common-place book or miscellany.”112 Its Anglo-Norman and Middle English contents include prayers, devotional works, charms and prognostications, romances, fabliaux, humorous lyrics, games and party tricks, medical recipes for people and hunting birds, and other useful tidbits including different procedures for removing unwanted guests and malignant spirits from a house. The largely lighthearted content of the manuscript might reveal the Letter’s entertainment value.113 In contrast, a number of the Letter’s manuscripts were found in monastic and scholars’ libraries.114 These audiences perhaps responded to the theme of moral utopia in the Prester’s Christian Indies, where all travelers and pilgrims are greeted with hospitality and there are no poor, thieves, plunderers, flatterers, or liars, as well as no avarice, division, adultery, or vice.115
The Letter of Prester John would have satisfied a range of desires for educated laymen, friars, and enclosed monks. Its vivid evocation of a vast distant realm of incredible fertility, riches, and marvels must have met a European hunger for the exotic and wonderful. Prester John describes his own dominion in almost biblical terms: “If you truly wish to know the magnitude and excellence of our Highness and over what lands our power dominates, then know and believe without hesitation that I, Prester John, am lord of lords and surpass in all riches which are under heaven, in virtue and in power all the kings of the wide world.”116 His land contains all manner of exotic beasts and monstrous peoples, from elephants and dromedaries to one-eyed men and Cyclopes.117 “Milk is flowing and honey abundant,” and it produces pepper in large quantities. The river Ydonis, with its source in Paradise, flows throughout the realm and contains precious gemstones.118 The Letter devotes most of its latter section to a description of Prester John’s own palace, adorned and indeed partly constructed of gems, crystal, and gold reminiscent of Revelation’s description of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:9, 18–21).119
The Letter of Prester John seems at first glance to be the definitive account of eastern alterity—and has been plausibly construed as such by recent scholars120—yet the biblical imagery and cadences of its prose fasten it securely to the traditions of the European, Latin imagination. Indeed, it could be said to evoke Sameness as much as Otherness. Prester John is an eastern potentate who provides a shining model of what western rulers would like to be. The king and his people—and this can hardly be too strongly emphasized—are Christian. In the cultural context of high and late medieval western Europe, where religious faith served as the ultimate marker of identity, these eastern Christians are like long-lost brothers or spiritual kin: “We wish and long to know if, as with us, you hold the true faith and if you, through all things, believe our lord Jesus Christ. … I am a devout Christian, and everywhere do we defend poor Christians. … We have vowed to visit the Sepulcher of the Lord with the greatest army, just as it is befitting the glory of our majesty, in order to humble and defeat the enemies of the cross of Christ and to exalt his blessed name.”121 Later versions of the Letter made Prester’s realm even more definitively the West’s spiritual twin. The French printed translation of c. 1500 affirms, “And since you say that our Greeks, or men of Grecian race, do not pray to God the way you do in your country, we let you know that we worship and believe in Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, three persons in one Deity and one true God only.”122 Prester John is not only a Christian but a true Christian, upholding the Trinity unlike the schismatic Greeks. Indeed, he warns against “false and treacherous Hospitallers,” whom “we have killed in our country as it should be done with those who turn against the faith” and against “those treacherous Templars and pagans.”123 His may be a land of crocodiles and camels, not to mention horned men, anthropophagi, Amazons, centaurs, pygmies, unicorns, and dogheads, yet theologically Prester John has more in common with the French king who is by now the Letter’s co-addressee than with the perceived enemies of Latin Christendom who lie on or within its borders.124
Through this diverse body of sources, which we may gather under the heading of medieval “travel writing,” Europeans of the Latin West embarked on bold new textual voyages. The Mongol incursions of the early thirteenth century had revealed the world was far larger and more diverse than either classical or biblical authorities had suggested. Once European travelers began to make their own journeys deep into the Asian continent they immediately began to record their observations and experiences, and audiences at home responded with enthusiasm. The boundaries of the world were suddenly expanded. Previously unknown peoples and cultures came into view; eastern cities, landscapes, and natural wonders began to stir the European imagination. To some extent the authors and audiences of these new books sought to fashion eastern realms in conformity with familiar structures of thought; thus monstrous peoples, the Earthly Paradise, mythical beasts, and biblical waterways recurred in certain texts but most particularly in the fictional travels of Mandeville and his ilk. However, the writings of genuine travelers—while certainly not immune from traditional imagery, especially when amanuenses and later copyists made their own mark—painted pictures of Asia with many details entirely new to European readers. For the modern reader intrigued to explore these, it is tempting to jump straight to the content of medieval travelogues, but this would be to overlook their textual production, literary form, and the responses of contemporary readers. Considering the production of travelogues requires much more than straightforward examinations of authorship. When we try, as twenty-first-century readers, to come face-to-face with Odoric, Rubruck, Marco Polo, and others we find ourselves chasing fleeting ghosts. Trying to confront fictional travelers such as Mandeville or Johannes Witte de Hese is even more confounding, as they recede like Cheshire cats. Through considering matters of audience, textual transmission, and relative popularity we may arrive at a more grounded understanding of the resonances of writings on the distant Orient for medieval readers.
Chapter 3
Travel Writing and the Making of Europe
“Travel writing” is a modern term for a recognized branch of literature, but we need to consider its suitability to medieval texts. Many modern readers, as we will see, find some medieval “travel” texts disappointing because they fail to live up to certain expectations, such as that travel literature presents a first-person narrator with an exciting tale of encounters with the foreign or that it documents the formation of both personal and cultural identity. Not only a version of personal memoir, travel writing also allows the author to explore the broader cultural encounter of Self (for example, “the West” or “Europe”) and Other (“the East” or “Orient”). Can travel writing exist without a first-person narrator, need it incorporate the kind of individual reflection most likely to engage modern readers, and to what extent did medieval descriptions of far eastern places adopt a perspective one might truly call “European” in an era before European identity was necessarily a strong preoccupation?
This chapter finds that our expectations about the nature of travel writing need to be reset before we can fully appreciate medieval reports of Asia and that concepts of European identity, as opposed to a notion of Christendom, are identifiable but not yet dominant during this early stage of European-Asian encounter. It contends, and the remainder of the book will illustrate, that while responses to Otherness presented a common refrain in many travelers’ tales, sameness, similarity, or a sense of relationship between a traveler and peoples newly encountered were also regular motifs. When foreignness and estrangement were asserted, it was often for particular pragmatic reasons or because the authors in question were fictional travelers more prone to repeating old stereotypes of nomadic barbarians or the marvels of the Indies. Curiosity and the hunger for knowledge, it is argued, were at least as important as either hostility or wonderment for many of our authors and their audiences.
Travel Writing
“Travel” as such is not usually the main subject of works produced out of late medieval encounters with the far Orient, though details of journeys feature particularly in Carpini’s, Rubruck’s, Odoric’s,
