not have picked up from sources widely available in Europe.106 In a classic essay, Bernard Hamilton argues the Letter was produced for imperial propagandistic purposes on behalf of Frederick Barbarossa. The identity of Prester John and his Christian kingdom were drawn from two earlier texts. The first of these, by Odo, abbot of St. Rémi at Reims and independently by an anonymous source, described the meeting of a mysterious “Indian” archbishop (named “John” in the anonymous text) with Pope Calixtus II in Rome in 1122. The second, from 1145 (just after the Fall of Edessa in 1144), was Otto of Freising’s account in The Two Cities of “a certain John, king and priest, who lived in the extreme east beyond Armenia and Persia” and had won a major victory against the Persians. Hamilton makes the case for the Letter’s forgery in support of Barbarossa’s quest to establish imperial power over his papal rival: “In the utopian world of the Indies supreme power in both church and state was vested in the Priest King. Prester John’s kingdom mirrored the kind of empire which Barbarossa was trying to establish.”107
The Letter’s evocation of a spectacularly rich Christian kingdom in the distant East, presided over by a ruler who was at once priest and king, possessed a powerful and flexible appeal for European readers well beyond the reign of Frederick Barbarossa. Generations of crusaders and their promoters took heart from the notion of a vast realm under Christian kingship somewhere to the east of Saracen territory.108 The ongoing significance of the Letter, for our purposes, lies partly in the continuing quest for Prester John in Asia and, from the early fourteenth century, Africa.109 Carpini, Simon of St. Quentin, Rubruck, Marco Polo, Monte Corvino, Jordan, Odoric, Mandeville, Witte, and Niccolò all speak of Prester John as a true king, contemporary or historical.110
The widespread popularity and shifting content of the Letter indicate its appeal went beyond both propagandistic and crusading impulses. There are more surviving copies of The Letter of Prester John than almost any of the travel narratives discussed in this book, rivaled only by Mandeville, with over 260 manuscripts in Latin and many vernaculars.111 As a relatively short piece it presumably had the advantage of cheapness and seems to have been purchased by readers of varying social backgrounds.
